Searching retail sites can be frustrating at times. While many retailers try to present product search in a visually appealing way, search can often be slow or difficult to refine. Tonight, Google is making a huge play in retail space with the launch of Commerce Search, a hosted enterprise search product to power online retail stores and e-commerce websites.
Google offers a general hosted search product that is used by organizations that want to add customized Google search functionality to their websites. Google is now entering the vertical space, by the first tailor-made enterprise product, with retail optimized space. There are four key components to thew new search offering for retailers:
Speed: Google promises “ultra-fast speed and accuracy” by leveraging Google’s search technology to provide sub-second response time to customer searches on retail sites. Commerce Search also uses a proprietary ranking technology to analyze the products in each data feed and serve the most relevant match. Google says that faster search speed will help increase conversions to buy products, as customers can quickly find specific products without having to navigate complex search interfaces.
E-commerce-Specific Search: Google Commerce offers a variety of features that are optimized for retail and product search, such as parametric search, sorting of results, spell checker, stemming, and synonym suggestion, which in some way or another let users to refine and target their searches. I’m told hosted search uses several proprietary signals to determine the ranking of search result. Commerce also offers a compelling product promotions features, that lets retailers fine-tune search results to push promoted products to the top of results. The search interface allows for retailers to specifically label products as promoted.
One of my bones to pick with Google Commerce was that it’s interface may be to simple for retail sites like Saks, Bloomingdales or others who tend to display products in a more visually appealing way. Presentation, whether it be real-store or online, matters. But Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager for Google Enterprise Search, told me that the Google Commerce Search API allows retailers to fully customize the search experience on their website and add all the bells and whistles they need to make the interface match the rest of their site. And, retailers using Commerce don’t need to show the Google logo on the search site.
Scalability: Because Commerce Search is hosted by Google and based in the cloud, Google says it’s easily scalable to absorb additional traction on the site. For example, says Mangtani, during the holiday season, retailers will most probably experience high traffic on search. Google will ensure that retailers can manage the boost in traffic and scale the search application. And Mangtani adds that once all product data is incorporated, search can be deployed on any e-commerce site fairly quickly.
Leveraging Other Google Products: Google promises integration with other Google products like Google Analytics and Google Product Search. Using Commerce, retailers can measure clicks, conversion rates, number of transactions, average order value and other data via Google Analytics. And e-commerce vendors can provide a single feed of products and catelogue items that will power Commerce and indexing of their products on Google Product Search. Product Search (formerly Froogle) was blends shopping results with Google search.
Google didn’t release too many details on its pricing mode for Commerce Search, but a spokeswoman told me that the product will start at $50,000 per year. Beyond that, pricing will be based on the number of products (SKUs) in the customer’s database and the number of search queries entered on their site each year. This pricing isn’t cheap so obviously this appeals to bigger retailers and e-commerce shops. Google has already partnered with Birkenstock USA to power search, which looks mediocre. It was a little simple for my taste and it lacked a visible search bar but I’m really interested to see what can be done with Commerce for more embellished e-commerce sites. Google Commerce will now compete with the likes of Omniture,Endeca, and others.
Google is playing into “conversion rates” when advertising the product for retailers, saying that while the average online retailer conversion rate is just three percent, it could be five to ten times higher with a powerful search technology. With Commerce, Google is making an aggressive move in the retail space. Google Product hasn’t really taken off, but Commerce could and could effect the use of Google Product as well (and maybe Google Checkout?). Google’s other enterprise search offerings have steadily gaining users, so it should be interesting to see if the search giant can make inroads with big-name retailers.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
1. What is the brand name of the H1N1 vaccine currently available in Singapore?
It is called Panvax®H1N1. It is used for the prevention of infection by the influenza virus strain that is causing the current pandemic H1N1 influenza (also known as “swine flu”).
2. Which company manufactures Panvax®H1N1?
Panvax®H1N1 is manufactured by a leading biopharmaceutical company in Australia [...]
As more games on the web begin to embrace virtual currency, users often run into the same problem: they’ve racked up mountains of whatever currency they’ve been playing with, but then don’t have a way to actually do anything with it outside of that game. Sure, they can always buy the latest tractor or weapon to arrive in their game, but at some point that gets old and they’re ready to cash out and move on to something new. Enter Bodega, a new platform that’s looking to help users swap virtual goods and currencies across different games, and even across different social networks.
Bodega lets users sell their virtual goods at auction in return for for Bodega’s own currency, the Bodega Bill. When you go to sell your virtual goods, you can either put it up as a ‘buy it now’ style purchase or an auction, with a minimum reserve if you want. Users looking to purchase virtual goods can obtain Bodega Bills by completing offers, buying them with their credit cards, or by selling their own virtual goods in the marketplace. You can also earn Bodega Bills by completing actions on the site, like adding another user as a friend or listing an item for sale.
