Until late 2009, Groupon was considered a massive failure. If you looked at their Alexa rankings before 2010, you would notice they had very little traffic.

Groupon owes a huge debt to affiliates.

And one important part of their strategy was to cut out the middle men, affiliate networks like Commission Junction and the Google Affiliate Network, which took huge cuts from the revenues generated.

Instead, Groupon focused on creating relationships directly with affiliates.

That’s why Groupon took off.

Great article, definitely tough to believe Groupon made it because of their affiliate program but it is possibly one of the strongest viral growth strategy used by Groupon.

Created by http://www.tastylabs.com/ (Joshua Schachter), this new engine works as follow:

• You sign up using Twitter
• Skills.to grabs all your contacts, and you can start tagging each of them with specofoc skills
• You can endorse skills from existing users
• You search by usernames or skills

Of course, this has a lot of potential. It's super easy to use, entertaining, but also has the risk of abuse. On the other end, i could see it tied more closely to you social graph and potentially become a about.me for the tech world.

Give it a shot.

It's hard to write a story or post about Pinterest and copyright law without at least one reader leaving a comment along the lines of "What about Tumblr?" Indeed, comparisons between the two sites are fairly obvious: while Tumblr is more of a blog platform and Pinterest is more of a link-sharing site, both are set up to allow users to easily share content they find on the Internet, and both do a great job of displaying visual content -- whether or not the person sharing that content has rights to share that work.

Why we should read TOS when we sign up...

And here's the kicker: The user agreement of both sites has language requiring users indemnify them against any copyright claims, Bradley said. They can do this by claiming proietections for service providers included in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Pinterest is successfully riding a new trend wave in the social space, moving mechanisms for content sharing beyond connections (friends) and towards relevance, effectively broadening the social horizon for us content addicts. Google+ has been the first to fuel this trend, by connecting social to search and media, and expanding the notion of connections to “Circles.” In addition, according to several industry rumors, Google has expressed interest in acquiring Pinterest.

As the “wisdom of crowds” converges, it results in what is called a "folksonomy." Folksonomies dramatically lower the barriers to information sharing, as well as discovery. Pinterest “one-upped” the game on link-sharing by tacking on self-expression, a most vital social currency. It nailed information relevance and social behavior in a single package.

The end note:

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”

We want to help decentralize online sales. Storefronts are a thing of the past. Most creative people find themselves with something they want to sell at some time or the other. But often the time, money, or energy required to start selling online makes you keep pushing it to the bottom of your to-do list. Not anymore. ShopLocket makes selling anything online as easy as embedding a Youtube video.

We aren't like all those other ecommerce platforms you've seen.

• No storefront.

• No upfront fees.

• No risk.

• You and your friends can embed your products anywhere.

We don't over complicate things. We're focused on delivering the best possible experience for selling individual products from any website. No unnecessary complications. We'll take you from signup to selling in minutes.

All I Really Want™ lets you give and receive the perfect gift on every occasion by allowing you to create and share your personal wish list. Easily upload pictures of your favorite items onto your list.
Then share and swap your list with anyone you want. Finally you have a way to take the guesswork out of gift giving.

Caterina Fake is back with a brand new venture. The co-founder of Flickr and Hunch revealed the new startup Pinwheel on her blog Thursday, comparing it (kind of) to a “Flickr for places.” The idea is that you can find and add notes on physical places, anywhere around the world. The initial implementation is browser-based, although Fake said in the blog post that an iOS version is in the works. That can be anything — including stories, memories, found objects, information or even ads. To kick things off, Pinwheel has raised a $7.5 million Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures. That’s in addition to about $2 million in angel funding raised last year from investors such as True Ventures (see disclosure), Betaworks, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Obvious Corp and other angels. Along with the most recent funding, Redpoint founding partner Geoff Yang has joined the Pinwheel board.

Wiser than a tutor, faster than flashcards, more fun than trampolining - Memrise - the best way to learn new words in any language.

This has potential.

Glam Media launched this foodie.com which is bad news for any recipe site out there because, well it adds to the competition and Glam Media is a big fish with lots of money and quite a publisher base.

They paid $100k back in 2011 for the domain.

