Though Etsy sellers may no longer peddle drugs or sell racist dolls without provoking a Change.org petition, they’re continuing on with heads held high in the adorkable tradition of selling mildly creepy DIY products. A new trend gaining popularity, according to the Daily Mail, is refashioning breast milk into jewelry, because of course. Read More
Etsy community sales topped $895 million last year, according to CEO Chad Dickerson. Who bought? The knit scarf-wearing citizens of Alaska and Massachusetts more than pulled their weight. [Etsy]
Meanwhile, pour out a little bit of Earl Grey for Regretsy, as the craft-snark blog is shuttering. Wrote founder April Winchell in a blog post: “After three and a half years, I’ve said everything I have to say about it, and now we’re just Bedazzling a dead horse.” [The Daily Dot]
The nice thing about a Yahoo earnings call, if you’re Kara Swisher, is that you don’t have to hide in the vents to hear what Marissa Mayer is saying. The good news: Yahoo beat Wall Street estimates. The bad: Revenue was flat, and oh, can someone do something about that pre-call elevator music? [AllThingsD]
That was a short-lived experiment: Months after Tumblr gave users the option of paying $5 to pin content to the top of followers’ dashboards, the pay-to-pin feature has been abandoned. [The Daily Dot]
This hardware will self-destruct: the Pentagon is interested in military hardware “capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner”—the better to keep enemies from collecting and reverse-engineering the detritus of war. [Wired]
Less than a week after Twitter launched Vine, the video-sharing app it acquired last year, the company went back to the acquisition well, announcing a deal for Crashlytics, which tracks bad code when apps fail. [Business Insider]
Shopping Site Goes Shopping Back in 2011, Khoi Vinh, the former design director for The New York Times’s website, attempted to launch an iPad collage maker called Mixel that even Taylor Swift would love. The interface was kind of clunky, and the company soon pivoted to a smoother iPhone product, which became fairly successful. And now Mixel has been acquired by the custom product giant Etsy.
No, you won’t be creating any collages of your twee collectables any time soon. According to AllThingsD, The Mixel team is being acquired for its stellar mobile talents. Mr. Vinh and his cofounder Scott Ostler, along with employees Akiva Leffert and Roy Stanfield, will all make the move to Etsy’s Brooklyn offices. Mixel will be shutting down the social side of its app, but will leave up its collage-making tool. In an email to Betabeat, Etsy CTO Kellan Elliot-McCrea explains, “We expect our mobile traffic to surpass desktop traffic by the end of 2014.” Read More
Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!
This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.
Sooooo…it’s that time of the year again. SXSW (a.k.a. Spring Break for Geeks) is right around the corner, running March 8 to 12 in Austin, Texas. And you know what that means: Parties, parties ‘n more parties!! So, once again, we’re putting together what we hope will be THE definitive guide to all this year’s SXSW Interactive parties. We’ll be updating this list regularly, so check back often. And email me if you’re organizing an event or a party. Read More
Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!
This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.
So we survived! The Mayan-predicted end-of-the-world-armaggedon-pocalypse was a no-show. Now it’s time to party! Of course, I still have a dozen cans of anti-zombie spray lying around… interested?
In the wake of the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, Mayor Bloomberg and 750 other mayors have come together to create Demand A Plan to fight for gun safety. A ton of leaders from the tech industry, both here in New York and in Silicon Valley, have joined the cause including Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Marc Benioff (SalesForce), Evan Williams (Twitter), Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz), Laurene Jobs, Randi Zuckerberg and many others. And a large-scale social media effort is underway, similar to how the industry came together during SOPA/PIPA. Read More
SoundCloud Busts Out Of Beta At this point, SoundCloud is basically the audio version of YouTube. A private-beta version of the site launched earlier this year called Next and the newest version integrates a bunch of those social features that the company hopes will help its users discover new music. “From today, ‘Next’ is now simply SoundCloud,” said Alexander Ljung, founder and CEO of SoundCloud in a press release sent to Betabeat. “It’s a platform for people to discover new, original music and audio, for creators to build audiences, and for everyone to share what they hear whether online or on mobile.”
The company claims that users now post over 10 hours of music and audio every minute while reaching over 180 million people. That’s a staggering 8% of the entire internet population, every month. On December 6th, mobile users will be able to enjoy reposts, updated mobile search, and UX updates on both iOS and Android SoundCloud apps. Read More
Lots Of Tiny Wicker Puppets Sold Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson took to the company’s blog to address his craft-obsessed minons and report big new numbers. Etsy recently hit 20 million members across over 200 countries. In the first week of November, they passed the $700 million sales mark and their direct checkout system has now processed over $100 million in transactions. By the end of the year, Etsy projects that it will have sold over 100 million items in the company’s history.
The company is also going all out for the holiday season and expects to have its best month yet. It’s running a multi-million-dollar online advertising campaign and opening a Etsy Holiday Shop in SoHo from November 29th through December 8th. SoHo though? Isn’t Greenpoint or Williamsburg more on target with the Etsy brand?
Chu Bets Against Zynga Betable has already announced partnerships with big game companies and is right on the path to become the Spotify of online gambling and pass its closest rival, Zynga. Ya-Bing Chu, a former VP and GM of Zynga’s mobile division, has now joined Betable as the company’s new Chief Product Officer. At Zynga, he was responsible for operating Words with Friends and Scramble with Friends. Mr. Chu explains the move in an essay on Betable’s blog, where he says, “I realized that Betable was the only frictionless way to enter the real money market, which is revolutionary.” Read More
Worst nightmare for workday Skype gossipers: It appears until very recently there was a vulnerability that made it possible for anyone who knows your email to hijack your account. UPDATED: Skype says it’s been resolved. [TNW]
Do you fret about the amount of info you’ve shared with Facebook? Think for a minute about your Google Search history taken as a whole, and you’ll have a panic attack. [Buzzfeed]
As we head into the holidays, an update from Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson reveals that the community is now 20 million users strong and did more than $700 million in sales in 2012. By the end of the year, total all-time marketplace sales will surpass 100 million products. The company is also doing a holiday popup shop in Soho this year–right next to Dior. Fancy! [Etsy]
Are startups funded in the early-stage investing boom starting to run out of money? [Business Insider]
Judging from this video about the Jawbone UP, wearable computing requires a whole lot of trial and error in the design process. [Fuse Project]
Ebay announced two new product features today to help better position itself as a competitor to ecommerce sites like Amazon and Etsy. With Ebay Now, an iPhone app, customers are able to order things from their mobile devices and have them delivered anywhere they choose, usually within an hour. Ebay Now has been tested in San Francisco. An Ebay rep declined to elaborate on when the feature would be available in New York.
The site also announced an interface redesign to make search and browsing easier, as well as a new Pinterest-like feature called “Feed” that, as Ebay CTO Mark Carges said, “is a little like creating a newsfeed, but instead of search it offers visual shopping inspiration.” Users can follow brands, styles, bands–basically any topic aggregated on Ebay–and streamline it into a visual shopping board, a lot like Pinterest, where they can easily click through and purchase items with a seamlessly integrated Ebay-Paypal account. Read More
It’s tough being a platform, especially one that wants to be open but maintain a certain community identity. In the last six months or so, questions have started to bubble up about whether Etsy can balance its DIY ethos with the demands of scalability. Even so, the DUMBO-based startup has kept intact much of its friendly, show-love-it’s-the-Brooklyn-way aura.
Which is why this Change.org petition (spotted here) against the sale of “Golliwog” dolls on the site is likely to make everyone involved feel a little awkward. Read More
