Salon enters the world of e-commerce with 'curated' stuff

Want your very own 7-inch by 7-inch indoor lawn? Now you can get it from Salon.com. Credit: Salon.com.

The pioneering online magazine Salon, which debuted in 1995, opened its first e-commerce venture this week. Salon Store offers readers of the famously liberal site the opportunity to buy selected books, gadgets, household items and novelties.

But don't call the man in charge of the venture a manager or buyer. On the site, he's referred to as the "curator." And the items for sale are the "curated collection." 

Richard Gingras, chief executive of parent company Salon Media, took a near-apologetic tone when explaining why this site that deals with hard-hitting political issues has started selling stuff.

"Why do we think the interests of Salon and its audience translate into products?" he wrote in an essay on the site. "Because, in various ways, things matter to all of us. They make statements, they offer solutions, they express or create emotion."

And he wanted to make it clear that Salon does not actually stock the items, explaining that orders placed on the site would be fulfilled by affiliated merchants. "We're guides and commentators, not shopkeepers in the traditional sense," Gingras wrote.

Does that mean Salon is not interested in money, in the traditional sense?

Answering readers who posted comments to his essay, Gingras disclosed that the site gets a commission on any item it sells. "As you may know, Salon has had mixed financial results over the years," he said.

In 2003 the company reported it was more than $80 million in debt and was having a hard time making its rent. The rocky financial times are clearly not over.

"It is very important," Gingras continued on the site, "we achieve better financial results going forward."

Even so, some fans of Salon.com were not happy with the debut of the store. "Product endorsement is a slippery slope," one wrote. Another cracked that one of the products -- a $20 ceramic coffee cup made to look like a Styrofoam cup -- shows "students, the poor, the unemployed and Afghans that Salonists care!"

But even detractors allowed that at least some of the more than 100 items in the "collection" were pretty cool. 

Among the offerings: a flashlight made of wood ($48), a cardboard radio with admittedly "crappy" sound ($36), a book of hand-drawn lost-pet posters ($13), a solar-powered toy car ($40), an eco-friendly skateboard made of bamboo ($148) and a miniature, living-grass lawn enclosed in a 7-inch frame ($70).

-- David Colker

Cyber Monday sales up 13.7%, says Coremetrics

Cyber Monday shoppers spent less time but more money this year, giving online retailers a bit of holiday cheer in the gloomy economy.

Total online sales were up 13.7% versus last year, with clothing and jewelry retailers leading the way, according to market research firm Coremetrics. The average shopper spent $180.03 this year, up a whopping 38% from last year's $130.04.

It seems buyers were more efficient this year, spending 10% less time browsing than last year, with the average shopping session lasting 7.5 minutes, down 51 seconds from 2008. Peak browsing time: between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. PST, just as West Coasters were sliding into work and East Coasters were starting their lunch breaks.

What's driving consumers online? Convenience and bargains, said Coremetrics Chief Strategy Officer John Squire. He said he expects another bounty of online orders mid-December, right before the shipping cutoff dates for Christmas delivery.

We'll update this post with new figures as they roll in.

-- Alex Pham

Image by Bartelme Design

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

So long, Cyber Monday?

Need a lift? Online retailers continue to rely on Cyber Monday to give holiday sales a boost. Credit: Dan Hontz via Flickr.

As long as there has been e-commerce, there has been Cyber Monday. But is that old gem of the new economy endangered?

Online retailers for the last decade have counted on the Monday after Thanksgiving to deliver for Web merchants what Black Friday does for bricks-and-mortar stores -- a turbo boost into the holiday shopping season. Back then, many people hopped onto their employers' fast Internet connections to do some quick holiday shopping when they returned to work after Thanksgiving.

But with more than 60% of U.S. homes now sporting high-speed Internet, more people are now flipping through those online catalogs at home, said Ken Cassar, vice president of Nielsen Co.'s online research division.

As a result, more online stores aren't waiting until Monday to get the party going. They're throwing their own Black Friday events. Some, including Amazon.com, are doing deals every day this week.

That doesn't mean Cyber Monday will evaporate, however. That's because some people still shop at work, away from the prying eyes of family members. "Mondays still tend to be busier shopping days," Cassar said.

It's also a good marketing hook that retailers want to keep alive.

"Retailers liked the marketing focus," Cassar said. "It remains a big shopping day, but it's now fueled more by retailer marketing and promotion."

That means online merchants will be out in force trumpeting Cyber Monday specials.

More merchants say they plan to offer some type of promotion such as free shipping or extra discounts on Monday, 87% compared with 83% last year, according to a survey by Shop.org, the online division of the National Retail Federation. Check out Shop.org's Web page listing Cyber Monday specials offered by 650 of its member merchants.

The shipping promotions are likely to come with fewer...

Google bets big on mobile advertising in $750-million acquisition of AdMob

Google Inc. has shown which way it believes the winds are blowing by forking over $750 million for mobile advertising firm AdMob, one of the Web giant's largest acquisitions to date. 

