News about <![CDATA[marketplace]]> News about en-us <![CDATA[After 7 Years & 50K Storefronts Launched, Shopify Launches Major Redesign To Simplify Online Store-Building]]> Forrester recently predicted that the online retail market will grow to $370 billion over the next four years, up from $231 billion this year -- a 10 percent compound annual growth rate. In other words, the message is clear: The eCommerce juggernaut ain't slowing down any time soon. In 2013, every business needs some kind of online presence; the problem, of course, is that many small business owners don't have the technical know-how (or capital) to set up their own eCommerce marketplace.]]> <![CDATA[Like A CarWoo For Used Cars, AutoRef Raises $850K Seed Round Led By European Car Buying Marketplace, AutoScout24]]> Pittsburgh-based startup AutoRef.com, which is something like a CarWoo for used vehicles, has raised $850,000 in seed funding. The round was led by an interesting, strategic investor: the large European online car marketplace, AutoScout24, which is owned by Deutsche Telekom. T-Venture, the venture arm of Deutsche Telekom, also participated in the round alongside Innovation Works, plus local angels and other investors. ]]> <![CDATA[Ooomf Shutters Its App Discovery Platform, Relaunches As A Freelancer Marketplace For Web & Mobile App Projects]]> Ooomf, a startup which raised half a million in seed funding last fall for an app discovery platform, is already closing that service down and pivoting to become a marketplace to connect developers, designers and copywriters with web and mobile projects. The new service will operate under the same name, and founder Mikael Cho tells us that during its private beta last month, ooomf has already approved over $125,000 in projects, with 90 percent connecting with one of the site's professionals. ]]> <![CDATA[AlumniFunder Launches A Crowdfunding Platform Where Alumni Can Back Student Entrepreneurs]]> AlumniFunder launched in beta this week with a simple mission: Help create a deeper relationship between current students and alumni, while supporting collegiate entrepreneurship and creativity. To do that, AlumniFunder wants to give alumni a platform by which they can invest in innovative projects created by students at their alma mater. Whether it be for a new science lab, natural language processing research or a documentary film, the startup also wants to help give students access to the capital they need to get their ideas off the ground.]]> <![CDATA[Founded By Early oDesk Employees, Freelancer Marketplace Rev.com Raises $4.5 Million Series A]]> Rev.com, a freelancer marketplace founded by early oDesk employees, is today announcing $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Venky Ganesan of Globespan Capital Partners. Also participating in the round were Craig Sherman (former COO of Ancestry.com) and Austin Ligon (founder of CarMax). All three are now members of Rev.com's board of directors, following the round which closed back in August 2012.]]> <![CDATA[If You Think 10% Is A Good Transaction Fee For Your Marketplace, Then It Will Struggle]]> Editor’s note: Sunil Rajaraman is the co-founder and CEO of Scripted.com, a marketplace for businesses to create content at scale; Scripted has a pool of 80,000 freelance writers and 1,000 customers. Follow Sunil on Twitter @subes01. Like many others, I read the news about Zaarly, reported by TechCrunch’s Rip Empson last weekend, with some degree of shock. Zaarly is a well-funded business with an extremely talented team and ample resources to execute on their original vision, so I cannot understand why they decided to pivot so early in the game. Bo Fishback, co-founder of Zaarly, offers a detailed explanation here, but I can’t help but think they gave up on their original vision way too early. Zaarly’s pivot highlights a much larger point, which is that marketplaces take a lot of time and effort to build. Why are marketplaces difficult to build? The reason is liquidity; Simon Rothman of Greylock Partners writes the best material on the subject. There is always imbalance until you have that moment. People point to Airbnb and Uber as great examples of startup marketplaces, but they’ve only hit liquidity in certain big cities. Try searching for Airbnb listings in niche markets and you’ll see what I mean. oDesk is just about there, but remember it took them 10 years and a lot of resources to build up both sides of the marketplace successfully. Josh Breinlinger wrote a great piece about the early days of oDesk, which provides some perspective on how difficult it is to get the flywheel spinning so to speak. Achieving liquidity is akin to nailing low-cost customer acquisition on both sides of the marketplace. Most companies only have to worry about customer acquisition cost in one dimension, e.g. if you are selling hard drives, the hard drives have a fixed cost associated with production + distribution. Marketplaces are effectively fighting a two-front battle. In his article, Rip noted how Zaarly is doing revenue-wise: At the peak of their “reverse Craigslist” days, Zaarly was processing $1 million in transactions a month. Let’s examine this further: $1M in transactions * 15% fulfillment * 10% transaction fee = $15K in monthly net revenue As a marketplace entrepreneur, you do not want people necessarily making a living off of you. That sounds pretty abysmal, but it illustrates just how difficult it is to build marketplaces. Despite raising ~$15 million, Zaarly appeared to have a pretty significant imbalance in its marketplace; I would assume]]> <![CDATA[Zaarly Shutters Its Reverse Craigslist Marketplace, Goes All In On Virtual Storefronts As Co-Founder Exits]]> After winning LA Startup Weekend, Zaarly almost immediately raised $1 million from a long list of notable investors (even "Steve jOBS"), and then raised $14 million more before the end of the year in a round led by Kleiner, while adding Meg Whitman to its board. Fast forward to today and you'll no longer find Zaarly's marketplace on the Web. And, with the next update to its mobile app, co-founder Bo Fishback tells us, its "request anything" model will disappear from the Zaarly experience completely.]]