While the debate as to whether group buying as whole is a viable business model rages on post-Groupon S-1, there’s no doubt that these social deal things keep sprouting up — Yesterday someone introduced themselves to me as the CEO of a Groupon for moms (and yes I thought it was a good idea).
We’ve got Groupons for techies, a Groupon for Jews, what will there be a Groupon for next!? Wait, please don’t answer that.
Still it makes sense that people would want a piece of the action, as the size of the market in the US is estimated at $2.7 billion in 2012 (up from $1.1 billion last year). And to give you a sense of some of the players and their relative size, the folks at Flowtown have revised their original infographic to reflect the social buying boom.
What can we tell from the above? Well first of all that space is nascent and so are its physics; First movers aren’t necessarily rewarded. Woot, which was founded in 2004, currently has over 1.4 million unique monthly visits versus dominant player Groupon’s (which was founded in 2008 and pivoted to the model) 29.1 million. Mercata, which isn’t even on the graph, was shut down in 2001.
Current second runner up LivingSocial is around half the size of Groupon, at 14.3 million unique monthly visits, with 301 US cities to Groupon’s 182. Yeah that’s about 5% of the US population visiting the site monthly; Enjoy your teeth whitening guys!
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When you visit Craigslist, it’s almost as if you’re visiting the early 90s web. Blue links. That’s it. On one hand, you have to appreciate the simplicity (and speed). On the other, WTF? It’s 2011.
Many competitors have tried to disrupt Craigslist in the past, and failed — often miserably. But there’s reason to believe the space is ripe for disruption now thanks to one key ingredient: mobile. That’s exactly what EggCartel is aiming to do.
Their first product, EggDrop launches today on the iPhone and tomorrow on Android devices. Think of it as a way to put a version of Craigslist in your pocket, but one that’s much more visual. And even more focused on location. And most importantly, one that’s much easier to add items to.
That’s really the key to EggDrop. Adding items is as easy as taking one picture with your phone, setting a price, and uploading. You can add a title and other details, but EggDrop does the rest to categorize your product on the backend. From there, it’s listed in a location-based directory accessible by the apps. Users look for items they’re interested in and can watch them to see how the price fluctuates, or can put down a bid right away. It’s Dutch auction-style, so the price goes down over time if no one bids.
Location plays a huge role in EggDrop because there is no shipping allowed. Every item sold and bought must be done so locally. So if you see a bike for sale, you know that it’s relatively close to you, and you have to go pick it up (or have the seller drop it off). “Location isn’t just about where you live or work, it’s where you are at any given time. Maybe a Star Wars action figure isn’t available in your neighborhood — but you go to LA and there it is,” co-founder Dan Zheng says.
With this human interaction in mind, EggDrop is also doing something a bit old school — they’re leaving it up to the buyers and sellers to handle the transactions. That’s right, there is no fancy payment system within the app. When you buy something, you do it with cash, check, PayPal, or credit card (if the seller has something like Square). They’re thinking about partnerships in the future to handle payments within the app.
So how do they avoid spam and fraud? A rating system is key to EggDrop. Once you buy and/or sell an item, you give feedback on that experience. If a person is marked as being a flake (they said they’d buy but never showed up) or as selling lemons, that rating stays with them. Just like eBay, the goal is to have a robust reputation system largely maintained by the users, that they can trust.
We first covered EggCartel when they launched as one of the initial AngelPad companies late last year. Since then, they’ve been in private alpha testing with under 100 people. But the founders note that things have been going really well, and now they feel confident enough to open it up to all U.S. users. At the same time, they realize that things may be a bit slow in the beginning due to a lack of items listed, so they’ve created a wish list feature. If there’s something you’re looking for that isn’t listed yet, you can add it to your list and get alerted when such an item becomes available near you.
Zheng and co-founder Brian Lynch expect that most people will use EggDrop to sell electronics, furniture, kids items, and things of that nature at first. But they note that already on their website in limited testing, they’ve sold a couple of cars.
In terms of monetization, EggCartel doesn’t do the obvious thing in taking a cut of sales (because again, they’re not involved in the actual sales), instead they’re going to focus on adding premium features over time. But all that is in the future. For now, they just want to get users.
To that end, EggCartel is offering TechCrunch readers a $5 gift (in the form of either an Amazon gift card, iTunes gift card, or donation to the Red Cross) if you list 5 items by noon PT on Friday. To claim this gift, simply email [email protected] from within the app (Account => selling => promote => email) when you hit your 5 items listed.