As AdMob itself has described, the volume and effectiveness of mobile advertising has been skyrocketing over the last several years as more advanced smartphones have caught on, making it easier to deliver more kinds of graphical and text-based advertising to phone-toting consumers.

In a recent report, AdMob said that the number of mobile ads it served had increased nearly 540% from September 2007, to 10.2 billion per month from 1.6 billion.  

As mobile phones morph further into pocket Internet devices, and consumers grow accustomed to performing online functions like search, gaming and instant messaging on their handsets, opportunities for advertising companies like Google will grow rapidly, analysts expect. 

Google says the number of searches performed by smartphone users has increased by a factor of five over the last two years, led primarily by iPhone users and owners of Google Android phones. At least a dozen new Google-powered phones, such as last week's launch of Verizon's Droid, are expected to be released in the coming year.  

Google also says that marketer spending on mobile advertising is growing at 30% annually.

AdMob was founded in 2006 by Omar Hamoui, a Web entrepreneur looking to generate traffic for his mobile-based website. The company has taken funding from venture firms such as Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Northgate, and the company's clients have included Ford, Coca-Cola, Electronic Arts and Paramount Pictures.

Google, which already owns a major stake in mobile advertising with its DoubleClick Mobile unit, said it expects regulatory scrutiny of the AdMob deal but hopes the pact will be approved within a matter a months.

-- David Sarno

Searching for an improved online shopping experience? Google has a new plan

Google offered this example of how an online store using Google Commerce Search could look, with searchable products sortable by category, color, size or price. Credit: Google.

Just in time for the holidays, Google Inc. took the wraps off a new business, one designed to help big online retailers make their websites easier to search.

With Google Commerce Search -- a service that will cost retailers $50,000 or more for an annual subscription -- the Internet giant will set up a search function on an online retailer's website, which Google says will dramatically improve user experience and drive sales. The product represents a challenge to Google's archrival Microsoft Corp., as well as to Oracle Corp., Endeca Technologies Inc. and other firms that run retailers' websites.

The main selling points are that everything that has made Google a dominant company -- vast computing resources, algorithms that provide right results, and even the ability to fix your typos and find what you're looking for -- will help people navigate clunky retail websites that cause a major stumbling block to sales.

"Search was the most important aspect of an e-commerce experience," said Nitin Mangtani, a lead product manager at Google. People go to a website looking to buy, say, a laptop, and they search the site for the item they want. "If the users are able to find that laptop easily, they are more likely to buy the product," Mangtani said. "If it takes them eight to 10 seconds, and they can't find it easily, they leave the website."

Whereas people have high expectations, websites weren't delivering, so Google saw an opportunity, the company said.

Search engine analyst Greg Sterling said...

KaChing aims to shake up the mutual fund industry

Venture capitalists love to use the Internet to disrupt traditional businesses. But surely by now no business is left undisturbed.

Not so, says Andy Rachleff, a founder of Silicon Valley’s Benchmark Capital. He thinks he’s found a big one, what he says is “a $10-trillion market that has not had any innovation in the last 25 years and has not been affected by the Internet.”

It’s the mutual fund industry. And some valley heavyweights have joined Rachleff in his bid to rock that world: Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, Hewlett-Packard executive Ben Horowitz, Open Table CEO Jeff Jordan, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers partner Kevin Compton.

This team believes that mutual funds take investors’ money, but only tell them what their holdings are on a quarterly basis. The funds also charge all sorts of hidden fees. The Internet is famous for bringing transparency to a variety of businesses, but mutual funds, Rachleff says, are as opaque as ever.

Enter kaChing, a start-up that Rachleff has not only backed but has joined as its chief executive. KaChing has been around for about 18 months, accumulating 400,000 users with a Facebook application, but is now ready to unveil its business model.

The company offers up a website that any investor can use for free. The investors – some professional, some amateur – state their philosophy and show their stock picks. KaChing will then rate those investors, using a formula akin to the one that Ivy League universities use to evaluate their institutional fund managers, and anyone with a rating of 140 or more will be tabbed as a “genius.”

Any other investor can log onto the site and see what the geniuses are picking. But if you decide you like one of them, you can plunk your money down – minimum $3,000, which Rachleff says is far less than the institutional level typically required for such services – and invest like the genius of your choosing. Every time the genius makes a trade, you make the same trade at the same time, and get an e-mail alerting you to it.

To be sure, other companies out there have similar ideas. Other so-called social investing firms include Covestor, Cake Financial and PersonalRIA. Plenty of people have an eye on that mutual fund disruption.

And success is far from guaranteed. KaChing will have to persuade people to put their money behind stock-pickers who, while the site may call them geniuses, don't have the backing, brand names or Morningstar ratings of Fidelity, Pimco, Vanguard or other big funds.

-- Dan Fost

TechCrunch50: SeatGeek advises you when to buy tickets to the big game

It's the ticket-scalping conundrum: Will it be cheaper to buy seats in advance of the event or will prices drop as it gets closer to game time and the sellers want to unload their wares?