> <![CDATA[Now 18M Users Strong, Edmodo Makes Its First Acquisition In Root-1 To Become The App Market For Education]]> After spending years working as technicians at public schools, Jeff O'Hara and Nicolas Borg launched Edmodo in 2008 to address what they had come to see as a huge gap in the teacher-student relationship: The need for a better, safer way for teachers to connect and communicate with their students. However, with the launch of its APIs early last year to allow developers to build apps on top of its platform, what began as a social networking tool -- a sort of Facebook or Yammer for education -- has more recently evolved into a marketplace for education apps. ]]> <![CDATA[Airpair Connects Startups With Expert Developers To Get Help With Code Via Online Sessions]]> Airpair, a newly launched service which connects entrepreneurs and expert developers over remote online sessions, aims to help startups build better software and speed their time to launch. The idea's name, which brings to mind "pair programming" techniques, offers its users one-hour screensharing sessions where developers will help review your code, brainstorm architecture, assist with problems, and more. ]]> <![CDATA[Amazon’s Record Holiday Season Boosted Its Third-Party Sellers Marketplace, Too: Sales Up 40% Year-Over-Year]]> Following Amazon's end-of-the-year announcement touting its record-breaking holiday sales, the company today released figures for its third-party sellers marketplace, which also saw record sales growth. Although Amazon declined to provide hard figures, it says that sellers' sales were up 40 percent year-over-year from 2011, and that sellers on Amazon sold "hundreds of millions of units worth tens of billions of dollars." ]]> <![CDATA[Backed By $500,000 In Seed Funding, LiveNinja Launches Its Video Chat Marketplace]]> LiveNinja, a video chat marketplace we spotted in TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Alley in May, is today announcing having closed a seed round of $500,000 in funding as it goes to publicly launch its platform. The round included angels from the Miami area, where LiveNinja is based, as well as a few from New York and South America. ]]> <![CDATA[Meals Marketplace Munchery Raises $4 Million For Expansion, Now Delivering High-Quality Meals To All Of Bay Area, L.A. In 2013]]> Munchery, the Bay Area startup that lets customers order healthy, high-quality meals from professional chefs, said it raised $3.3 million of an ongoing $4 million in Series A funding in a round led by E.Ventures. Also participating were angel investors (and die-hard users), Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress; Randi Zuckerberg; and El Dorado Ventures' Tom Peterson. To date, Munchery has raised $4.21 million in outside funding, which includes a small seed round from November 2011.]]> <![CDATA[Mobile Marketplace EggDrop Shuts Down Following Craigslist C&D, But Says Slow Growth To Blame]]> EggDrop, a mobile marketplace application with over half a million downloads, is shutting down. The company will inform its current user base via email on Friday. According to CEO Dan Zheng, EggDrop was the recipient of a Cease & Desist letter from Craigslist a few months ago, but that's not the primary factor in his decision to close up shop - instead, it was slower than expected growth that is to blame. ]]> <![CDATA[Mobile’s Hidden Opportunity: Marketplaces]]> Editor’s note: Matt Cohler is a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. He’s responsible for identifying investment opportunities in Internet-related companies in addition to working closely with companies across the firm’s portfolio. You can follow him on Twitter here.  Building and controlling a marketplace is hard. Marketplaces consist of two sides: supply (sellers) and demand (buyers). To build a marketplace, you need to aggregate both sides of the market. And to control that marketplace, you need to have more visibility into both sides of the market than anyone else has -- in real time. ]]> <![CDATA[If You Can Think It, You Can Buy It: Makeably Debuts A Marketplace For Custom-Made Goods]]> Love Etsy, but looking for something even more unique? Makeably, a new marketplace for custom-made goods, can help. The site, founded by two ex-Googlers and longtime friends, Ryan Hayward and Anastasia Leng, has just launched into beta, offering makers a new way to manage their custom work requests online - a process which, today, is largely handled via email. On the site, buyers can search through a variety of categories ranging from apparel to kids' items to household goods and more, and can check out photos of the types of items the makers produce, as well as the prices associated with the custom work. Buyers can then begin to communicate with the maker about what sort of work they want done, and settle on an exact price and due date.]]> <![CDATA[Amazon’s attempt to commoditize cloud resources falls short]]> ]]> <![CDATA[99designs Makes Its First Acquisition, Scoops Up European Rival 12designer]]> 99designs, the polarizing crowdsourced design marketplace, announced its first acquisition tonight, as the Accel-backed startup scooped up its European rival, 12designer, for an undisclosed amount. In the near-term, 12designer will continue to operate as a stand-alone site. Since raising $35 million from Accel, 99designs has been focused on international growth, said Patrick Llewellyn, the company's President and CEO. 12designer is based in Germany, which has become 99design's top non-English (and fastest-growing) market, with European users now accounting for 15 percent of the site's graphic design contests.]]