Category: Tech news

There are a few lessons you could take away from the fact that FacebookIPODayClosingPrice.com exists right now:

1.  Ask and ye shall receive, especially if you’re Chris Sacca.
2. The Hacker Way goes way beyond Facebook headquarters.
3. Facebook IPO fever is definitely in full swing and we should all just give in to it.

Here’s the story: Angel investor and all-around web magnate Chris Sacca wrote a quick tweet early yesterday about how it’d be cool if there was a website where people could predict where Facebook’s stock will end up at the end of its first day as a publicly traded company. Horse races in general are always fun to watch, after all, and it’s definitely a conversation that’s happening around many a watercooler now that Facebook’s IPO is officially on for tomorrow morning.

So a programmer named James Proud answered the call, hacking together FacebookIPODayClosingPrice.com, a fun little website that keeps a running tally of people’s bets on where Facebook’s stock will close on IPO day.

@sacca Ok!—
James Proud (@jamesproud) May 16, 2012

The site, which went live yesterday afternoon, says it was “quickly knocked together with Python, Tornado, Postgres, Redis, Heroku, no sleep and Bootstrap.” It’s pretty simple: Anyone with a Twitter account can sign in and place his or her bet on what price Facebook’s stock will be at market close tomorrow afternoon.

Some big names in the web have weighed in on the site already: Chris Sacca thinks it will close at $56, while Chris Dixon predicts a slightly more modest $50.

And what’s the general consensus at the moment? As of press time (or clicking publish on WordPress time) the site says that 475 people have predicted an average closing share price of $54, which values the company at more than $135 billion. That’s a 42 percent boost over the $38 share price of its IPO — not too shabby. Anyway, if you’re so inclined go on over and place a bet of your own. At this point there’s no fighting the Facebook IPO fever — and if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Twitter does a lot of things right, but it still hasn’t solved the problem of turning its noise into signal. After joining Twitter, it can take a lot of following and unfollowing scores of accounts before you’ve curated a stream that makes sense for you. With its platform growing fast, Twitter is looking to make the onboarding process a little easier (and more personalized) for new users, which is why it announced today via its blog that it will begin serving users tailored suggestions of who they should follow.

Twitter is calling its new personalization features “experiments,” (in other words, they’re in beta), which will manifest for users in several ways. The first being that it will show new users a list of recommended accounts, which will be accompanied by a timeline that features tweets from those recommended accounts. New users (who are part of the beta testing) will see the list as soon as they sign up, but will not be required to follow their suggestions.

For those of us already using The Twitters, if you’re a lucky winner, you’ll begin to see Twitter’s suggestions in the “Who To Follow” box on the left side of your homescreen. From what we can tell, the box won’t be altered from its current placement/design, but will instead just start showing more relevant suggestions. To see who Twitter will recommend for you, check out their preview page here.

So, how exactly is Twitter going about serving you these recommendations? The suggestions are “based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem,” meaning that Twitter is culling the data that it receives from other websites that are utilizing its buttons/widgets, identifying the accounts that are most followed by people who visit those sites, and recommending it to you based on similarities with those users in your own Twitter activity.

Twitter will be offering the ability to turn this functionality off. This comes with the context of the announcement earlier today that Twitter will be supporting Mozilla’s “Do Not Track” feature, which allows users to opt-out of those pesky third-party cookies, including … wait for it … those used in advertising.

This morning, that seemed just a symbolic gesture on Twitter’s part, because they weren’t really tracking you anyway. With the addition of their follow recommendation engine, now this move makes perfect sense, and is obviously timed perfectly. Now Twitter can just say that, hey, if you don’t like it tracking your activity, turn on Do Not Track. As to who’s supporting: Firefox, Safari and IE9 already have some form of Do Not Track features built-in, but it seems that only Firefox is really evangelizing. However, all three browsers should be compatible with DNT, and allow for opt-outs.

There is more information about Twitter’s integration with Do Not Track reflected in its privacy policy, so, as mentioned, if you’ve got it enabled in one of those browsers, you won’t see any tailored suggestions. With the heightened interest and concern over the way social networks (and beyond) are using our personal data, this is a smart move on Twitter’s part to ensure users that it’s taking transparency (and privacy) seriously.

The other important piece of this is that people who are new to Twitter will see an option to tailor their feeds based on the sites they’re visiting from twitter, accompanied by a “learn more” link, whereas current users will find a “personalization” section added to their account settings.

Users can disable personalization at any time, which prevents Twitter from collecting information on your activity, and as the blog post adds, “You can even choose to turn off tailored suggestions from the preview page (which shows some suggestions we’d make for you).”

What’s really interesting here is that this is the first sign of Twitter getting serious about building its own interest graph, as if you’d ever get tired of all this “graph” talk, right? But this is the social network’s first big move that shows it following in the footsteps of Facebook, as the more personal info they collect on your interests and activity on their platform, the more info there is to feed targeted advertising and tweets.

For more, check out Twitter’s blog post here, and current users can test out preview here. Do Not Track info here. Do Not Track info here.