The seven person team also has one other bit of exciting news today: funding. EggCartel has just closed a $1 million seed round led by SV Angel and BlueRun Ventures. Trinity Ventures and Charles River Ventures participated as well.
You can find EggDrop in the App Store here. Look for it tomorrow in the Android Market.
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As the complaints about Flickr continue to pile on, scrappy Toronto-based service 500px continues to grow, going from 1000 users in 2009 to over 85K (around 45K of which have joined in the last three months). And after two years of bootstrapping, the startup is today announcing its $525K Series A round with investment from High Line Venture Capital, Deep Creek Capital and ff Venture Capital.
Says co-founder Oleg Gutsol, “The idea of making 500px arose from Evgeny [Tchebotarev] and I having difficulties with the current available platforms — there wasn’t a good service that would allow us to display our photos is a visually pleasing way and be easy to use. I think we tried every somewhat popular service online and still were not quite satisfied. So we decided to build one ourselves.”
Founders Gutsol and Ian Sobolev migrated their Livejournal-based photo sharing community to the current site on Halloween 2009 with little fanfare. Recently garnering some positive press as well as drawing in Flickr power users like Thomas Hawk, Troy Holden and Ivan Makarov and this whole thread of Flickr migrations, the site grew 60% in the last 30 days, bringing in an impressive 2.5 million visits last month.
Despite its unexpected scales, 500px is committed to its main goal to help photographers reach larger audiences, with Digg-like Popular and Upcoming pages as well as an editorial staff that curates the Editor’s Choice and Fresh collections. ”We encourage young talent,” says Gutsol Tchebotarev, “It is not uncommon to see someone new joining our site and have their photo appear in our popular feed in a matter of hours.”
Gutsol plans on using the money to hire more engineers, like everyone else in tech right now, hoping to build a “global platform” for digital photography. The company currently makes revenue by offering a $50 pro-account that gives users custom layouts and giving photographers the ability to sell their prints.
Short version: Rosetta Stone launched its iPad app today, which is basically just a lighter version of its core “course” software. The app itself is nothing extraordinary, but the way it teaches languages is pretty awesome. Foreign language has never been my best subject, but I had a blast playing with this app because it feels way more like a puzzle than a language lesson. The worst part is the price: you have to be a Rosetta Stone customer to access the app.
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.
Mashape, which was founded in November by Augusto Marietti, Marco Palladino and Mike Zonca, aims to be a little bit Etsy, a little bit Github by building a unified, all-in-one marketplace where users can find, sell, distribute, and hack on APIs. The platform makes it easy to list any JSON API using its simple wizard and provide it to a community of developers just waiting to get hackin’. Plus, there are 5 auto-generated client libraries, including PHP, Ruby, Python, Object C and Java.
API consumers can use any API listed on Mashape via a single Developer Key and a standard interface, so that once you’ve learned how to consume an API on Mashape, you know how to consume then all. Developers can even test their APIs by using Mashape’s online Test Console.
At this point, Mashape is supplying more than 110 APIs, both published and private, and has tallied more than 22K API searches. The APIs in stock range from stuff that helps you get your homework done to music services and photo filters — and even more obscure APIs like “DNA manipulation” or a “Nitro accelerator”.
“We believe that APIs have no limits”, said Mashape Co-founder Augusto Marietti, “though I still have to figure out exactly what kind of API a ‘Nitro Accelerator’ is”. The APIs listed on Mashape are both free and for charge, and today the startup is launching a simple (and free) tool that enables users to monetize JSON APIs. Once a user has listed an API, they can set up billing with a single click. Users can choose monthly charges, give API call limits, and give a price per additional call. Pretty cool.
For a market consisting mainly of enterprise solutions, the startup’s addition of social layers to its marketplace will strengthen its API community and come in handy for startups and independent developers. By building a social layer on top of APIs, Mashape also hopes to address the discoverability and trust issue through the ability to see what your friends are using.
For all TechCrunch readers looking for a few coupons, go to Mashape signup on the homepage and insert your email address. You will be asked a question to which the answer is “var x”. Add the TC coupon, and voila!
When you visit Craigslist, it’s almost as if you’re visiting the early 90s web. Blue links. That’s it. On one hand, you have to appreciate the simplicity (and speed). On the other, WTF? It’s 2011.
Short version: Rosetta Stone launched its iPad app today, which is basically just a lighter version of its core “course” software. The app itself is nothing extraordinary, but the way it teaches languages is pretty awesome. Foreign language has never been my best subject, but I had a blast playing with this app because it feels way more like a puzzle than a language lesson. The worst part is the price: you have to be a Rosetta Stone customer to access the app. 