> <![CDATA[Rakuten-Owned Buy.com CEO Neel Grover, COO Greg Giraudi Step Down [Memo]]]> A changing of the guard at Buy.com, which was bought by Japan's Rakuten in May 2010. Long-serving executives CEO/president Neel Grover and COO Greg Giraudi are stepping down from their roles, effective September 1. Grover had been instrumental behind the sale of the e-commerce site to the Japanese giant for $250 million. The memo does not make clear why the pair are leaving, but it coincides with the two-year mark since the Buy.com sale closed, so it may be connected to an earn-out. It may also be a sign of Rakuten strengthening its control of operations at Buy.com as it ramps up its activities in the U.S. That has included leading a $100 million, strategic investment in Pinterest in May this year. ]]> <![CDATA[Meet the Q&A site where people pay $150 for answers]]> ]]> <![CDATA[Meet the Q&A site where people pay $150 for answers]]> ]]> <![CDATA[Exclusive: Why Glenn Beck is selling pillows, salsa and purses]]> ]]> <![CDATA[Exclusive: Why Glenn Beck is selling pillows, salsa and purses]]> ]]> <![CDATA[After Ditching Auctions, Mobile Marketplace EggDrop Hits Half A Million Downloads]]> EggDrop, essentially a mobile app alternative to Craigslist, is starting to pick up steam. The company now boasts half a million downloads of its app on iOS and Android, with $8 million in listings from across the 50 U.S. states and the U.K. (EggDrop's top two markets). The app originally launched last June, backed by $1 million in funding in a round led by BlueRun Ventures and SV Angel. But that first experience doesn't look much like EggDrop today. In November, the company rolled out a major update (ver. 2.0) which completely replaced the auction format found in the original with more traditional marketplace-style listings. Since then, over 5,000 items have been sold within the app, including electronics, games, furniture, and even grand pianos and wedding dresses. ]]> <![CDATA[Bored This Weekend? LifeCrowd Launches A Marketplace For Social Activities]]> LifeCrowd, the first startup to emerge from the newly-formed TechStars Network member MuckerLab based in L.A., is today launching its marketplace for social activities into public beta. The company, which aims to provide a curated selection of quality events, happenings, classes and outings, is available now for users in San Francisco, San Diego, and all of Orange County, Calif., as well as in its original test market of L.A. Only a month and a half old, co-founder Bong Koh says the concept for LifeCrowd is very simple. "We just help you meet new people and try new activities," he explains.]]> <![CDATA[“Etsy For Eco” Ethical Community Raises $300,000+ In Seed Funding]]> Ethical Community, an online, eco-friendly marketplace (which has plans for a snazzier name in the works!), has secured a £200,000 ($316,640 USD) round of seed funding from a syndicate of angel investors, the company is announcing today. Founded in 2009, the marketplace has signed up over 850 sellers from around the world, who have now listed over 7,000 eco-friendly, organic and natural products including clothing, jewelry, health and beauty products, food and drink items, pet items and more. ]]> <![CDATA[Apptopia’s New Marketplace Will Help Broker Sales Of Mobile Apps]]> Remember the news from earlier this week about a mobile app developer who turned to eBay to unload his underperforming iOS app? (Update, the app is now up to $15,100+!) Well, there will soon be an alternative to eBay auctions for other developers looking to do the same.  A new marketplace called Apptopia will launch in February, allowing developers to sell their mobile apps, source code and all. ]]> <![CDATA[Want to Invest like Ron Paul? Buy Gold]]> <![CDATA[Redbeacon comes to iPhone to make good help easier to find]]> ]]> <![CDATA[Mashape, The Etsy Of Cloud Services, Goes Beta; Lets You Monetize Your APIs In A Click]]> Mashape has a somewhat unusual backstory: The Italian startup spent two years looking for funding in its home country, only to be rebuffed at every turn. So, in 2009, it moved operations to Silicon Valley. The team found funding in less than three weeks. Granted, it was $100K, but it was enough to begin building a real service. Persistence, it seems, is key. (It also helps to have a great idea and position your business in a market that's on the rise.) As you may have noticed, APIs are all the rage these days. Twitter attracts 15 billion API calls per day, Google and Facebook were pulling in 5 billion per day as of last year, Amazon currently stores over 260 billion objects in S3, and Saleforce.com receives 50 percent of its traffic through its API. You get the picture. Mashape, which is going into private beta today, hopes to ride this API surge to victory through a marketplace makes it simple for developers to discover, distribute, and consume all things API. ]]> <![CDATA[How 99Designs Bootstrapped Its Way to Profits]]> ]]> <![CDATA[Goldman charges made simple]]> <![CDATA[CryoPort, Inc. (CYRX.OB) Appoints McDowell Sr. Vice President for Logistics and Operations]]> <![CDATA[eFax Enters GOOG’s App-Store – Zacks Tale of the Tape]]> eFax, the flagship product of unified value-added messaging services provider j2 Global Communications Inc. (JCOM), will now be available on the Google Apps Marketplace. Google Inc. (GOOG) recently launched its online storefront called ‘Google Apps Marketplace" for the company’s application products and services. The Google Apps Marketplace is used by more than 2 million Google Apps customers to easily discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services.
 