Additional reporting from Frederic Lardinois

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo ruffled a few feathers yesterday when he mentioned at an investor conference that every one of their customers would be on one of the carrier’s new data share plans.

In an effort to clarify his meaning, Verizon sent a statement to a handful of news outlets today that shines a bit more light on how they plan to make this situation work.

First thing’s first — Verizon still intends to make those pesky (for them, anyway) unlimited data plans a thing of the past, they’ll just be doing it more gradually than originally anticipated.

That said, subscribers currently clinging to their unlimited data plans can actually keep them in certain cases. If you’re a customer who just upgraded from a 3G to a 4G device with that older data plan intact, congratulations — you’ll be able to hang on to it until the next time you waltz into a Verizon store to upgrade your smartphone.

Furthermore, customers who pay the full outright price for their handsets will be able to keep their unlimited plans as well, though that’s hardly anything new for them — by buying the device outright, you’re able to dodge another multi-year contract extension. As far as Verizon seems to be concerned, you’re fine unless you take them up on the offer of a discounted device (and the contract that goes with it):

“When we introduce our new shared data plans, Unlimited Data will no longer be available to customers when purchasing handsets at discounted pricing.”

That little “discounted pricing” proviso is an interesting one — does that mean customers would be able to hold onto those unlimited plans if they opted to pay full price for devices from now on? It certainly seems that way, though I can’t imagine too many people would be eager to take them up on that deal considering how damned expensive smartphones are without that nifty little subsidy to help out. Still, the option seems to be there for anyone who doesn’t mind spending gobs of money to prove a point.

The ongoing interest and use of cloud-based services has brought a generally good set of results to one of the leaders in the enterprise software-as-a-service business. Salesforce.com released Q1 earnings just now and in a quarter that is traditionally slower for the company, it swung to a net loss of $19.5 million, compared to a net profit of $530 million a year ago. Nevertheless, total revenues for the quarter were $695 million and earnings per share of $0.37 — beating estimates from analysts as polled by First Call, who expected adjusted EPS of $0.34 and $678.21 million for revenue. The figures were also better than Saleforce’s own guidance of $0.33-$0.34 for the EPS and revenue of $673 million – $678 million.

The sales were an increase of 38 percent on revenues for the same period a year ago, and Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com, says that the company is on track for its first $3 billion year; last year the company broke new ground with $2 billion in sales.

Within salesforce’s revenues of $695 million, the company is making the vast majority of its money on its core, cloud-based CRM software, for which subscription and support revenues were $655 million. Professional services accounted for a much smaller portion of sales at just $40 million. Subscriptions are growing more: they were up by 38 percent compared to 30% for professional services.

Deferred revenues — that is, revenues that Salesforce has yet to collect from its customers — is up by quite a lot. Salesforce notes that overall deferred revenue on the balance sheet was $1.33 billion, a rise of 46 percent on last year. Meanwhile unbilled deferred revenue — business that is contracted but unbilled and off the balance sheet — was up to $2.7 billion from $2.2 billion a year ago. Rises in both might be a reflection of Salesforce’s own growth, but could also be a sign of customers delaying their payments, which Salesforce cites as a risk factor in its business.

Salesforce says that it generated cash of $213 million in Q1, up 53 percent over last year. Total cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities are at $1.7 billion.

In addition to the bullish projections on $3 billion in revenues for the full year, Salesforce.com says that it expects revenues for the next quarter to be up on this quarter and in the range of $724 million and $728 million, up 33 percent on last year’s Q2.

Looks like tomorrow might be a good trading day for Salesforce.com. In a research note, Canaccord Genuity analyst Richard Davis noted that the thinks that shares of Salesforce.com might rise by as much as three-eight percent on Friday, due to “at least temporary exhaustion of risk-off selling of high valuation growth stocks,” and “a positive halo effect from a successful Facebook IPO.”

 

Love’em or hate’em, despite the best efforts of Bump and others, traditional business cards aren’t going away anytime soon. At least, though, some companies are trying to bridge the gap between paper cards and efforts like Bump. New York-based Vizibility first announced its NFC-enabled businesses cards during SXSW earlier this year. Now, the online identity management platform for professionals, is ready to take this project out of beta and is making it widely available as a standard feature for its paying subscribers and for a one-time fee of $15 for users with free accounts.

With these cards, Vizibility promises, users will be able to wirelessly exchange contact information and share “hand-picked profiles, video bios, verified Google results and more.” Given that many phones, including the current generation iPhone, don’t yet support NFC, Vizibility is also printing a QR code on the front of the card as well. Vizibility users can also buy additional QR stickers and business cards and allows users to track when and where their cards were scanned.

Once scanned, the user’s browser will open up a mobile-optimized microsite with the contact’s information. The site lets you download you contact’s vCard and will also show mutual LinkedIn and Facebook friends. According to Vizibility, its cards are “the first commercially available mobile business card using QR code and NFC technologies.”

Vizibility has raised about $2.6 million since it was founded in 2009. The company’s latest funding round was a $1.3 million round last August that was led by Launchpad Venture Group of Boston.

