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ShopWithYourFriends brings you real-time, social shopping

Group buying may be all the rage via companies like Groupon but ShopWithYourFriends, which launches today, adds a new twist to social shopping by enabling group shopping sessions online.

The Dutch startup uses co-browsing technology to share the screen between multiple shoppers who can put together different pieces and discuss their choices. The idea is to simulate online the real-world experience of a group of women shopping together.

The consumer web site offers items from 50 online shops in the US, UK, Germany and France, including French Connection, My Wardrobe, Karen Millen, Mango and other well-known European high-street brands. Users can invite friends to a shopping session via Facebook or a URL.

The target market is women aged 15-45. Personally, I can’t see many 30 something women finding the time or inclination to organize a live shopping session, but it could be a hit with teenage girls.

ShopWithYourFriends screenshotCo-shopping might work best as a feature in existing online shopping portals, rather than as the focus of a new one. Accordingly, ShopWithYourFriends offers a B2B, white-label version for online clothing retailers. Retailers can integrate ShopWithYourFriends into their website by embedding a small piece of code.

The parent company of ShopWithYourFriends is ChatVenture, which is based in Utrecht in the Netherlands, has eight employees and is privately funded. The company was founded in 2008.

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Businesses turn to college kids for social media lessons

Consumer ResearchLast year, Sprint gave students in a marketing class at Emerson College 10 smartphones with unlimited wireless access. In return, Sprint received free marketing work for their budding 4G network in Boston from students who blogged and tweeted, and more importantly were able to record firsthand how social media could be effectively used at the company.

Unbeknownst to many, companies have increasingly turned to universities for research on social media. This isn’t highly unusual, as traditionally manufacturers have given financial support to universities conducting research relevant to their companies. In the past though, support has been given to “hard” sciences, for example to the research of pharmaceutical drugs. Companies had never partnered with universities to better understand social media.

However, this appears to be changing. Programs at Northwestern, Emerson, Arizona State, and the University of Florida have been partnering with businesses to specifically research how social media can be used effectively. “It’s allowing for a new kind of research that just wasn’t even possible a few years ago,” says associate professor Dmitri Williams, the Wall Street Journal reports. In a world where social media continues to be a buzz word, businesses are looking for every advantage they can get.

As an example of how social media is being examined, the Wall Street Journal reported that at one class at Arizona State University, the students divided into teams to generate buzz around FoxSportsArizona.com. Fox Sports Net, a group of regional sports channels, will be working with 10 schools as part of a program it calls Creative University.

Despite the successful results from the companies thus far, is it a good idea for companies to conduct social media research at the university level?

Although there are advantages, as seen above, there are hidden costs as well. The time needed to establish a partnership with a program and the commitment the company gives to a university and its students; these may not always be financially related, but they are important nonetheless. Even with this commitment, in return the company would receive students who spend a limited amount of time per week on the project and who have multiple sources competing for their attention. As creative as students can be, they are not working 9AM to 5PM on these projects.

The lack of time and attention is particular true in the examples above, where businesses partnered with undergraduate programs. Traditionally, companies that have lent financial support to “hard” sciences have supported graduate programs, namely PhD students, and these students, in addition to having more time to spend, are under strict supervision. A PhD student, it could be argued, is more similar in their commitment to a project to a full-time employee than to an undergraduate student.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and perhaps the costs, hidden or explicit, of conducting social media research at the undergraduate level outweigh the benefits.

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Social ranking tool PeerIndex introduces its most requested feature…Groups [Exclusive]

StuckintheMiddle

Algorithmic social ranking service PeerIndex has introduced one its most highly requested features today, debuting PeerIndex Groups – a new way to track and view the social rankings of groups of people – friends, enemies or competitors en-masse.

PeerIndex already examines social activity across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs and Q&A site Quora, evaluating a users’ “online social capital” based on the activity of the individual across their various social platforms.

With PeerIndex Groups, users are able to create and organise their friends into one easy to view list, ranking them by their PeerIndex rating. Their Authority, Activity and Audience are listed, allowing a user to view the individual elements of an individuals PeerIndex score.

The image below shows the team here at The Next Web:

Groups created on PeerIndex aren’t limited to just your friends, they also allow conference organisers to set up a list of attendees at their events, also giving community creators to gather and group members of their community and track them.

It also provides a platform for business owners or media publications to keep an eye on how their competitors rank on the service, providing an insight into what a user could do to emulate their rivals.

Adding A Group

Adding a group is easy. Users need to navigate to their PeerIndex Dashboard, where a new My Groups option will be available:

Once you have named your Group, you need to fill it with the people you want to track or group together. As a test, I grouped a a few of my Mobile-specific followers, manually entering their usernames (which are auto-listed). Alternatively, you can add a Twitter List, taking a lot of the hassle out of adding members.

The group can be listed publicly or you can choose to keep it private and up to 50 users can be added to each individual group.

DISQUS comments are embedded below each group, perfect for events where attendees may want to interact before it commences.

PeerIndex was founded in 2009 by Azeem Azhar, an Internet entrepreneur and investor who previously worked at the Guardian; Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist; and Ditlev Schwanenflugel, formerly of McKinsey & Co. The company has received financial backing from prominent technology investors who have invested in companies including Last.fm, Lovefilm and Zoopla.Image Credit

LinkedIn, GitHub team up on collaboration tool for programmers

Professional social networking startup LinkedIn has joined forces with well-known open source coding repository GitHub, which will allow others in a user’s network to see what projects they and their connections are working on at any given time.

GitHub is a central repository for code and has become a key source of reputation for coders in the open-source community.

Under the new partnership, GitHub actions will be introduced into LinkedIn’s network update stream and will be searchable through its Signal tool.

If a user has collaborated on open-source projects on GitHub in the past, the program then introduces a user to their co-contributors on LinkedIn.

The company said that by adding LinkedIn’s professional social graph on top of GitHub’s data, users will be able to add a significant social layer to the code.

You can see the company’s statement about the partnership in its blog post. Here’s part of it:

GitHub is a fantastic way to collaborate with others on software projects. It hosts code for many prominent open-source projects, including LinkedIn’s Voldemort and Kafka. With over 600,000 developers hosting over 1.7 million projects, the work hosted on GitHub is essential to professionals around the world.

Software developers know that the code they’ve written is one of the most important parts of their professional identity. It shows their involvement, interest, and dedication to their work. Now developers can showcase their projects on the world’s largest professional network.

After you’ve installed the application and added your GitHub account on LinkedIn, check your Profile – your GitHub projects should appear automatically. Your network will now be automatically updated whenever you create, follow, or update a GitHub project. …

With this new application, you can now leverage the power of your professional network to discover new and interesting projects. Discover which of your connections are on GitHub, and follow their projects right from LinkedIn. Even if you’re not a software developer, the new GitHub application will help you discover which of your connections are actively following and working on new software projects.”

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Teenagers Jailed For Criminal Version of Facebook

An anonymous reader writes “Three teenagers in the UK have been sentenced for up to five years in jail for creating and operating Gh0stMarket.net, one of the world’s largest English-language internet crime forums. The Gh0stMarket website, which had about 8,000 members, was dubbed by the court as the ‘criminal equivalent of Facebook,’ or ‘Crimebook.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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