The demo store, which actually run by one of Squarespace's craftier employees. (Photo: Squarespace)

Another big move from Soho-based Squarespace: Today the company is launching a commerce offering for digital and physical goods, which will allow Squarespace users an integrated option for selling whatever they want through the platform.

CEO Anthony Casalena said the reason was pretty simple: Demand. It's been "the number-one most-requested feature across the platform for half a decade."

The project has been in the works for about a year, and most of that time was devoted to addressing the weediest of ecommerce needs: inventory management, shipping, taxes, coupons and so forth. Mr. Casalena gave Betabeat a walk-through (using Hide + Stitch, a store created by a particularly crafty Squarespace employee who handmakes leather goods) and it looked as seamless as the rest of Squarespace 6.

"I think a lot of times in our industry, a lot of stuff gets overshadowded by marketing," said Mr. Casalena. "People say 'ecommerce on the platform,' but really? You really do order workflow, shipping rules, inventory management, all the stuff people really need to do this?"

"We wanted to make sure this was a real offering," he added.

Stripe will handle the payment processing, taking a 2.9 percent slice of the proceeds, plus 30 cents on every successful transition. Squarespace, however, won't be charging an additional transaction fee. Users get the whole kit and caboodle--the site and the ecommerce feature--for $24 a month. While initially designed for stores with fewer than 200 SKUs, there's no limit on the number of products you can sell for that amount of money.

"You can really be accepting payments directly to your bank account within 10 minutes, 15 minutes, from setting this up," Mr. Casalena promised.

There's even a little detail sure to warm the hearts of content marketers everywhere: "We have this page builder where you can add different blocks to either blog post, sidebars or pages." They've built a product block, which means that if (for example) you run a blog about vintage clothing, you could feature a broach from the '40s right next to the writeup of your latest thrifting trip. (Hear that, Etsy types?)

"Instead of just having the static store, if you've got people subscribed to your blog and you want to talk about new products you've got, it's right there." The writers of the J. Peterman catalog would be so proud!

The feature debuts at a booming period for Squarespace, which launched a complete revamp back in July. "A lot of companies do things like this and I think it destroys their company," said Mr. Casalena, citing cautionary tales like old Digg and Netscape.

"For us, it was the opposite. It completely changed our company's trajectory." The company's growth popped 22 percent in January alone. While that's a steeper incline than the average month, it's certainly not a bad sign, either.

"You have to understand, version 6 was just such a ridiculous move," said Mr. Casalena. "You literally sat there behind the scenes and rewrote something that was making up to 20 million bucks a year and said no, that's not going to be the future for us. The thing that's going to be the future for us is this platform that lets us create any kind of website."

Onward and upward!

One of the Fog Creek volunteers, buckets in hand. (Photo: Squarespace)

When Hurricane Sandy smashed into lower Manhattan last week, customers of the data center Peer1 faced the prospect of major downtime. Just a blackout would've been no problem. But when the basement flooded, it took out the pumps that transport fuel from the reserve tanks to the generators on top of the building. That's where Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena came in.

“I wake up Tuesday, I live in Soho," said Mr. Casalena. "There’s no reception. There’s no power, so all the cell towers are dead." Somehow a couple of messages snuck through to his cell phone: "Anthony there’s a major problem at Peer1, the basement’s flooded, they can’t access any reserve fuel, we have 12 hours." He hurriedly packed a bag and started walking downtown.

Squarespace was already preparing  its "hundreds of thousands" customers using the platform for the possibility of downtime. But when he got to Peer1, Mr. Casalena realized it might be possible to keep the data center going. All they needed was a steady supply of fuel to the generators on the roof. So he told the team back at the office not to shut down the service just yet--"I emailed all the people and said, don't shut down. I don't see them turning off, and I think we’re just going to try and push it."

There was fuel in the area. The only problem was getting it upstairs. "So we find, like, oil drums--one of our employees finds oil drums somewhere on Craigslist," Mr. Casalena explained. "We’re just filling them up and trying to take them upstairs, and on day one it was pretty haphazard. It wasn’t like, a nice thing with everyone on the stairwell carrying things one flight--it was like half an oil drum of diesel with people pushing it upstairs taking an hour and a half."

Employees from Squarespace, Fog Creek and Peer1 all pitched in, first with drums and then buckets, working through the night. Their efforts were chronicled moment to moment on a bare-bones status blog. 

