Commerce

Social shopping for the socially conscious

In the market for a laptop bag made of recycled soda bottles or a solar-powered iPod charger? You could spend hours searching online for boutiques that stock those green goods. Or you could go straight to Five Limes, a social-shopping site linking to stores that hawk ecofriendly products, such as Green Home for nontoxic bedding, BTC Elements for organic blue jeans, and Green Office for recycled-paper Post-Its. Five Limes is "something like an Angie's List for green products," as Sustainablog puts it. Five Limes saves a history of your activities to tailor search results accordingly and to … Read more

All the pretty pictures from Craigslist: Listpic

Just got a ping from the developer of Listpic, a service that provides a visual interface into Craigslist. Want to see all the motorcycles for sale in your area? Or houses for rent? This tool will display just the pictures. Clicking on one displays a pop-up of the listing. Clicking again pops you over to Craigslist. It also works with personals. Very easy to use, very useful, and a lot of fun. Thumbs-up from me.

It also made me think: how cool would it be if Like.com searched Craigslist (and eBay) in addition to the online retailers it currently … Read more

Riya launches Like.com, visual search for shoppers

Earlier this year, Riya launched an extremely cool face-recognition system for your family photos. Today at the Web 2.0 Conference (but not during the Launchpad sessions), Riya said it is launching its next product, Like.com, a visual catalog and search tool for consumer goods.

The site lets you search for items by keyword. Once you find a picture of one you like, you can find more that look like it. You can also adjust sliders to tell the system that color is more important to you than shape (or vice versa), and you can zoom in on a … Read more

3D life on a mobile phone

Could this be "Third Life"? Gemini Mobile Technologies is unveiling "S! Town," which it calls the world's first 3D community for cell phones. Mobile Magazine says this third dimension, based on Gemini's patented eXplo software, can be used for such activities as chatting with other avatars, buying goods in virtual stores and sharing multimedia content.

S! Town, which is cutting its ribbon on the Japanese market first with phones from Sharp and Toshiba, would obviously like to duplicate the success of that nation's Mixi social network. But even if it wins popularity there, … Read more

The official start-ups of Web 2.0

There are several new companies and products being unveiled at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week. I'll be reporting on as many of them as I can.

Only 13 companies were selected to participate in the "Launchpad" sessions on Tuesday. Chosen from more than 200 applicants (I'm trying to get ahold of that list), these are supposed to be the most promising of the current crop of Web 2.0 start-ups. I'm not sure they are hands-down the best the Web has to offer, but they are all very interesting. The … Read more