Of course, actually executing these transactions is difficult, because none of these games have any of this functionality built in. To work around this, Bodega holds the buyer’s Bodega Bills in escrow until there is confirmation from both users involved with the transaction that the virtual good has actually been received. This system does have the upside of allowing the platform to work across multiple social networks and platforms (Bodega is currently available on Facebook with plans to launch on MySpace, Bebo, and the iPhone soon), but it’s not the ideal situation. CEO Mark Sendo says that the company is currently in discussions with a number of big games in this space, in the hopes of integrating an API into the games themselves that would negate much of the hassle associated with the transactions, but it sounds like it may be a while before any big deals come to fruition.
Once you’ve earned some Bodega Bills, you can use them to purchase other virtual goods (so you could potentially buy points on another game or social network), or you can trade them in for cash — something that sounds like it could be especially appealing to gamers who are looking to turn their online wealth into something a bit more tangible. Sendo says that the amount of money paid out will be established by the market (the actual conversion rate will likely play a big role in how quickly Bodega catches on).
Virtual currency marketplaces have always been a tricky area, rife with scammers, so-called ‘gold farmers’, and fraud (there’s a reason eBay has largely banned them). But that doesn’t negate the fact that there are lots of people who’d like to sell their virtual goods. Bodega is going to be fighting a long uphill battle here, but if it can pull off a unified, safe platform, there’s plenty of money to be made.
Bodega rose from the ashes of urTurn, a startup we covered last year that looked to reward users for their actions on Facebook. It’s worth pointing out that Sendo was convicted of wire fraud a decade ago and was later forced to wrangle with the SEC over violations involved with InternetMoney.com (Sendo settled by agreeing never to deal with penny stocks).
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
ReVolt, a Swiss spinoff from a Norwegian research firm, promises to triple the driving range of electric cars while lowering costs and increasing battery reliability and safety.
These claims would be remarkable for any battery. What makes the company even more unique is that ReVolt is developing larger-scale and more reliable batteries using zinc-air technology, which has been abandoned by most energy storage companies for being too fickle for long-term recharging.
Typically, zinc-air cells give out after a couple months, making them fit only for button-cell applications like watches and hearing aids. ReVolt is hoping to turn this around, making them work through 500 and 2,000 recharge cycles. If it can, it will scale them up for electric vehicle and grid storage capacities, and offer them at a more affordable price than competing battery makers.
By combining hypercapacitors and lithium-ion batteries, ReVolt supplies the fast-discharge “peak” power in an automotive system — that “oomph” you feel when you stomp on the gas. Then it uses zinc-air cells as the general motive force that a Tesla Motors’ Roadster could use to travel over 600 miles on one charge.
If zinc-air batteries become a reality, cell phones could go unplugged for days at a time. Laptops would become more portable that ever. Black & Decker cordless blenders could be used in true wilderness conditions without backup batteries. With three times the storage potential of lithium-ion batteries of similar size, zinc air batteries could make almost any appliance imaginable more useful and reliable. On top of that, the cells use less exotic and more stable materials, making them cheaper.
This technology has been around for years. So what’s the holdup?
Zinc air cells tend to jam after you recharge them several times. The zinc branches out from the electrode and shorts out, the electrolytic solution gets drawn into the porous “air” electrode and clogs it, the humidity changes in the battery. In a word, they are fragile. ReVolt is hoping to make them less so, reaching for commercial viability with 500 to 2,000 recharge cycles. Right now, the highest number reached is 100 before the cell dies. The company seems to be well on its way.
When ReVolt announced that they were developing a zinc slurry pumping device inside its batteries to prevent clogging, people took notice. The technology is still in the midst of being scaled for EV and grid applications, and refined for long-term durability. In order to make them suitable for EV use, the cells will have to be flattened for easy packaging and installation — not an easy task in itself.
Given the progress the company has made so far, the question isn’t “if” it can make zinc-air a rechargeable energy source, it’s “when.” With an estimated two to five years left in the development phase before EV batteries and grid storage solutions become viable, there is plenty of time for competitors to release their own breakthroughs.
VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr. Get your discounted early-bird tickets before Nov. 5 at GreenBeat2009.com.
The nanometer scale-wires greatly increase light-interactive surface area. The cables are also coated in a dye that increases their solar reactivity while the zinc nano-fibers generate electricity.