On day two, they hired a crew of day laborers and assigned one man to each flight of stairs, managing to truck hundreds of gallons to the roof. On day three, the building went into lockdown, as crews attempted to put in place proper fixes rather than quick-and-dirty workarounds. Luckily, by that point, a Peer1 engineer had finally gotten an impromptu pump working.

As we spoke, Mr. Casalena toggled back and forth between modesty and amazement they'd actually pulled it off. First he said, "I walked down and tried to help, and once it became evident something was possible, I just asked anyone if they wanted to help, and they did, and this is the result." Moments later, he added, "This thing could have fallen apart from like ten angles. Even if it does right now, we still bought three days of uptime. That’s just crazy."

The can-do startup mentality rarely invovles so much manual labor. And, after all, Datagram--another major data center just down the street--went down for days, taking Gawker Media, Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post with it. But to Mr. Casalena, it seemed less like a business decision and more like he had no other option.

"I am really, really proud of Squarespace’s uptime and everything we’ve accomplished," he said. "So, sitting there in an apartment where there’s no electricity or anything else--I mean, I would have to be, like, so lame not to walk down to the data center and just try and help. What am I going to do, sit at home in my apartment? That’s just absurd."

"It’s okay to care about things, you know?" concluded Mr. Casalena. "Even things as silly as websites."

We're pretty sure Peer1, which came out of this looking like heroic to Datagram's hapless, would agree.

This guy means business. (Photo: Squarespace)

Wanna see commitment? Employees of Squarespace, Fog Creek and Peer1 kept their data center up and running throughout the disaster by hauling fuel up 17 flights of stairs. [TechCrunch]

Despite the tendency among Mac users to go batshit nuts lining up for every new product, crowds weren't quite as major as usual for the iPad Mini. [TechCrunch]

It's like pulling teeth to get Apple to apologize to Samsung for IP infringement, as the U.K. court of appeals is discovering. [Guardian]

Speaking of the U.K., Kickstarter is now open to projects from across the pond. [Kickstarter]

Popcorn brand Pop Secret has released an app to help you plan movie nights. And let's face it--this weekend, you deserve a movie night. [Fast Company]

Gorgeous friends not, to our knowledge, included. (Image courtesy of Squarespace.)

Finally, officially out: Squarespace 6, a complete rework of the web design platform that's been around since the olden days of 2003. The beta has been trucking along since last October, but today the company finally flipped the switch. The new platform is the culmination of two years of work, following a $38.5 million investment made by Index Ventures and Accel Partners back in 2010.

Included in the overhaul is practically everything but the kitchen sink. A brief summary, from today's announcement:

The Squarespace 6 platform adds over 50 new features to Squarespace’s core service, including LayoutEngine, a transformative technology for building web pages. Other features include sophisticated media management, a new blogging engine, deep social network integration, Facebook page publishing, real-time statistics, a new commenting system, multiple author support, and more.

In a walkthrough of the new software for Betabeat, founder and CEO Anthony Casalena described Squarespace 6 as a “totally new product” and called the rebuild a “monumental undertaking.”

“The foundation that we created with 5, which lasted us basically the better part of a decade, that was good. But we needed something that would get us through the next 5 years,” he said. Asked what had taken them so long to launch since the beta, Mr. Casalena sounded affronted: “You can’t just in a couple weeks or months redo everything that was built up over seven or eight years and put it together haphazardly and throw it out there and launch it."

He does not strike us as one to be rushed.

Mr. Casalena described Squarespace 6 as designed to meet the needs of both developers and less code-savvy consumers: “We started creating this because we wanted to really be able to create any kind of site on the platform,” he said. “We’ve done a good job with blogs and portfolios here and also with small business websites, but we want to make sure that developers can use this to create great things,” he said.

The results are, in fact, pretty impressive. For one thing, the page builder is elegant and easy to use. Contrasting the new platform with others like Wordpress, with their "little wizzywig editors," Mr. Casalena showed off a new a grid-based editor, which allows you to drag elements around, only to see them always line up and resize properly. The results are also automatically responsive, meaning they'll work on mobile devices. Here's what that looks like, in practice:

“No one had ever solve the fundamental platform CMS question for websites. There’s all these little options out there,” but none of them quite nails it, he said. “This is our stab at saying, all right, this is what we think will really send things forward.”