Facebook shares will start trading at $38 tomorrow, the company confirmed in a release, giving it a valuation of $104.12 billion. Facebook and its early shareholders will raise just over $16 billion in tomorrow’s much anticipated IPO.

At a $104 billion valuation, Facebook is worth more than any other tech IPO candidate at the time of its offering.  It also perfectly matches what Facebook shares have been trading at in secondary markets over the last several months. Google was worth $23 billion at the time of its very unusual Dutch auction IPO back in 2004. As of tomorrow Facebook will be worth about half of what Google is worth now.

The proceeds of the sale are actually split between Facebook and early shareholders like Peter Thiel, DST and Accel Partners. Facebook is only selling 180 million shares while the other stockholders are parting ways with 241,233, 615 shares. On top of that Facebook has given the investment banks underwriting the IPO the 30-day option of selling up to 63,185,042 extra shares. At final pricing, that would be worth $2.4 billion, but it’s likely that Facebook stock will pop a bit tomorrow.

Because Facebook priced at the higher end of its $34 to $38 price range, this suggests that there will unsurprisingly be a lot of demand tomorrow. Bankers will want to price the deal so that there’s a bit of a pop for good publicity, but Facebook won’t want to underprice the deal so much that they leave billions of dollars on the table.

Accel Partners, the first venture firm that backed Facebook, will walk away with $1.9 billion from the sale of its shares. Goldman Sachs will take away $1.1 billion after its late stage investment in the company last year.

Facebook will have the third largest IPO in U.S. history. Only Visa and Italian electric utility ENEL raised more in their IPOs. It’s valuation would also make Facebook worth slightly more than Amazon, which has a $98 billion market cap.

A $104 billion market capitalization puts Facebook at more than 100 times its trailing earnings. That’s a big multiple to live up to, and it will likely need to add bold new revenue streams to justify the mammoth valuation.

Shares will begin trading tomorrow at 11am Eastern Time after Mark Zuckerberg remotely rings the NASDAQ opening bell from Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. Zuckerberg is expected to give a speech or at least a few remarks from Facebook HQ courtyard tomorrow morning, and preparations for the ceremony are already underway.

Last night, Time Inc. threw a pretty badass party in Manhattan to celebrate “Ten NYC Startups To Watch.” Among the ten were Fancy Hands, a site that offers up a personal assistant for every and any need you might have, and Stamped, a social network that lets you put your stamp of approval on the things you like.

We pulled aside founders of both companies to find out a little more about them, their business models, and why they think they deserve a spot on Time Inc.’s list.

In the case of Fancy Hands, founder Ted Roden justified his slot on the list with staying power. He’s been working on the site, that up until a recent $1 million funding round was entirely bootstrapped, for three years, with the site alive and growing for the past two years.

In his opinion, Time Inc. chose Fancy Hands because it’s not necessarily all about how much hype you get at launch, but your ability to scale and grow over time.

For Stamped the story is a bit different. After asking co-founder and CEO Robby Stein why he was named one of Time Inc.’s 10 best startups, his answer was all about disruption.

“We think that we’re trying to do something that will hopefully disrupt the way people think about discovering new information, and really transform the model from one that’s more crowd-sourced and anonymous to one that’s extremely personal,” said Stein.

Freshdesk is trying to make waves in cloud customer support. Launched in June of last year, the young company is on a mission to help businesses of all sizes manage customer service through both traditional channels, like email and phone, as well on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Earlier this week, Freshdesk added to its customer support suite, launching support for private customer messages via the new Brand Pages Facebook launched back in February. This means that, using the new Pages, customers can initiate private conversations with brands, with the ability to share the kind of sensitive information they wouldn’t post publicly on Facebook or Twitter, like passwords and credit card numbers.

Freshdesk said that it’s the first customer support platform to offer this kind of integration, a shot across the bow of its two largest and well-established competitors, Zendesk and Salesforce’s Desk.com. To compete, the startup is making a push to differentiate its platform, adding private messaging via Brand Pages on top of what it believes is its core differentiator: Allowing its customers to support and manage multiple products and brands from one simple web interface.

In less than a year, Freshdesk has already raised $6 million in venture funding from Tiger Global and Accel, and, though it believes that the biggest market opportunity down the road will be in offering its brand of cloud customer support to the enterprise, Freshdesk wants to entice (and give back to) the little guys as well.

That’s why the startup is today announcing the first phase of its “Future Fund,” which will provide customer support services to 501 startups and early-stage businesses through a $10 million “fund,” which includes free support for one year. Freshdesk has teamed up with incubators and angel funds, like YouWeb, Tandem Entrepreneurs, Internet India Fund, 500 Startups, and Proudly Made to begin giving their early-stage businesses customer support tools so that they don’t have to worry about allocating their own money to CRM tools at those critical, early stages of growth.

Not unlike any other fund that provides growth services, value, or support to young businesses, Freshdesk is looking to give startups a painless way to start generating customer love early on in their growth.

So what does the Future Fund offer? Qualifying startups (any company that has under $1 million in annual revenues is welcome to apply, it’s not limited to the accelerators we mentioned earlier) will get up to three full-time customer support agents free for an entire year as part of Freshdesk’s “Garden” plan. The plan includes multi-channel support, which startups can use to support customer relation management through email, phone, their website, Facebook, and Twitter from one dashboard.

