Products

VoteIt Officially Launches to Help Groups Quibble Over Decisions Online

We’ve all been on that nightmare email chain. The 79-thread one where 15 of your college friends argue over Atlantic City or Vegas for a bachelorette party. Or the internal company email where each response includes a new “cc” recipient who has to weigh in. Or even the annual sibling email over what to get Dad for Christmas.

VoteIt makes the group decision process simple. You pose a question, you invite friends, they vote, they explain why they voted the way they did. It’s all socially integrated and it’s all open, clean and simple. (Here’s an example.)

It was conceived to solve small day-to-day group decisions like the ones I described. “We had this theory that decisions are social,” CEO Taylor Beery said. Reasonable enough. But since the company’s soft launch in private beta last Fall, VoteIt has been floored by the types of things users have put up to vote.

“We didn’t anticipate the breadth of ways people would use the product,” Beery said. Everything from dog names to neighborhood associations testing out opinions on new initiatives to companies deciding on new logos. (Beery actually tried to persuade his wife to put the name of their baby up to a vote. He was overruled–three month-old Walker’s name was ultimately decided “as a one-on-one decision,” Beery said.)

Today the New Orleans-based startup has quietly opened its platform from private beta.
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PandoDaily’s First Ebook Is Out Now! Your Definitive Guide to Facebook’s IPO

We had a lot of luxuries when we started PandoDaily. One was knowing without a doubt what the biggest story of the year would be: Facebook’s IPO.

We knew we had to do something special for it, particularly because several members of our staff and contributors are among the world’s leading experts on the company. So rather than simply bang out a bunch of blog posts and live-Tweet how the stock trades on Friday, we decided to do something a little more in-depth.

The result is published today. It’s our first ever eBook “Buy This Book Before You Buy Facebook: A PandoDaily Expert Guide to the Internet’s Biggest IPO,” available on Amazon Kindle right now, and on other platforms very soon. Continue reading

NetSuite Shifts to Next Step In Its Cloud Evolution: Commerce as a Service

At the SuiteWorld conference in San Francisco this morning, NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson has announced the launch of a new cloud commerce service that will let its business customers manage transactions and interactions easily across all devices and platforms.

Nelson says the new platform, called SuiteCommerce, represents the next evolution of commerce. A website alone is no longer enough to manage transactions, he says, because people today want to use multiple touchpoints – such as smartphones, social media sites, and in-store devices – to interact with businesses. “You can’t really anticipate the channels anymore,” he says. Continue reading

Honestly, the Pivot Machine, is Now TalentBin

How many pivots make a full circle? Ask Honestly, previously Unvarnished.com, now Talentbin. You following?

The company started as a Yelp for people, but quickly realized it was difficult to crowdsource reviews of humans from other humans. LinkedIn isn’t exactly teeming with recommendations (and half of the people who have made them wish they could call takebacksies). It had the potential to become a pit of defamation and was maybe a little evil, too. So it’s no surprise that an online vouching social network type of hybrid was a challenge.

Now the company has relaunched as a more recruiter-friendly LinkedIn. Continue reading

Elicit Raises a $1.5 Million Series A to Fix Site Search

Chicago-based Elicit has raised a $1.5 million Series A funding round. Greycroft Partners, First Round Capital, ff Ventures, and Michael Lazerow’s L3 investment fund all participated.

Best described as human-driven search curation, Elicit was designed to assist marketers in tackling a serious issue: product search. Continue reading

Refer.ly Launches Influencer Affiliate Platform Ahead of YC Session

Share links and earn rewards! It sounds like a shady Internet get-rich-quick scheme. Or a way to spam your friends in exchange for pennies. There is a reason pay-per-tweet businesses geared at average Joes and Janes haven’t quite taken off.

But word-of-mouth marketing is so damn tempting to capitalize on, especially when social media allows us to track and attribute every successful recommendation. Someone just needs to do it well.

That’s the basic premise of Refer.ly, a startup launched today by Danielle Morrill, former head of marketing for Twilio, as well as Kevin Morrill, formerly of HelloFax, and Al Abut, formerly of AOL. Refer.ly will be a part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 session, but unlike most YC companies that wait until Demo Day to unveil their product, Morrill has launched Refer.ly early. “We already have a product so we’d rather find out early if it’s not a good idea,” she says.

The small idea is affiliate links. Social media users who share them get paid with rewards, charity donations, or cash. The big idea is “an Internet without ads.” Continue reading

Subscription Commerce Isn’t a Revolutionary Business Model, It’s a Smoke Screen

“We get pitched on a new ‘something in a box’ every day.”

That’s a top commerce VC, who was quick to add that every day he says no. It’s a theme we’ve heard repeated over and over asking around about the explosion of subscription commerce startups in the market.

We feel the VCs’ pain — our inboxes are overflowing with new twists on the subscription commerce business model. But the thing is, subscription commerce is already a twist on the standard ecommerce business model. It’s no more a “revolution” to ecommerce than was the now-dead “revolution” in daily deals. Ecommerce isn’t an easy business to be in, and slapping a subscription onto your model doesn’t suddenly lead to magical, never-ending guaranteed streams of revenue.

Maybe we’re just talking to negatrons who don’t know a good revolution when they see one. Maybe the subscription commerce bulls will have a good laugh at our expense when, five years from now, Jam of the Month eclipses Amazon in sales. There are some companies who are doing it well. Birchbox and JustFab are in that category and we’ll explain why below. Continue reading

Fitocracy Enables Users to Defend Their Honor with New “Duels” Feature

Fitness platform Fitocracy will be debuting a new feature named Duels early next week. Duels will further Fitocracy’s goal of encouraging exercise through competition, adding the caveat “…on Fitocracy” to the end of “I’m going to kick your ass!”

Duels use the points system already present in Fitocracy’s gamified approach to exercise, encouraging a race for “Most Swimming Distance” or “Most Weights Lifted” between two users. Founder and CEO Brian Wang says that the feature is a result of users’ requests for more game-like features and is designed to encourage a bit of friendly competition. Continue reading

Piccsy Leaves Private Beta on a Mission to Dethrone Google Images as the King of Image Aggregation

Piccsy founder and CEO Daniel Eckler, who previously founded the EveryGuyed network and co-founded Vizualize.me, isn’t concerned with his site’s similarities to the so-popular-it’s-frustrating Pinterest. While there are differentiating factors, and 25,000 users have joined the service during its two-year-long private beta, Eckler’s vision for the service has nothing to do with beating Pinterest.

He’s aiming much higher. While Pinterest and Tumblr continue to gain popularity as content aggregators, neither can touch Piccsy’s target: Google Images. Continue reading

Course Hero, a DIY Education Startup, Is Now Paying Students*

*That is, if you complete a “Learning Path” on entrepreneurship and pitch a winning idea. In partnership with Course Hero investor SV Angel, the company announced a quarterly award of $5,000 and the opportunity to pitch their business to SV Angel to one student entrepreneur.

But let’s put that into context. Course Hero is among the recent class of startups angling to disrupt education. Its take on the trend is through guided online courses, creating from existing online sources. It might remind you a little of Boundless, only instead of replacing textbooks, Course Hero replaces the entire course.

CEO Andrew Grauer wouldn’t want me to say Course Hero’s aim is to kill colleges. Until the company launched its official course product last month, the site was just a study supplement and tutor matching service. Not to diminish that, the five-year-old company has been profitable for over a year.

The company’s real goal is far less inflammatory: Course Hero wants to make online learning free and awesome.
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