But if the product impressed us, we're a little less certain about where Squarespace fits into the market. Despite its long history, the company has quite a bit of competition on the CMS front, with Wordpress sucking up most of the air in the room. Best estimates suggest Squarespace has users in the tens of thousands, while Wordpress has something like 54 million. Now, Squarespace is a paid product ($8 a month), which makes the metrics for success a little different. But that is a big gap.

Pressed on the issue, Mr. Casalena got a little fiesty: “If you really wanted to do a custom template on Wordpress, you have to go to Wordpress VIP, which puts ridiculous restrictions on what you can actually do.”

“Like, have you ever tried to place video?” When Betabeat admitted that yes, we had, and no, it hadn't necessarily always worked quite right, he added, “It’s kind of unbelievable. I actually don't understand how that sort of situation is going to be defensible for them, when there’s platforms like this, that give [users] total code control and also complete editorial control, without any of these problems.”

He proceeded to demonstrate the process of posting a video, which looked almost heartbreakingly easy.

The company's intention is to push for artists and others who'd respond to the portfolio offering, as well as bloggers and simple websites. "That's really what Squarespace version five targeted really well, so we're just starting with that as a baseline," he said. He also explained that, when they showed the demo to the CEO of Getty Images, who is one of their board members, he told them that his photographers pay $25,000 for equivalent sites.

And then there's Tumblr, which hosts 64.6 million blogs and has made inroads among the artistic crowd most likely to respond to the portfolio templates of which Squarespace seems so proud. But Mr. Casalena didn't sound too concerned.

"Well, Tumblr won't let you make a portfolio," he said, adding that "it's an integrated system where you've got not only project management, but pages and blogs all within one site, and you own the content, and it's a site you're paying for, so you have complete control over it."

"We consider Tumblr a channel," he added confidently.

Mr. Chau.

This morning Betabeat learned that Rolling.fm co-founder and former Googler Tim Zhou had joined Tumblr. It has also come to light that another Rolling cofounder and Xoogler, Thomas Chau, has joined another prominent New York startup: Squarespace. "We liked Thomas's strong entrepreneurial spirit (take risks and run fast) along with his perfect Squarespace DNA of product design sensibility coupled with engineering awesomeness," Squarespace SVP Jesse Hertzberg wrote in an email. Squarespace, if you're not familiar, is a website builder and hosting platform (that is often likened to Tumblr, as it happens) founded in 2003. Now we just need to suss out what has become of the third Rolling co-founder, Xoogler Nhon Ma...

Full-time entrepreneur, part-time factchecker.

In in its Sunday issue, the New York Post put its own spin on data showing that New York City's tech start-ups racked up $1.7 billion in funding this past year. Using numbers from CB Insights, the paper identified nine "NYC tech giants" based on the amount of funding those start-ups had accrued. But at least one tech scene native was restless over the way the results were reported.

On her Tumblr, MessageParty co-founder Amanda Peyton, who works out of the Makery's co-working space in Williamsburg, pointed out some of the "half-truths or straight-up errors" in the piece. Her issue wasn't the numbers, but rather the way the paper described what the companies do. After acknowledging that the tech reporting isn't exactly in the Post's wheelhouse, Ms. Peyton added, "But surely someone there should know that Foursquare isn’t an e-commerce company."

Here are some of the points of contention Ms. Peyton circled in red:

“FourSquare Location E-Com” — Foursquare is misspelled and is not an e-commerce company. They have little revenue except for maybe the fact that they sell Foursquare shirts on their website, though that’s hardly a defining characteristic of the company.

“AppNexus Web Services” — web services?  What does this even mean?  That they do shit on the internets?  Yes, I suppose that’s fitting, but if you need to summarize the company in three words maybe “advertising” somewhere in there would help. “Real-time ad platform” is clearly too advanced.

”Squarespace Web Developement”  -- Web development implies a dev shop — a group of people who make website for other people.  Squarespace is not this.  Squarespace makes *software* that helps individuals make websites on their own. Big difference - one is scalable, the other is not.

“Adkeeper Web Ad Development”  Adkeeper does not make ads. “Ad Development” implies that they are somehow involved in the process of making advertisements for the web, which they in no way are.  They make software that allows consumers to save advertisements, which is tangentially related to “Ad Development," kinda.

If Ms. Peyton ever gets bored with building her own company, we bet old media's fact-checking departments will gladly snatch such an eye for detail.