This means that they can view and manage queries, lead or sales questions, ticketing functionality, as well as community management capabilities that allow teams to engage customers in discussion forums and let early adopters suggest and vote on ideas. Startups with multiple brands or product lines can support their brands through a single account.

Freshdesk is supporting the fund from its internal revenues, and although it’s not disclosing rev growth, the team did say that it was supporting 700 companies as of April, which has doubled since February. With its Future Fund, Freshdesk believes that it’s doing a community service by way of a free service that lets young businesses focus on their product while maintaining quality customer support, but this is also very much an initiative that it hopes will introduce SaaS support to a new generation of companies, which it will try to convert to paying customers when the year of free service expires.

Like others, Freshdesk is free to start, with a tiered pricing scheme that escalates based on the number of agents and customization features a business needs. More on pricing here.

For startups looking to participate in the Future Fund, check out its landing page here.

Tiny sidebar and news feed ads aren’t going to cut it. If Facebook wants to live up to a $104 billion valuation it will need bold new revenue streams. An offsite ad network, big glossy news feed ads, and payments for physical goods are a few ways it could boost its average revenue per user far beyond the puny $4.34 a year it earns today.

Facebook has a tough decision to make now that’s going public. It will have to strike a new balance between the good of its users, advertisers, app developers, and investors. If it refuses to explore new business models, its share price could sink. But if it strays too far in favor of making money, Facebook could lose its addictiveness and the faith of its users. Here’s the four aces Mark Zuckerberg could have up his sleeve.

The AdSense Killer

Most ads suck because most advertisers don’t know much about who you are. But Facebook does. What if any website could use everything Facebook knows about you to show you ads you’d want to click? Well, those sites would pay Facebook a lot of money. They also might use Facebook to replace Google AdSense, the current leader amongst ad networks, which analyzes a site and automatically displays relevant ads.

Facebook’s ad network essentially turn ad real estate on any website into places to serve the campaigns that advertisers buy for display on Facebook.com. Anyone currently logged into Facebook who visits one of these sites would be shown ads targeted by their Facebook information, such as age, gender, location, work and education history, interests, app usage, and friends. Facebook and the site hosting an ad would then split the money made on clicks or impressions.

Facebook has denied this product is in the works whenever it’s been asked, but last week it revised its privacy policy to expand its ability to serve ads to its user while they’re outside of Facebook.com. There’d be little reason to do this if something wasn’t in the works. The march across the web of its other social plugins such as the Like button have also paved the way for an ad network plugin. It might need to develop or acquire a company with expertise in analyzing site content so it could serve somewhat relevant ads to site visitors who aren’t logged in to Facebook.

The biggest obstacle, and likely the reason Facebook hasn’t already launched an offsite ad network, is that the world might not be ready. People are already skittish about Facebook using all their personal data to target them with ads when they’re on its site. Even though Facebook wouldn’t technically be “tracking” user web browsing history to power ad targeting, seeing offsite ads targeted from their onsite data might cause some people to have an all-out privacy meltdown. But if it worked, the ad network could double or triple Facebook’s ad revenue.

PayBook

Facebook has its own virtual currency called Credits that’s typically used to let gamers make in-game purchases like powerups, clothing for their characters, and of course, cows for their farms. Users buy the Credits for $0.10 each, and when they spend them Facebook gives 70% to the game’s developer and keeps the other 30%. These in-game payments are a healthy business for Facebook, and they’ve made game developers like Zynga rich because creating and selling virtual goods is cheap.

The problem is that the 30% tax is too high to for people to sell physical goods for Credits. And while Apple also charges 30% to sell music, games, and in-app purchases through iTunes and its App Store, it has a tight grip on the digital media market. Facebook allows media sales with Credits, but only a few developers and content producers are experimenting with it as the tax is prohibitive.

But if Facebook wanted to get serious about making money on payments, it could reduce its 30% tax for digital media and physical goods. In fact, its S-1 filing to IPO noted that “In the future, if we extend Payments outside of games, the percentage fee we receive from developers may vary.” That could turn Facebook into a competitor to Amazon for the huge market of physical goods, and pit it against Apple, Google, and Amazon for selling music, films, and more.

The real power of Facebook Payments comes in its tie in with Facebook Connect. Together they could one day let you make a purchase and fill in your shipping info anywhere on the web with just a click or two. Before privacy fear-mongers in the media and congress made Facebook retreat, the social network briefly allowed apps to ask for your home address, aka your shipping address. Eventually Facebook will bring this back. Then this frictionless purchase system could increase conversion rates for ecommerce stores enough that they’d gladly implement Facebook Payments and Connet…

Charging For Apps For Your Identity

There were over 550,000 apps and integrated websites on the Facebook platform as of a few years ago. Many rely on Facebook’s identity system to replace or provide an easier alternative to signing up for an app-specific account complete with another password to remember and profile to fill out. This service saves app developers from having to build their own identity system, and primes users for social sharing that can drive crucial referral traffic to apps.