eFax is a full-featured Internet service that allows faxes to be sent and received as email attachments. This saves both time and money by eliminating the need for a dedicated fax machine and phone line. eFax will be available as an integrated cloud application within the Google Apps Marketplace. As a result, eFax accounts for onsite staff, remote offices, and mobile users can be established more easily.
 
We believe, j2 Global Communications needs more business partners like Google in near-future. Competition in the outsourced, value-added messaging industry is fierce and continues to intensify. The company faces competition from, fax-to-email providers, broadcast fax companies, traditional fax machine/multi-function printer companies, unified messaging/communications providers, telephone companies, voicemail providers, companies offering PBX systems and outsourced PBX solutions providers. 

j2 Global Communications delivers integrated communication services through its unique digital faxing and voice messaging systems. At present, the company commands approximately 30% of the world digital faxing system. From an operational standpoint, the company continues to focus on subscriber usage revenue, which increased more than 2% year-over-year in 2009.
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]]> <![CDATA[eFax Enters GOOG’s App-Store – Analyst Blog]]> eFax, the flagship product of unified value-added messaging services provider j2 Global Communications Inc. (JCOM), will now be available on the Google Apps Marketplace. Google Inc. (GOOG) recently launched its online storefront called ‘Google Apps Marketplace" for the company’s application products and services. The Google Apps Marketplace is used by more than 2 million Google Apps customers to easily discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services.
 