Quipol is social polling. Create simple & elegant one-question polls, embed them into your blog posts and webpages, and find out where your audience stands on virtually any topic.

Simple, clean polls you can embed on any site. I really like that one.

My Big Campus extends the classroom to a safe, engaging online environment that balances educational use of Web technologies with network and student safety.

Engagio tracks your online conversations and lets you develop meaningful relationships from them.

This is a really good tool. It always comes back to email :)

It gets all your social conversation in a email format with replies, a clean amd simple interface.

You can also browse shared links directly from the conversation threads... powerful.

Check it out.

Sometimes you don't know you want something, until someone shows it to you. This looks really well executed.

Pinterest is able to avoid violating U.S. copyright laws thanks to a provision in the Internet Service Providers Act, which gives immunity to sites that publish information provided by others, according to Aaron Messing, an associate with OlenderFeldman LLP in New Jersey. As long as Pinterest continues to comply with a provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that requires it to remove content when asked by the copyright owner, users are free to continue pinning any images they find on the Internet.

To accomplish this, Pinterest has mastered the art of minimizing cognitive load – in other words, reducing the mental effort required to do what the site wants users to do. Reducing cognitive load is what good design is all about. Making something simple makes it easy to understand, easy to use, and ultimately increases the desired behaviors.

Consuming information through images is easier, which means users consume more of it than ever before.

Visually simple.

Social and search continue to be essential inbound marketing channels. And while Google’s generating a lot of discussion around its new social network, Google+, another website is actually driving more inbound traffic: Pinterest. With its U.S. traffic skyrocketing to more than 10 million visits, the virtual pinboard is now one of the top 10 social networking and forum websites. Our latest infographic introduces you to Pinterest and provides ideas on how you can use the social photo sharing website to promote products, build community, and drive website traffic and conversions.

According to a new report published by Shareabholic, Pinterest drove greater traffic than LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, and Youtube…combined. Additionally, Pinterest was just .01% shy of tying Twitter for the 4th spot and .02% behind Google, which currently sits in 3rd place.

Pretty impressive numbers, i can see it.

Many consumer brands are also experimenting with Pinterest, using pinboards to present complementary products, ideas, and imagery to inspire consumers to visualize and remix new possibilities. From fashion to interior design and home to retail to entertainment, brands are using Pinterest to thoughtfully assemble a curated lifestyle.

My takes...

"push button content generation."

Here's what he means: Clicking Pinterest's "Pin It" button, which can be added to your browser's bookmarks toolbar, will automatically grab the picture you want from the website you are on. What is different is that it immediately adds it to any of your Pinterest boards, allowing you to categorize your content then and there. The boards each have a separate page and can be easily accessed, shared and viewed on a sort of mother board on your Pinterest profile.

"Importantly, it was easy for new users to consume these sets of content visually as structured sets, and to share these sets with others," Gil wrote. "This next wave of social curation will fundamentally change how users find and interact with content over time."

Recurly, a startup that makes it easy for other companies to manage their subscription billing, has raised $6 million in a Series A financing round led by BV Capital, and including Polaris Venture Partners, Harrison Metal Capital and FreeStyle Capital. This brings Recurly's total funding to $8 million. Recurly's service allows businesses to quickly implement a subscription billing system, handling tasks like credit card number storage (it also supports integration with financial software like QuickBooks). Recurly automates many of the complexities involved with subscription billing management, such as customer upgrades and downgrades, credit card errors and declines, automated customer communications, and customer retention management.

Quora has joined the "Button" wars today with the launch of the Quora "Follow" button, created by Quora engineers Shu-Uesugi and Edmond-Lau. In the same vein as the Twitter "Follow" button, the Quora Follow button can be embedded in any website by cutting and pasting a customized snippet of code from the Quora Resources page. Users can choose between a light button and a dark button to taste. "The goal is to help people discover great Quora users from the outside of www.quora.com," says co-founder Charlie Cheever, "Like blogs and personal websites. When someone clicks on your button, he/she will start following you immediately if he/she is logged on to Quora; otherwise he/she will be prompted to log in or sign up."

There you go, another button for bloggers to add to their site.