“We are so excited to partner with Flipboard and provide our customers and Flipboard’s users with a unique and interactive culinary experience,” says Shan-Lyn Ma, Gilt Taste General Manager.

Here are screenshots of the Gilt Taste experience within Flipboard:

“Flipboard shares our design aesthetic and passion for creating new ways for people to interact with content and share ideas with others. The launch of Gilt Taste on Flipboard will allow us to continue building a community of food and wine lovers, and further our mission of inspiring people to discover, shop, cook and taste.” says Shan-Lyn Ma, Gilt Taste General Manager.

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Watch the video below and you will truly be inspired.

GOAB. A TV Experience Concept from Syzygy on Vimeo.

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15Gifts makes its recommendations based on a variety of data including: Demographics – age, sex, relationship, occassion, what makes the recipient happy, and variety of occassion/recipient specific questions. At times this selection and recommendation process can be daunting as our example included nearly 8 steps to get to the recommendation. The company has partnered with a group of etailers for the product selection and we wish that they would incorporate feeds from some more mainstream etailers such as Amazon and Bestbuy that both offer APIs and affiliate programs.

The idea behind 15gifts came from a belief that there must be an easier way to find gifts online. Whilst other sites boast hundreds and even thousands of gifts to choose from, we search all the best online stores for you and return with just 15 that really suit the person you’re buying for. – Tom Cox, founder

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While the site could use an aesthetic makeover, this use of Facebook’s like is very innovative. They did not simply add a like button to every product, rather they built a Facebook application. This is essential so that they do not have to manually adjust prices based on a given “like” threshold. When people “like” a product, they are both liking the product and opting to add the application. Once they approve the permissions, Loose Button can determine the total number of likes and automatically adjust the price of the product accordingly.

View a screenshot of the “like” approach:
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What inspired you to create Town.ly amidst very large competitors such as Groupon, Gilt, Bloomspot etc?
A couple things inspired us to dive into the deals industry. First, my father-in-law has a dry cleaners that has been struggling for some time now. He spends $200-$300 a month in traditional coupons & mailings only to have on average 10 customers redeem those offers. That’s a CPA of $20-$30 when the margins average 17% from an average purchase order of $20. When asked, my father-in-law was more than happy to pay a $5 CPA especially because it was performance-based. Second, my partner & I had built an iphone location “tag” game where users can “capture” the spy who was a random player. Interesting concept but but no real monetization paths. Sure, we could sell virtue game items inside the app but we wanted something more organic. Then it hit us. What if we can get players to go inside stores to receive game cash & redeem a real deal while they were there? It dawned on us that we needed to build a simple robust platform to enable any small business to quickly join and create deals. So we instead of releasing our location “tag” game, we decided to pivot and create this deals platform first.

How is Town.ly different than other deal platforms and sites?
Groupon, LivingSocial & other collaborative purchasing sites are often plagued with results so good, they’re bad. Horror stories of businesses not being able to sustain the amount of sudden traffic resulting in poor customer service are far too common. Townly offers an easy way to create, schedule & manage deals so it allows SMBs to forecast traffic much more accurately. Given these large social commerce sites are centric to the “deal of the day”, SMBs are often in the dark waiting their turn. Townly gives the ability to create insane deals during specific times of the week or even the day to pull in foot traffic. These group purchasing sites are also too costly for SMBs. They are already losing out on profits due to the vast discounts on the deal but in addition, they have to fork over 50% of the revenue. Most importantly, Townly plays on immediate gratification. You’re at a mall, just launch the Townly app, locate the deals and walk in to receive the savings. No more purchasing online.

How did you manage to bootstrap this venture and how did you build the current team?
Bootstrapping was a given. My background is 11 years of design/ux/frontend coding/product development while my partner’s background consisted of another 11 years of middle tier & backend architecture of both mobile and web applications. Due to the insane amount of heat from the deals space, it became evident that we needed extra help. We began pitching the product to close friends who were talented programmers/biz dev/product developers. As much as I would like to say they joined because they liked me, it was all about the simplicity & the potential of Townly that easily won them over. Our team now is 5 strong.

Are there plans for a self service offering rather than a business development heavy approach?
Our entire model is entirely self-service. Equipping SMBs with deals analytics with a simple interface, SMBs can quickly understand which types of deals work or don’t work on which days. Our current business development focus is getting our initial batch of SMBs to join our platform. As soon as they are on and given a basic tour, they are let loose.

How do you intend on conquering the challenges of landing deals and at the same time landing users?
Town.ly is free for SMBs…for now. Our biz dev guy has had very little friction from the SMB side. Its free advertising. And simple. In this economy, free advertising goes even further. As for gaining user traction, we are in discussions with large retail property management companies to exchange ad space for purchase/shopping data. This helps us on both the SMB & user acquisition front. Our immediate product roadmap includes multiple social plays not including our auto FB post for every redeemed offer, which is already live. One specific feature is what we call, Social Loyalty. Its something we’re really excited about and hasn’t seen anyone execute it the way we’re scoping it so it should be exciting to see how that help us reach the critical mass. One thing we aren’t considering are game mechanics. Townly is about locating secret deals. Its a treasure map of deals. Or X-ray vision of where the deals are. That’s it. We may play with other basic ideas that could be considered as a game but those would be released as a separately branded app.