eFax is a full-featured Internet service that allows faxes to be sent and received as email attachments. This saves both time and money by eliminating the need for a dedicated fax machine and phone line. eFax will be available as an integrated cloud application within the Google Apps Marketplace. As a result, eFax accounts for onsite staff, remote offices, and mobile users can be established more easily.
 
We believe, j2 Global Communications needs more business partners like Google in near-future. Competition in the outsourced, value-added messaging industry is fierce and continues to intensify. The company faces competition from, fax-to-email providers, broadcast fax companies, traditional fax machine/multi-function printer companies, unified messaging/communications providers, telephone companies, voicemail providers, companies offering PBX systems and outsourced PBX solutions providers. 

j2 Global Communications delivers integrated communication services through its unique digital faxing and voice messaging systems. At present, the company commands approximately 30% of the world digital faxing system. From an operational standpoint, the company continues to focus on subscriber usage revenue, which increased more than 2% year-over-year in 2009.
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]]> <![CDATA[VeriFone Launches New Initiative – Analyst Blog]]> VeriFone Holdings,Inc. (PAY) recently announced a strategic initiative to leverage its current and future payment assets into the rapidly growing payment-enabled media marketplace. 

Management stated that consumers now want to take advantage of electronic payment options in locations that offer unique media and marketing opportunities. VeriFone currently provides advertising opportunities on a number of its taxi cab payment systems in New York City. 

Management now intends to broaden this footprint nationwide and begin a major initiative introducing other payment-enabled media opportunities. 

As part of this new initiative, VeriFone is announcing a major refresh of its taxicab technology to include IP-connected Flash 10 technology and dynamic content generation capabilities. VeriFone intends to roll this technology out to all of its New York taxicabs by June 2010. 

Additionally, VeriFone intends to build its payment-enabled media sales force to more than 20 sales representatives serving both local and national media buyers. Management expects to accomplish this by the first quarter of 2010. Earlier this month, the company reported results for the first quarter of fiscal 2010 which beat management estimates. 

Management stated that it sees a recovery in all international markets and some signs of improvement in the domestic marketplace. Management believes that the growth in American markets is driven by recovery from the stimulus and the environment should become challenging once the effects of the stimulus wane. 

Our long-term recommendation for VeriFone is Neutral, which means the stock will perform in line with the broader market. 

Based in San Jose, California, VeriFone designs, markets and services a transaction automation system that facilitates electronic payments among consumers, merchants and financial institutions.
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]]> <![CDATA[Understanding the Economy through Podcasts]]> <![CDATA[Lenovo Strengthens its Status as a Global Brand with Strong Sales in China and Europe]]> Lenovo Group Ltd. (OTC: LNVGY) may be the world’s fourth-largest PC vendor, but strong earnings, a fast-growing home market in China, global expansion, and the company’s involvement as an official sponsor of the Olympic Games have positioned the brand for solid…

]]> <![CDATA[Subprime Crisis Again in the Spotlight as the Meltdowns of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Fuel Fears of a Deeper Downturn]]> We’ve been warning you since the start that the subprime crisis would have some real staying power.

Indeed, every time optimistic prognosticators have predicted an end to this global financial debacle, we’ve had the same response: Don’t you believe it.

Again just…

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