Could Facebook convince some of the developers to pay either a subscription or per-user fee? Yes, but the price would have to be steep to make it a serious revenue stream. If it got 300,000 apps paying $100 a month each it’d still only be make $360 million a year. $100 a month could be a bargain for popular apps, but it might discourage smaller developers from signing on. Meanwhile a per user fee would disincentivize growth, and force apps that suddenly get popular to abandon Facebook’s identity platform.

Charging for identity has potential, but it could also backfire and send developers fleeing to Twitter and Google’s free identity systems. That’s a huge problem because Facebook relies on third-party apps to contribute content to its news feed which Facebook monetizes with ads. So instead I think Facebook’s best bet to boost revenue in the short-term is…

Big, Glossy News Feed Ads

Advertisers don’t want to have their message crammed into the little sidebar ad boxes. And while they’re happy to have their ads made social as Sponsored Stories and injected into the news feed everyone reads, they also want less subtle marketing options. Facebook is trying to be flexible with the launch of Reach Generator and the big logout page ad unit, but advertisers want a louder marketing channel within the core Facebook experience. But beyond advertisers and investors looking to make a quick buck, nobody wants to see more ads on Facebook.

So the trick is for Facebook to make ads seem like content instead. Content we actually want to consume. Tiny boxes don’t do that, but large, high-impact full screen or near-full screen ads could. Flipboard and some other mobile apps have been experimenting with these big, glossy ad formats in their mobile apps.

Imagine scrolling down your news feed on the web or mobile and when you got to where there’d be a “More” button or fold (if Facebook didn’t have infinite scrolling), you’d see a large or full-screen ad. You could scroll right over it, or Facebook could make it snap into place for a second before you were free to move on.

These ads could be clicked to open an advertiser’s presence on Facebook such as their Page or App, or to open the buyer’s website. Facebook could even require the ads to be social, essentially creating a glossy Sponsored Story format that could only reach you if you Liked the advertiser’s Page or your friends had interacted with or Liked the brand.

As Facebook’s user base is quickly shifting to mobile where it only shows a few Sponsored Stories ads a day rather than multiple ads per page on the web, glossy ads could let Facebook make more money on mobile without having to show ads too frequently. Users might complain at first, and it could make people slightly less likely to visit the news feed. Still, Facebook could watch the data and manage rate limits to show these glossy ads only occasionally, and less often to users who immediately leave the site or app when they see them.

The fact is that Facebook is responsible to its outside shareholders, even if they don’t have enough voting rights to forcibly change the company’s course. If investors are smart, they won’t grumble if Facebook doesn’t immediately flood the site and the rest of the web with ads, payments, and subscription fees. Facebook got us all to connect. Now its biggest challenge is to remain cool while making more money. If Facebook expands its revenue streams slow and steady, it will have an ocean of users to draw from for years to come.

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More Big Facebook News

Facebook Will Have The Biggest Tech IPO Ever, Raising $16 Billion With $38 Share Price

Here’s What Could Kill Facebook

Zuckerberg Will Ring In Facebook IPO From Menlo Park HQ On Friday

Facebook has filed a new S-1, and it contains more details on the IPO.

It will offer underwriters the right to purchase up to an additional 50,612,302 shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotments. Facebook anticipates that the initial public offering price will be between $34.00 and $38.00 per share.

In total there will be 337.5 million shares offered, plus the 50.6 million additional shares (so up to 388 million shares sold), and it wants to raise $14.7 billion. The stock will be trading under FB.

With the low end of the pricing working out to $13.1 billion, this could mean a valuation of between $92 billion and $103 billion, according to CNBC.

The additional 50.6 million shares, and the pricing of between $34-38 per share, confirms a report we ran earlier noting both the “greenshoe” of additional shares to meet demand, as well as the stock pricing.

More to come. Refresh for updates.

A new breed of social media sites led by visual rather than text-based interactions is now spawning a new breed of marketing service catering to the new format. The latest of these is a startup called Curalate, which is officially launching today with $750,000 in seed funding from NEA, First Round Capital and UPenn-focused MentorTech for a service that lets brands search and track its images across the social network, whether they have been posted by the brands themselves or by everyday consumers.

Although the site is only officially launching today, in its beta format it has already managed to pick up more than 150 brands as customers, its co-founder and CEO, Apu Gupta, tells me. That speaks to how, up to now, there hasn’t been an analytics service available quite like the one that Curalate is offering.

Gupta notes that while there have been a number of companies that have jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon and started to offer analytics to measure how brands are resonating on the social network, Curalate is the first to look not just at what a brand is posting on the site, but it can also track what regular people are posting. In other words, not just the sweater as J.Crew pins it, but as you or I might pin it, too.

“Think of us as playing a giant game of Memory,” he says. “Everytime someone adds that sweater it adds that brand we play that game of memory and delivery the conversation and analytics behind it, all at ‘Pinterest scale.’”

Curalate is then able to track how that one piece of content moves throughout Pinterest and potentially eventually goes to a company’s site to convert into a purchase. Gupta notes that the solutions Curalate has built are proprietary but are based on some known techniques in visual search.