SeatGeek, a new company that showed its stuff at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, aims to take the guesswork out of that decision.

"We have an algorithm that can forecast ticket prices," said Jack Groetzinger, co-founder of the company. He compared it to Bing's FareCast, which does something similar with airline tickets.

SeatGeek aggregates tickets on sale from most of the major re-sellers, like StubHub, RazorGator, TicketsNow and others.

Say you're interested in getting tickets to Oct. 4's showdown between the Dodgers and the Colorado Rockies. (See the screen grab at right.)  SeatGeek searches available seats, and says you can get cheap seats for below face value, but you should wait -- the price will probably go even lower. But if you want the medium or expensive seats, buy them now, as those prices will probably rise. (Perhaps the conclusion is that if Dodger fans can't get close to the action, they'd rather stay home.)

Groetzinger, 25, and co-founder Russ D'Souza, 24, sold their earlier company, Scribnia (which D'Souza called "Yelp for authors and bloggers") four months ago, and immediately started SeatGeek. They were living in Boston at the time, where Red Sox tickets are hard to come by and only available on the secondary market.

"We see this as a huge opportunity for a change-the-world type of business," D'Souza said.

-- Dan Fost

Sony sees Google Books settlement as 'profoundly positive'

Sony's new e-book reader. Credit: HO/AFP/Getty Images

Sony, a major player in the digital reading marketplace, this week stated that the settlement between Google and a group of authors and publishers "may have a profoundly positive impact on the market for e-book readers and related devices."

In a request to file an amicus brief in the 4-year-old copyright case, Sony expressed its support for a settlement under which Google and the rights holders would share revenues derived from commercial use of the company's vast online database of digitized books.

Under the settlement, Google would be able to sell access to millions of books online, as well as offer for-pay subscriptions that would allow libraries, universities and other institutions unfettered access to the Google Books collection. Google would pay rights holders 67% of the revenues generated from the database.

Google began a large-scale project to scan books at libraries around the nation in 2004.

On Thursday, Google announced that it would support the EPUB digital book format -- also recently embraced by Sony -- for more than 1 million public domain books that users will be able to download and read on reading devices that support the standard.

Separately, Abilene Christian University also filed a letter with the court expressing its support of the  settlement.

"The new access models created by the settlement will be of extraordinary value to research at our institution," said Provost Jeanine Varner in a statement, adding that it would lessen "inequalities among educational institutions as information becomes available to all students everywhere."

-- David Sarno

Follow my variable-rate stream of tech, media and culture musings on Twitter: @dsarno

Highlights from the '1984' lawsuit against Amazon

"Kindling."  Credit: oskay / Flickr

Justin Gawronski and Antoine J. Bruguier are suing Amazon for having deleted their copies of George Orwell books from their Kindle readers, sans permission.  The potential class-action lawsuit claims harm inflicted on the parties for rendering their notes "useless" -- causing some commentators to call it the "Kindle ate my homework" case.

Here are a few highlighted quotes from the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court in Seattle.

-- "[Plaintiffs] bring this class action complaint against defendants Amazon.com, Inc. and Amazon
Digital Services, Inc., ... for their wrongful practice of remotely deleting digital content from their customers’ Amazon Kindle electronic book (“e-book”) reading devices and Kindle for iPhone applications."

-- "Amazon not only deleted the e-books,but also rendered useless any electronic notes and annotations that consumers had made within these e-books because the notes were no longer tied to the referenced or highlighted text. Amazon then refunded the purchase price to these consumers."

-- "Amazon never disclosed ... that it possessed the technological ability or right to remotely delete digital content purchased through the Kindle Store from Kindles or iPhones."

-- "As part of his studies of '1984,' Mr. Gawronski had made copious notes in the
book. After Amazon remotely deleted '1984,' those notes were rendered useless...

Cannabis App passes 1,000 paid downloads; SoCal developers stoked

L.A.-based software engineers Devin Calloway and Julian Cain are also medical cannabis patients. And they're looking to "harvest change."

Over the last several months, Calloway, 24, and Cain, 32, matched their programming talents to their political passions to put Cannabis up for sale on iTunes. The price? $2.99. 

Cannabis is a geolocation-based iPhone app that allows users to quickly find the nearest medical marijuana dispensary as well as weed-friendly doctors and lawyers, all with a few quick touches.

The app has sold more than 1,000 units, and its founders said they planned to put 50 cents of every purchase -- or 17% of the proceeds -- toward establishing a nonprofit organization dedicated to media outreach for the pro-pot cause.

The idea behind the app is to "use technology to empower the medical cannabis industry and the global hemp movement," Calloway said.

In California and other states, the substance is legal with a doctor’s prescription but remains illegal under federal law.

Calloway is a founding member of ajnag.com -- that's ganja backwards -- which stands for Activists Justifying the Natural Agriculture of Ganja. According to Calloway, the website was the first comprehensive online map of...