commerce

I'm looking forward to moderating a panel discussion (although I usually detest panels) about "cloud labor " on Wednesday at CrowdConf. The panel title is a bit of a misnomer, since the most interesting new crowd commerce plays (like TaskRabbit, Gigwalk, and Zaarly) use the cloud only to coordinate labor. The actual labor itself may still be done in person.

For a 25 percent ticket price discount at CrowdConf, see the end of this story.

But I am fascinated by the potential these and other cloud commerce companies have, for three reasons: They can connect people who need … Read more

When I first talked with Zaarly CEO Bo Fishback (see Zaarly: Not nearly as crazy as it appears), he told me he had $1 million in "announced" funding, wink wink. "There's more?" I asked? Yes, he said, he had millions of dollars "waiting at the door" for his peer-to-peer commerce startup. But he was keeping it a secret. Even from his employees.

Fishback is a big personality. He's a passionate, aggressive guy. This could have been just bluster. Certainly I've heard this kind of BS from entrepreneurs before, sometimes just weeks … Read more

Facebook, the world's largest social-networking platform, is tapping eBay's commerce platform to create new social shopping experiences for hundreds of millions of consumers.

Specifically, eBay is integrating Facebook's new Open Graph 2.0 functionality into its global commerce systems, which come under the umbrella of a new business unit called X.commerce, and include eBay, PayPal, and Magento (which has built shopping sites for 100,000 merchants). The news was announced at Innovate, eBay's developer conference, being held today through Friday in San Francisco.

"Facebook is now linked into the largest commerce ecosystem," Matthew … Read more

Nothing quite says "you're special to me" like a happy birthday note on your Facebook wall, does it? The person sending the note doesn't have to remember your birthday--Facebook does that for them--and the effort to post the note is so low it can be done between sips of coffee.

Yet these gestures matter, computer-moderated or not. We are social creatures. We get a little pleasure zap in our brain when someone recognizes us, gives us something, or tells us something personal, no matter what the impetus to do so was.

So if it's the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--We will see more change in how consumers shop and pay in the next three years than what we've seen in the last fifteen, according to eBay's CEO and president John Donahoe.

"The lines between online and offline are blurring," Donahoe asserted. "What's that doing is expanding the opportunity for innovation."

eBay is trying to meet the demands of that opportunity with its new X.commerce open platform, an ecosystem made up of the online auction site and its subsidiaries. X.commerce is intended to bring together the full suite of commerce … Read more

Another car-sharing service is launching today. Wheelz does the same thing as RelayRides and Getaround: If you have a car that sits unused from time to time, it lets you rent it out to other people, like AirBnB can do for an apartment that you leave vacant.

Wheelz is more focused than its competitors. It's designed exclusively for college and university campuses. The service is going live initially for Stanford students and employees.

CEO Jeff Miller made it clear to me that his company has learned from the hit that AirBnB took when one of its members' homes was … Read more

E-commerce firm Rearden Commerce is looking to expand both the company and its Deem platform through a round of funding and a new acquisition.

The e-commerce developer announced today that it has picked up $133 million in financing from its current partners American Express and JPMorgan Chase and from new investor Citi. The company is looking to spend the influx of cash on paying off debt, generating working capital, and setting up some acquisitions.

In line with that third goal, Rearden also said that it has bought social-buying service HomeRun.com and its OfferEngine platform, an acquisition that will be … Read more

I wrote recently that receipts are the the new check-ins. And now companies are emerging that are trying to roll up the receipt collection process for consumers. One smart new business doing this: Itemize. It scans your e-mail receipts to build a profile of your favorite brands, and then it sends you deals so you can get the stuff you like at a discount.

"We are receipt geeks," CEO Jim Thomas told me. He previously worked on analytics for MasterCard, which you'd think would have the mother lode of data when it comes to analyzing what people like. But think again: credit card companies know where you shop, but not what you buy. "I wanted to build a Pandora for shopping," Thomas said.

There are two challenges facing Itemize. First, it needs a diet of receipts to work. Pretty much everything you buy online will generate an e-mail receipt, which works to its favor, but things you buy in physical retail stores generally don't--except for, say, the stuff you get at the Apple store. Thomas believes more retailers will be following Apple's lead, though.

Itemize will get a physical-receipt-scanning app eventually. The iPhone app for that is being built. Thomas does think that physical receipts will eventually vanish, but not soon enough.

The other problem: So you have this mailbox full of e-mail receipts. How do you get them to Itemize? The service gets your receipts by scanning your live inbox. You give it access to your mail (it works on Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, and several other mail providers) and it watches for receipts. Thomas says the service does not keep your e-mail nor read anything that it doesn't at first determine is a receipt, but there will be consumers, like me, who don't like the idea of giving yet another third party access to their communication.… Read more

Back in 1999 and 2000, when I was writing Catch of the Day, a daily column about start-ups for Red Herring, my co-worker Jeff told me I needed to launch a new column called "That's the Stupidest Thing I've Ever Heard" to cover all the boneheaded pitches I got for companies that were too sickly to write about.

A few months ago, as this second Internet bubble began to inflate, Jeff told me I needed to really--finally--launch That's the Stupidest Thing, specifically so I could write about Zaarly, based on the coverage it got on TechCrunch.

Zaarly is a well-hyped community gig marketplace, competing in many ways with GigWalk (story), FetchMob (story), and TaskRabbit.

CEO Bo Fishback is a big, twitchy man who seems uncomfortable sitting still. He is enthusiastic and eloquent about the idea that Zaarly is based on. I'd fund him if I was in a position to do so, even if I wasn't convinced (and I'm not) that Zaarly will be as big as Fishback says it can be. And how big is that? "It's the first idea I've seen in my life that will be bigger than a $50 billion company," he says.

Fishback calls Zaarly a buyer-powered market. Other markets--eBay, Craigslist, Macy's, Wal-Mart--are seller-powered. People with things to sell offer them up, and if you're looking for something, you check out what they have. On Zaarly, if you want something, you broadcast that desire; if someone has it, they find you.… Read more