This is a gap that Patrick Chung, a partner at NEA, says is only now starting to get addressed, as brands continue to see huge traffic coming from the image-based social network — contrary to whatever reports we’ve heard that traffic seems to be levelling off at the site.

“Pinterest is being crushed under the weight of its own traffic,” Chung says, who notes that brands can tell that there is a lot of traffic coming to their e-commerce sites from Pinterest, but that’s effectively all they know.

“Brands  have no idea how it’s all happening, it’s just a massive amount of traffic being driven to their e-commerce sites. It’s just an enormous black hole. The complaint is ‘we have all this traffic from Pinterest but we have no idea what this is.” The idea, with Curalate, is that they will be able to now track exactly how that user arrived at its site — so that the brand can then hone and improve how it interfaces with sites like Pinterest in the future. Chung notes that while NEA invests in other social analytics companies — for example Hearsay Social and Sprout Social — Curalate stands apart from these in its focus on visual-based analytics.

Companies that have already signed up to the service in two months of beta use are a testament to how the service, in its early days, is appealing both to other tech-savvy startups but also more traditional brands. The customer list includes Birchbox, Bonobos, Kraft, Neiman Marcus and Curalate’s Philadelphia neighbor, the online eyeglass sensation Warby Parker.

Pricing comes in three tiers: $19/month, $49/month and $99/month for varying levels of service and tracking, Gupta says.

While Pinterest will be the initial focus for Curalate, the plan is to extend it to other social networks that are also making a significant impact not through text but images: other sites that are likely to be added into the mix are Polyvore, Fancy, Wanelo and Instagram, says Gupta.

Big mobile plans afoot for Baidu, the Google of China that leads in search and has launched a host of other services in the wake of that business. The company today unveiled the first smartphone to be built on its own platform, the Changhong H5018. And while that device is designed on a “forked” version of Android — forked Android devices being very popular in China — Baidu says that it doesn’t want to stop there: the idea is to take its platform, the Baidu Cloud Smart Terminal, to other operating systems like Windows Phone and iOS.

“We want Baidu’s Cloud Smart Terminal to function as a platform that sits on top of all operating systems, such as Windows Phone and iOS,” Kaiser Kuo, a spokesperson for Baidu, told TechCrunch today.

“We are not yet working on a Windows Phone device but the hope is to make one,” he noted, adding that while Baidu plans to leave no stone unturned in its strategy, “some stones are proving to be more recalcitrant than others.” That is likely a nod to Apple and how Baidu could develop its platform on iOS without completely ruining its relationship with the iPhone giant.

Mobile is a big and growing area for Baidu. In Q1, it noted that 20 percent of all of its search traffic is now coming from mobile — it is already the leading search engine in official Android devices with 80 percent penetration, Kuo noted — and he added that the mobile traffic percentage is “growing rapidly”, almost certainly faster than its more mature traffic on fixed internet devices. At the same time, mobile continues to boom in China, with the country now outstripping the U.S. and the world’s biggest smartphone market.

The Changhong H5018 is Baidu’s big strategy to create a device that will appeal to the less affluent demographic in the country. While the iPhone has proven to be hugely popular in China, it is sold at a premium price and that cuts out large parts of the addressable market that cannot afford it. Kuo notes that at the moment there are some 1 billion mobile users in the country still on feature devices. “It’s a market dominated by feature phones that prevent users from taking full advantage of the internet,” he said. “There is a tremendous market for low-priced but feature-laden smartphones, and this product fits that niche very well.”

It’s understood that while the basic price for the device will be 1,000 yuan (around $159), it will be sold through resellers that will attach data and calling tariffs to the device — the first named carrier is China Unicom — and subsidize the cost of the handset in the process. The phone will start to sell later this year, the company says.

Part of the reason the device will be priced so inexpensively, Kuo said, is because most of the services that Baidu is loading into the device will be cloud-based. That means the device does not need to have as much processing power built into it. “You don’t need a lot of power, just the ability to connect to the internet because we are shifting the computing from the terminal back to the cloud,” he noted.

Among the services will be a cloud-based storage service, location-based services and Baidu Map, voice recognition and handwriting-based search input, Baidu Music and services to recharge your call and data credits on the device.

In other respects the device sounds like it will be very much on par with other basic smartphones: 3.5-inch touch screen; 3G connectivity; 3 megapixel camera and a 1400mAh battery.

The phone is being made by Foxconn and that in itself is an interesting development and shows how the manufacturing giant — partner to Apple for the iPhone and iPad among many others — also has ambitions to position itself as a mobile brand in its own right.

It also follows on from an earlier model that Baidu had released in conjunction with Dell, which Kuo described as the “precursor” to the phone launched today.

Baidu’s plans to extend its circle of partners for the phones was also indirectly confirmed by its VP of engineering Jing Wang, who noted in a company statement that “The Baidu Cloud Smart terminal platform is a crucial step in Baidu’s overall Cloud strategy in the mobile Internet sphere…it will significantly lower manufacturing costs for many mobile manufacturers and cooperating partners. Baidu is joining hands with hardware vendors, terminal manufacturers, developers and others in the industry so that everyone along the whole value chain is a winner.”