If the invention is commercialized, bundles of fibers could be saturated with sunlight using lens arrays on the roofs of buildings. The prototype of the fibers is 3.3 percent efficient. The project’s leader, professor Zong Lin Wang says the fibers need to be at least 8 percent efficient to make it to market.
The reflective coating used on the optic fibers multiplies efficiency by up to six times that of traditional film-based zinc oxide solar panels. This jump in efficiency allows for much less material to go into manufacturing while upping energy generation.
Wang and his team have produced fibers up to 20 centimeters in length, noting that “the longer the better because the longer the light can travel along the fiber, the more bounces it will make and the more it will be absorbed.”
If the fibers could be made a meter long and budled into the walls of buildings, rows of fiber would take up little more room than a gutter on the roof, providing electricity without the eyesore of flat panels or the mechanical problems of mounting and maintaining them.
So far, Wang’s team is using traditional quartz fibers. They are exploring the use of polymer fibers to keep costs low as well as an alternate titanium oxide coating that could increase efficiency. Combined with a possible lens array system, the 8 percent efficiency goal could be reached in the next couple years.
Wang doesn’t expect his fibers to replace silicon panels entirely, but he says, “to meet our energy needs, we need all the approaches we can get.”
VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr. Get your discounted early-bird tickets before Nov. 5 at GreenBeat2009.com.
On Monday, ngmoco released worldwide its latest game for the iPhone and iPod Touch: Eliminate Pro. It’s been downloaded 500,000 times so far at a rate of about 25,000 an hour, currently making it the top free app in iTunes. The top paid app, Skeeball, also happens to be affiliated with ngmoco through its Plus+ social game network. ngmoco has had it’s own top paid apps as well, like Rolando, but CEO Neil Young says that Eliminate Pro is more “representive of where we have been moving our business—free applications, that we monetize with in-app purchases.”
Ever since Apple opened up in-app purchases for free apps two weeks ago, it’s been catching on. In general, free apps are downloaded 10 to 20 times as much as comparable paid apps. Now, says Young, the payments can be “built into the compulsion loop of the game.” In other words, developers will get consumers to try their apps and then ask them to pay only once they are hooked.
This model works particularly well for games. Eliminate Pro easily could have been a paid app for which ngmoco could have charged $7.99 or $9.99. It is the first multiplayer first-person-shooter for the iphone. You play against other people on their iPhones around the world, and can connect to the server-based game via WiFi or the 3G cellular data network.
In order to advance or level up, your battle suit needs to be powered, and you need to buy power cells to charge up your suit. Power cells are the currency of the game. The game comes with 30 free power cells, and then you can buy them in increments going from $0.99 to $39.99. You can still play the game without buying power cells, and your suit gets trickle-charged, but some people are really impatient and they’d rather pay to play.
It only takes a small percentage of hardcore gamers who opt to pay for their power-ups to exceed the revenues ngmoco could have made with an all-paid app being bought by fewer people. Ngmoco has three more games it is planning to release before Christmas, and they will all follow the same freemium model. “We think at the end of the day this is the best way to build a big business on the iPhone,” says Young.
Both Eliminate and Skeeball are also part of ngmoco’s Plus+ social gaming network, which allows players to send out game challenges to their friends via push notifications on the iPhone 9the most effective method), as well as Facebook and Twitter. Add the multiplayer aspect to Eliminate, and what we’ve got here is a realtime game on the iPhone. No wonder it’s so popular.
Ngmoco is part of Kleiner Perkins’ iFund portfolio of iPhone startups. The company also announced today that back in July it acquired another iPhone game developer, Miraphonic, creator of the Epic Pet Wars game.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Twitter has a problem: A number of users tweet, then lose interest. It needs a way to reengage them in the site. And tonight it’s starting to test one way: Notifications.
The test is currently only rolled out to a “limited” number of users right now, according to this update. But those who have it should notice an indicator similar to what Twitter does to let you know there are new search results on a query (see a capture above and below). There’s another service that does these types of notifications for new messages also: Facebook. Yes, Twitter for once is taking a playbook from its rival rather than the other way around.
When Twitter was still a young service, it used to auto-update with new tweets as they came in, in realtime. That was one of the first features killed off as the service began to explode in size and was having trouble scaling. FriendFeed implemented a similar live-updating stream before the Facebook acquisition, and that seemed to help boost engagement. Twitter currently offers live updating stream with its widgets.
There has always been some debate as to whether a constantly updating stream is better than notifications. Twitter is clearly now choosing the latter. When FriendFeed first launched it, plenty of users complained that the live updating was moving too fast. Seeing as Twitter is much larger than FriendFeed ever was, that could be an issue. The notification method is probably easier on server load than the constantly moving stream, as well.