Do you have plans to cobrand your platform with publishers or other partnerships to bolster your user base and deal flow?
One thing we aren’t is a deal aggregator. Our platform requires every consumer to physically walk into a business & scan the Townly Store ID to receive the deal so every SMB on Townly will need to be equipped with the proper collateral. With that said, we do plan on going the other way. Given our initial application was a location game, Townly will release an API to all 3rd-party developers to integrate local deals into their apps for another method of monetization. It’s our version of rev-sharing. Imagine a developer wants to create a pregnancy app. Using our API/rev-share program, the developer will be able to display hyper local deals pertaining to baby deals. It will become another substantial revenue source for mobile developers but also provide true value to the end user. A true win for both consumers and SMBs.Tweet

Why Google should purchase Groupon?

• Spend some of the billions of dollars sitting idle
• Establish a stronghold on the CPA/local/social commerce
• Create a commerce graph combined with social graph
• Raise the acquisition bar above the financial reach of competitors

Spend some of the billions of dollars sitting idle
Every quarter, Google adds to its acquisition war chest based on profits that roll in. Increasingly, shareholders are going to begin and wonder what the company intends to do with the all of the money sitting idle and would probably prefer that the money not be used to fend off Facebook in a talent war.

Establish a stronghold on the CPA/local/social commerce
Predominantly, Google earns its revenues via search and a CPC (cost per click) business model aided by an advanced auctioning process of the respective keywords. The long term trend in media buying is pressuring companies to charge based on a CPA (cost per action) where actions in the case of ecommerce would be purchases. The CPA model puts the pressure on Google to deliver relevant ads to users with high intent for a given term or phrase. If the user clicks through and does not purchase or complete the desired action, Google would not get paid. Compared to Google’s current practices, every time someone clicks on an ad amidst the search results or text ads on the millions of sites, Google earns money.

Create a commerce graph combined with social graph
Google has some products that have social components including gmail, google voice, YouTube along with some commerce components but they are rather siloed and lack the polish of an integrated product offering. Similarly, Google entered the commerce space years ago via Google checkout but adoption has been lackluster.

Raise the acquisition bar above the financial reach of competitors
With an outright acquisition or investment by Google in Groupon, Google could raise the bar for any competitor to enter the social commerce/local deal space. In this case, the billions that Google would potentially spend would be strategically used to make a similar move by Amazon or Ebay cost prohibitive. Ebay and Amazon have started to make strategic moves at what seem to be relatively low price points.

Why Groupon should not purchase Groupon?

• Repeat business is questionable amidst merchant complaints
• Google could build a Groupon clone and leverage its own platform for targeting/marketing
• Merchants are not prepared to analyze ROI for Groupon type deals before signing up
• Google already has data to generate the social and commerce graphs

Repeat business is questionable amidst merchant complaints
Merchants are often ill prepared to determine if a Groupon is financially worth conducting through Groupon. Many have even blogged about the trials and tribulations associated with a Groupon deal. This is not restricted to just the financial aspects as businesses are often overwhelmed by the volume of customers the deals drive. Repeat business is already strong for Google via its current online advertising offering and I am not sure Google would want to disrupt it. Additionally, poor experiences online or with a participating merchant could also start to erode Google’s search market share.

Google could build a Groupon clone and leverage its own platform for targeting/marketing
Fact of the matter is that from a technology perspective building a Groupon clone is not difficult. There are hundreds of clones, some of which were even acquired by Groupon in International markets. Google has a far better staff of engineers and product managers that could build a platform with richer analytics, targeting, and scalability. A prime example is that even though I am a male, Groupon still sends me waxing offers with creative targeting women. I am not about to buy that for my wife nor for someone else as a gift, sorry!

Merchants are not prepared to analyze ROI for Groupon type deals before signing up
Regardless of the business, owners typically do not have a firm grasp of the business model of Groupon nor do they realize the negative impact it could have on their business. Groupon has many past deals that they probably leverage to show prospective businesses the amount of customers and money that a deal could drive. However, business owners must realize that it is not only about the net present value of money, rather how many of those coupon chasers will actually come back to their store/restaurant etc and pay full price.

Google already has data to generate the social and commerce graphs
One of Google’s biggest critiques is that they missed out on the social networking trend. If you think about the reach of Google and the amount of content that they have indexed, they are absolutely able and aware of a user’s social graph in addition to the commerce graph. Think of what Google can do by combining toolbar, google analytics data, gmail data, and real-time search data indexed from the wealth of social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace among others.

If I were Eric Schmidt, I would opt to pass on the Groupon acquisition and set the next trend in social commerce that would disrupt the online and offline World.

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Curation is burgeoning in a couple key segments outlined below:

Curation Platforms
First and foremost are platforms that empower the docents to gather, annotate, and share content with the Internet population at large. A very promising platform that just emerged into public beta is Curated.by. The curation platforms will typically tap into multiple sources and enable further bundling, annotation, sharing, and following of curated topics by a user.