Although Baidu certainly has a lot of ambition, for now it looks like most of the mobile plan is limited to China. Although Baidu has “dipped its toe” into other countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Egypt, there are currently no plans to offer Baidu’s new phone in markets outside of the mainland. “The whole point is that it is supported by Baidu’s cloud services and all of these are currently in Chinese and not supported outside of China,” he noted. “When we have robust cloud offerings outside of China, only then would it make sense to offer terminals there.”

BagThat, a new UK entrant to the daily-deals/e-commerce space, has picked up an investment of £2 million ($3.2 million) to develop its service, a mash-up of two well-known models for selling products online: auctions and group buying.

The funding is being led by Oxford Capital and is the first close on this round. BagThat says it is expecting additional institutional investment in the round.

Part eBay and part group-buying site (eg Groupon), BagThat is a clever kind of twist on both ideas, in which a user can bid on an item with a price that he/she is willing to pay for it, using a simple sliding feature to pick a price in a range set by the seller.

The system then collects all the bids from other users, and calculates a final selling price for the item, based on the minimum total amount that the retailer was willing to make from the deal. If enough people bid on the item in the bidding phase, with a total amount reaching the seller’s reserve, then they win the product: that final price might be the same price the buyer offered, or it might be lower — but never higher. PayPal is used for all the transactions on the site.

The social aspect of the site also includes the ability for bidders to spread the word to their friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to try to get others to join in on the deal — the more who join, the more likely the final price will be lower.

Will this new variation be enough to bring in punters to a new site, in a market that already has established players like eBay, Groupon, Living Social and others?

It will probably, most likely, depend not on the new brand but what BagThat offers through its retailing portal. For now, the selection on the site — which launched in November 2011 and is founded by Andy Sutton, who is also the CEO – is relatively streamlined rather than sprawling, and is covering several different bases: food/drink; fashion; home goods and vacations among them, with higher-end rather than cheaper offerings. (Examples: an Apple TV box, a men’s suit, a cute teddy bear)

It looks like that list will be growing with retailers like Halfords (a UK sporting goods retailer) and brands like Samsung signing up to BagThat for future deals.

Editor’s note: This post was written by Alex Rampell, the CEO of TrialPay. Rampell is a regular contributor to TechCrunch – see his previous guest posts here.

The biggest ecommerce opportunity today involves taking offline services and offering them for sale online (O2O commerce). The first generation of O2O commerce was driven by discounting, push-based engagements, and artificial scarcity. The still-unfulfilled opportunity in O2O today is tantamount to tacking barcodes onto un-warehousable services by standardizing and normalizing the units being sold, something I call “Service as a SKU.” Just as Amazon figured out how to build the best warehouses and technology in the world for delivering boxes, somebody will do this for “unboxed” services, with customers driven not by discounts or scarcity, but rather by the Internet’s hallmarks of customer experience and convenience. And unlike how “ship stuff in a box” ecommerce seems to be gravitating towards a few winners, Service as a SKU is still a wide open playing field.

The idea is to turn every service, or unit of commerce, into what retailers typically call a SKU (Stock Keeping Unit). Imagine the following as “items” you can buy, and have “delivered,” with a simple click or tap:

“1 Unit of Plumber-Fixes-Your-Leaking-Toilet”
“1 Unit of Dentist Fixes Your Crown”
“1 Unit of 12-Inch Hole-in-Roof-Is-Fixed”
“1 Unit of Piano Tuner Tunes Your Piano”
“1 Unit of Set Up a Home WiFi Network”

Groupon and LivingSocial, early leaders in O2O commerce, started a wave I wrote about a few years ago, but have historically focused on discounting and creating demand by artificial time or quantity scarcity. There are two main problems here:
-Adverse selection: Groupon et al tend to attract customers looking for deals. This is not what Amazon does, and not how most consumers shop for necessities (e.g., fix my toilet!).
–Push v Pull: Groupon et al tend to rely on “push” (e.g., email) to drive a tremendous amount of sales. Unlike Google, eBay, Yelp, or Amazon, people don’t tend to go to Groupon “unprompted.”

To successfully create a SKU for every service, you need to normalize both the service provider (price/quality) and the service being rendered. It’s more like buying produce than buying something mass-produced in a factory. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s more like booking a hotel reservation, where the rooms are anything but identical, there exist varying degrees of quality, but there are also quite a few commonalities.

The company that pulls this off will need to have the following:

-A seamless scheduling system, deployed at various service providers, to allow real-time inventory management. OpenTable does this for restaurants, and hence can provide a marketplace for “tables” at opentable.com. You can’t sell boxes without knowing how many items are in your warehouse; you can’t SKU-ify a Service without knowing how many hours are available.

