Pluralis is a crowdsourcing platform for Landing Page Optimization and Conversion Rate Optimization. The service can be used with A/B testing services like Unbounce to maximize the results.

Crowdsourcing to optimize your landing page conversion rate.

Dollar Shave Club couldn't be simpler. Select one of our great razors, pay one low monthly fee, and we send 'em right to your door. No more over-paying for fancy brand name shave tech. No more forgetting to buy your blades. Check out

http://www.dollarshaveclub.com

Just awesome.

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.

MAKE YOUR BEST FRIEND HAPPY!

Barkbox is an interesting startup. You pay a monthly fee and they send you dog treats. Plans start around $25/mth which does seem a lot to me... but i am not a dog owner, so i am not sure if this is the budget dog owners spend for their companions.

The great busines model behind this is the recuring payments, people are not reminded they have to pay, and they can cancel at anytime.

Watch this startup, the concept has a lot of potential, in a very large market, a very sustainable market.

Gary V just invested 100K.

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.

We want to democratize the ability to sell stuff online. You're a creative person; you create a lot of content. But most of it sits, archived, on some computer somewhere for the rest of time.

It's either too hard, or too time-consuming, or it doesn't even make sense to put in a store! We let you easily sell the stuff you haven't been able to, yet.

It turns out, that includes a lot of stuff:

• Beta previews of a video game you are developing.
• Some music that you never released. Your fans would love this.
• Unused illustrations you spent hours and hours working on.
• The source code of a killer app you developed.

Very smart idea.

Sahil Lavingia the creator of the service is a pretty smart dude, part of the founding team of Pinterest, and built turntable for iPhone...

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.

Awesome ideas! The team of 6 guys could not possibly handle creating courses in every language possible... so they turned their tool to create courses into a feature anybody can access to create their own course. CLEVER.

Codecademy, the white-hot startup that teaches even total novices how to code, has launched a new tool: Creators, which lets anyone create a course on Codecademy and teach technology to an audience of over a million budding developers. “We’re going from being a content company (creating courses) to becoming a platform for others to create courses,” said Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims in an email to VentureBeat. “This is probably the biggest announcement we’ve made yet.” Codecademy started out offering just JavaScript tutorials. The Creators user-generated courses will also include courses in Ruby and Python. Course creators will also be able to use the Creators site as a reputation-building tool, and Codecademy will be screening course creators’ credentials to keep the riffraff out.

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."

The best way to find apps in iTunes and the Android Marketplace, through a unique combination of app search and personalized recommendations. Search for iPhone and Android apps and see the best app search results, on sale apps and new apps.

Chomp's proprietary algorithm learns the functions and topics of apps, so you can search based on what apps do, not just what they’re called. Try searching for “puzzle games”, “kids games”, “expense trackers”, “tip calculators” or “chat” and start finding great apps.

Founded by ex-Googlers with Kevin Rose and Ashton Kutcher as advisors.

It's no secret that blogging is a game of page views. Without good analytics, blogging is all about watching, intuition and guesswork. After you've done some of that, you write some spaghetti posts, throw them at the wall and see what sticks. Dash gives publishers the motherlode of data about page views and how to get them. It shows them the past and the present of their site, and its ability to measure Web-wide trends offers a glimpse of the future.

Pars.ly has been impressive from the start. Google should eat them up and offer this for free, disrupt the blogging world by allowing anyone, and not only large companies with budgets who can afford this service (starts at $499/mth), access this information and put everybody in fair competition.

A tool like Dash gives a site a huge advantage in the short term. While some sites putter along without this kind of detailed feedback, the ones who have it could dominate. The ability to see exactly which topics and events need covering, and exactly how to cover them for a particular audience, is a sort of online omniscience.

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.

StyleSeat makes it easy to find and book beauty salon appointments online.

This is a mart model. It tooks years for OpenTable to be profitable. I was actually in the start restaurant business back in 2000(?) when opentable started to spread around, and i saw them taking 10 yrs to get to the point they are at (IPO 2 yrs ago i believe?).

This is a good model, and with a groupon like feature, this could really take off. And there is no POS system for businesses to adopt, everything happens online.

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.