Curated.by -leader focusing on Twitter but will expand to include YouTube, Flickr
Wanelo – LA based product centric curation platform
Wantist – dead simple along with gift finder
Loved.by – Users get rewarded for recommendations
Keepstream – a leader also focusing on Twitter initially
Twitter – leader via its list building capabilities, who to follow, interests
Foodspotting -leader specializing in food but can easily expand into other categories
Pinterest – leader and recently in the headlines
Mag.ma- leader in the video curation platform space
Storify - honorable mention
Pearltrees - honorable mention

Curated Commerce Companies
Earlier, we covered how Revolve Clothing applied curation to its ecommerce store and rewarded its curators via an affiliate commission for any sales from the curated stores. Some of these sites are essentially blogs relying on advertising and affiliate links. While others within the list are moving towards a technology and recommendations focus. Both approaches still rely on having a dedicated following and traffic to properly monetize the curated content.

Ahalife – luxury products by blogging team
Nextleft – one of the earliest social, product sharing startups
Notcot – collaborative blog network focusing on fashion, tech, gadgets, and food
Svpply – luxury products and stores
Outblush and Uncrate – luxury products for women and men
Gogobot – travel plans and recommendations
Trazzler – travel plans and recommendations
Artsy – Building the art genome

Where is curation headed?
With the wealth of content available, and the ease of consuming, sharing, and annotating curation will not go away anytime soon. We sincerely hope that the same legal battles that have appeared recently related to consuming Internet content via TV will not have any negative repercussions to the curation trend. Additionally, the curators need to be compensated for the time and effort and the respective audience that they attract (the answer is not awarding badges to the curators).

This idea of curation needs both a human and technology component to be truly successful and scalable.

The company that can balance those two components will be able to build the product, content, and media genome. If you have ever used Pandora you will realize the power of the music genome project and will start to dream about what is possible. Instead of wanting my MTV, I want my content genome!

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Registered users of the site will be able to curate and create their own boutique based on the products that they like throughout the store. If anyone purchases via their boutique, the curator will get a % of sales accordingly. This is a very innovative approach towards affiliate programs. Typically affiliate programs require a long form to fill out along with rather stringent criteria. Revolve Clothing removes those barriers to entry and makes it easier. Additionally, this encourages users to create their own boutiques, promote the boutique via social commerce and sharing which would probably outperform typical affiliate programs.

Notably, some celebrities and fashion designers have already started to curate their own boutiques within Revolve Clothing’s site: Rumi Neely and Nicole Ritchie. Users of the site can follow these curated boutiques and be notified of newly added products. I would expect other retail/etailers to fast follow this concept, especially brands like J.Crew and the GAP.Tweet

The first crowdsaver was for an Element 42″ Plasma TV with wallmount and required 5,000 likes which was easily achieved. The most recent offer is for a personalized Halloween photo mug requiring 1,500 likes in order to successfuly tip the deal. What is most interesting about this approach is that Walmart can afford to manipulate their margins probably more than any major corporation given the ways in which they have negotiated with its respective suppliers. Even if no one purchases these discounted products Walmart winds up with growing the number of people that “like” their brand by at least 6,500. Furthermore, everyone knows that both people that “liked” the deal and saw the deal from their friends will actually purchase.

What was really smart about this approach was that Walmart does not have to involve a 3rd party to execute this campaign and they are leveraging Facebook’s viral platform. Additionally, this approach drives increased likes of the Walmart fan page and drives awareness of the individual deals. Users have to like and opt into the crowdsaver within the fan page and then like the individual deal. While Walmart is known for its deal centric pricing, other brands should leverage this approach. Even GAP should have taken this route instead of leveraging Groupon’s platform.

Hey Target and Costco are you listening?

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Wanderfly addresses this by enabling users to select from a set of categories which then provide recommendations from disparate partners ranging from Yelp, Foursquare among other travel guide related site partnerships. There are many areas for improvement ranging from the data that is used for recommendations to the flexibility of the interface. Our first attempt to let Wanderfly choose a destination was a little disappointing, specifically it recommended that we travel to Oklahoma City in December which was not quite the dream vacation. Additionally, Wanderfly currently provides booking of travel services exclusively via a partnership with Expedia. Questions may surface around what the algorithms are optimizing towards margins or your preferences. Lastly, adding additional travelers is a painful and confusion part of the process.

Hipmunk, takes the approach of providing a dead simple interface to book your travel with no frills aside from a friendly hip chip munk character. Compared to sites like Orbitz, Expedia, and even Wanderfly, Hipmunk provides the leanest experience. Users can easily choose their origin, destination, # of passengers etc with ease. While starting the booking process is simple, it takes some guess work as to what to do next. Specifically users have to figure out that they should just click on the flight within a gantt chart like interface for both legs of the trip.

We eagerly await what will emerge from our friends at Gogobot. With $4M from Battery and a lean and experienced team, we imagine that an experience that facilitates planning, booking and recapping travel experiences.