-A trusted ratings system to allow for normalization of services and parsing of consumer feedback. How do I compare a $100 “fix my toilet” plumber to a $175 “fix my toilet” plumber? Ideally this will work like hotels: every service provider has a “star rating” and an associated cost. Hotel rooms are reasonably similar; consumers can choose between a 5 star hotel or a 2 star hotel, and even different star levels have significant variance. Yelp and Angie’s List have tremendous assets in their community-based feedback, although payment companies like PayPal and Square have perhaps an even better potential asset on their hands (chargeback rates are a good proxy for merchant quality, every completed transaction can solicit quality feedback and not just from aggrieved/fanatical customers, etc).

-A no-discounts, no-push site. OpenTable gets people looking for restaurants, and needs neither emails nor discounts to make that happen. Yelp, Google, eBay, Angie’s List, and Amazon are all contenders as they all have consumers “coming back” unprompted. If the product and site are sufficiently convenient, this often happens organically; having a well-designed and convenient search, shopping, payments, and redemption experience avoids the need for push marketing.

-Relationships with offline service providers. Despite the flash nature of Groupon and LivingSocial, their merchant relationships are significant. Yelp has virtually every business profiled but perhaps not every business engaged in an economic relationship.

It’s important to note that Service-as-a-SKU is not lead generation for offline services, nor is it just a glorified scheduling platform. “Leadgen” has been around since the beginning of the internet, but there is no standardization or normalization, not to mention the convenience of “one-click” purchase. There are leadgen services for housing relocation, laser eye surgery, insurance, etc, but none let you actually make a purchase online. The hard part is in “normalizing” to create a single “service item” that can be scheduled, paid for, and “delivered” with a mouse click or smartphone tap. As an example, Uber has done this for black cars, and EXEC is fixing hourly prices and limiting SKUs to low-wage labor services.

At 8:01 AM on June 26, 1974, a shopper named Clyde Dawson bought the first item — a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit gum — to ever be scanned with a UPC (universal product code). Today, barcodes are a part of every mass-market product bought and sold throughout the world. You won’t see plumbers, dentists, limo drivers, or gardeners walking around with UPCs on their backs, but we are poised for another shopping revolution of equal magnitude.

Everyone wants a piece of Facebook, so the company’s underwriters will likely exercise their option sell a “greenshoe” of up to 50.6 million additional shares, and Facebook will definitely increase its IPO share price range from between $28 and $35 to $34 and $38, I’ve confirmed with sources very close to the IPO. This means Facebook could sell up to 388 million shares to bring in between $13.1 billion and $14.7 billion at a CNBC-reported valuation between $92B and $103B.

A greenshoe is an SEC-permitted over-allotment option that can stabilize a stock’s price by allowing underwriters to sell up to 15% more stock than the company originally planned to sell, but with the option to buy back the stock at the offering price if the actual price drops below this. By exercising the greenshoe, underwriters including Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs could help Facebook bring in up to an additional $1.72 billion to $1.92 billion by selling up to 50.6 million shares, which could prevent high demand and limited supply from causing the share price to skyrocket and making the stock seem volatile.

“Quite likable indeed, har har” laughs some monocle-wearing banker on Wall Street.

The greenshoe option for underwriters is written into Facebook’s S-1, but now one source has confirmed that underwriters will exercise the option and another said it was very likely. The S-1 states “We and the selling stockholders have granted the underwriters the right to purchase up to an additional 50,612,302 shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotments.” Specifically that’s 6,029,988 shares directly from Facebook and 44,582,314 shares from the selling stockholders. That means the greenshoe could allow Facebook to raise an extra $204.6 million to $228.7 million.

The greenshoe is named after the first company, Green Shoe Manufacturing , to give underwriters the over-allotment option. Facebook could use the greenshoe to take advantage of stellar demand by selling more stock and raising more money. Alternatively, in the event that the share price falls below the offering price, Facebook’s underwriters could buy back all or some of that 15% at the offering price without losing money. In this way the greenshoe gives Facebook and its underwriters more control over the total pool of stock being traded and the price.

The fact that 526 million people use Facebook every day may have a lot to do with the strong demand for its stock. People around the world may be thinking to themselves “I can’t live without Facebook. It’s going to be around for a long time. I should invest.”

They may be right, at least about the first two parts. Facebook’s network effect is so strong that to be truly disrupted and fall from its place as the premier social network for everyone, another company would have to provide something much, much better than Facebook. Not just cooler features or faster apps or ties to search and other services (*cough* Google+ *cough*). But truly, revolutionarily better, and with a brilliant distribution strategy.

Whether that longevity makes Facebook a wise investment will depend heavily on its ability to make money on its mobile site and apps where it doesn’t currently show as many ads as its web interface. Its Sponsored Story in-news feed ads are a good start, but it will either need to show a lot of them or come up with another ad format or revenue stream. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook introduce full-screen, glossy, old magazine-style ads mixed in between organic news feed stories and more subtle Sponsored Stories.

Investors will need to make their plans quickly. Facebook will likely update its S-1 filing with the SEC over the next few days to make the $34 to $38 price range official, and possibly note the greenshoe. On Thursday it’s expected to set the actual IPO share price. And on Friday it all goes down with CEO Mark Zuckerberg opening trading of his company’s stock by ringing the NASDAQ bell from Facebook’s headquarters at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California.

[Image Credit: Converse, Alamy]