Making good home espresso is possible, but the machines tend to cost a small fortune. ZPM Espresso, a startup in Atlanta, is hoping to change that with its open-source espresso machine. If the company succeeds, it could have a nice market for itself, as the espresso and specialty coffee market have been growing quickly around the world. (Can you tell based on how many Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee places there are?). The founders like drinking espresso and they took apart a bunch of old machines to see how it’s done. They figured out how to make a machine for less money, but including important features such as PID controls, custom temperature, pressure profiles, and open source hardware and software using Arduino, a kind of microcontroller. The microcontroller governs the behavior of the thermoblock and the pump, rather than relying upon mechanical controls. That allows the data to be analyzed, saved, and shared.

To make good espresso, it helps to have the ability to control temperature and pressure precisely. Typical machines that can do that can cost more than $700, but ZPM is aiming at a target price of $300 to $400. One of the secrets is a custom-designed thermoblock that ZPM is creating itself.

Simply awesome.

Beepl is a new QAservice launched by an ex-techcruncher.

What is Beepl?

The smarter way to question the world

Beepl lets you ask questions that other users answer so that it's easy for anybody to crowdsource knowledge and opinion. Beepl also understands the topics that questions relate to and users' interests, expertise and who they know so that questions automatically reach the best people to answer them.

Connect with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn so that topics follow you

There's no need to friend, like, follow or poke! Instead, we enable you to connect Beepl to your existing Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles so that you see more content from people you already know and on topics that you're currently interested in.

Get recognized for your expertise

It's our mission to surface the expertise that each of us has; expertise that often goes unnoticed. Did you know that the guy who works in the cubicle opposite knows a heck of lot about vegan cooking? Or that the lady who lives in the next door apartment spends her weekends sailing? Nor did we (until recently) but that's where Beepl aims to help by making it effortless to connect with topic experts.

Related to this is our 'Beepl Rank' that scores each user's overall contribution in comparison to the Beepl community as a whole. It's our way of giving recognition to users who actively demonstrate their expertise.

How this will fit against Yahoo Answers, Quora and others, time will tell. This is a tough niche to break through, but this model is interesting, because it leverages your Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin connections to get answers.

There is not one better than others. Remark that the democratization of education is happening online... There are several startups directly related to educating.

http://www.skillshare.com/ http://www.boundlesslearning.com/ http://www.codecademy.com/

Shopobot, which was part of the second class of AngelPad startups, aims to give shoppers more transparency for price fluctuations on products online. It is not uncommon for retailers to change their prices several times in the course of a week, or put items on sale and unless you are checking the product every day, you don’t know when these changes are taking place. Shopobot analyses price data to make recommendations on where to buy specific products and users can follow products they’re interested in, and get alerts when Shopobot finds a great deal or steep price fluctuation. The site will also send you refund alerts if the price drops after a purchase and gives users access to interactive price graphs that show how prices have been changing at top stores (i.e. Amazon).

This is a really cool app. You can ask people who have checked in at locations, questions like "How's the wait?" "How's the crowd" "Any good sales?" "What's the special tonight?"

Very neat concept and useful.

With Zaarly, cash is all around you. Be one of the first to claim it. Get an exclusive invite to the world's first buyer-powered market. #launch

Interesting concept, needs to keep an eye on it.

What a great idea, cool startup - this one is one to watch.

Startup kit is like less than $30 and u r good to go to have fun.

Not sure, what i think. I guess if your interests coincide with the limited categories set (See, categories are like boxes that suck) and sources available, you could probably put together a nice morning cap... but I'm not sure it's worth the effort at this point.

promepi is an online newspaper that connects people with their news. Based on people's preferences and other people like them, promepi customizes news to what each user wants. This gives people news that is relevant and interesting to them.

Star. me lets you tell your friends* how awesome they are. Giving and receiving stars will unlock new stars, new features, games and more**.

created by @zefrank

Very interesting, in particular this page which i had the most interest for: http://venture-capital-firms.findthebest.com/

These guys have the perfect domain name. Like about.me, this is a wining recipe just with the domain.

They label the concept as "The smartest way to build and share your resume", not sure if this is going to become a competitor of Linkedin, but i would imagine they are going after the same success opportunity.

Will be watching.

Cool idea, great concept, nice execution. I like this.

Interesting, very similar to Polyvore but for teens i guess... i don't know about this but i'll be watching.

Good concept, this would have potential if integrated into something bigger, like Facebook for example.