As you can see in the screenshot below, these notifications shows up in the titlebar as well (just like with Twitter Search).
The FTC may sue Intel, too – FTCChairman Jon Liebowitz and Commissioners Pamela Jones Harbour and Thomas Rosch are, according to Reuters, in favor of filing a complaint.
“The basic allegation is that Intel entered into relationships with IBM and Dell and H-P designed to stop AMD’s growth,” antitrust lawyer John Harkrider told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s not really a question of the impact of AMD, but on the impact of the competitive process.”
J.P. Morgan drawn into managing industries it had not planned to run. – More than a hundred years ago, John Pierpont Morgan Sr. reorganized bankrupt railroads and took them over. The action was dubbed Morganization.
These days, J.P. Morgan the company owns stakes in dozens of companies employing thousands of employees, the Wall Street Journal reports. As these firms declare bankruptcy, Morgan is being forced to take them over in order to save its original loans, whether it wants to get involved in running Bally Total Fitness or not.
Online music service Bluebeat.com serves up the Beatles. EMI serves up a lawsuit –It’s not clear exactly how much of the Fab Four’s catalog Bluebeat offered up to customers for 25 cents per song, but it was too much. EMI responded fast with a lawsuit. An EMI company spokeswoman said the company “has not authorized content to be sold or made available on Bluebeat.com.”
Microsoft adds another 800 layoffs — Only about 200 of the company’s one-more-thing job reductions will be in and around its Redmond, Wash., headquarters just outside Seattle. The total cuts come to around 5,800, just over five percent of Microsoft’s workforce.
Disney has been rethinking Mickey – The New York Times reports that “Disney has quietly embarked on an even larger project to rethink the character’s personality, from the way Mickey walks and talks to the way he appears on the Disney Channel and how children interact with him on the Web — even what his house looks like at Disney World.”
Part of the project’s momentum: The Chinese government has, after 20 years of negotiations, given its approval of a Disney theme park in Shanghai.
eBay launches an online fashion magazine -The Inside Source, says editorial director Meredith Barnett, “a digital media destination that harnesses the eBay shopping community’s real time buying and selling activity to curate proprietary insights that shape the retail industry and American consumer’s lifestyles.” Below is Meredith’s first (I think) video for the site. Enjoy her untrained enthusiasm before this business burns her out.
We’ve received a great response from up-and-coming smart grid startups for our GreenBeat Innovation Competition. Just a reminder that this is the last chance for you to get your ideas in: The deadline to apply is end of day today, Wednesday, November 4.
Early-bird pricing also expires tonight so be sure to get your tickets now for 30 percent off. We’ve been really fortunate to assemble an amazing lineup of some of the most influential players in the smart grid discussion today: Al Gore, John Doerr, Eric Schmidt, top executives from Cisco, IBM, GE, Oracle and the largest utilities that have received stimulus money.
GreenBeat 2009 is shaping up to be our best conference of the year, so get your early bird ticket now for 30 percent off here. See you November 18 and 19 at GreenBeat 2009!
PayPal has been making a big deal about convincing developers to build cool applications using its global payments platform. Today it added a little more incentive, by announcing the PayPal X Developer challenge, where the creators of the most innovative payments apps will receive a total of $150,000 in cash and waived PayPal transaction fees.
Basically, the PayPal platform is supposed to give companies and developers more flexibility about how they process payments, by opening up a number of new APIs to developers. When the platform was first announced in July, PayPal executives said they wanted their technology to become the “electricity” that powers all online commerce. The initial APIs included the ability to send money, make chained payments, and parallel payments. New APIs announced yesterday include currency conversation, payments to non-PayPal users, and pre-approved payments.
Contest finalists will be chosen by popular vote at the PayPal developer website. Then a team of expert judges — eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, PayPal president Scott Thompson, Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen, and Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha — will choose the winners. The creator of the top app will receive $50,000 in cash and up to $50,000 in waived PayPal fees.
More than 1,000 developers tried the platform during the beta testing period, PayPal says. To illustrate what can be done with the platform, the company put me in touch with one of the beta testers, MedPayOnline. The company offers an online service to help hospitals process payments, and says it has used the PayPal platform to streamline its service. For MedPayOnline, the most significant change may be the ability to collect its fees right away — it charges a transaction fee for each payment that it processes for hospitals, but it previously only got paid once a day, as a lump sum.
“It could cause a significant amount of heartache,” said chief executive Clayton Bain. “Granted, we’re not talking about months here, we’re talking about hours, but within those hours a lot of bad things can happen.”
Bain said the new APIs also make it easier for MedPayOnline to instantaneously make chained payments of its own. So when it’s paid by hospitals, the company’s partners (i.e., companies that package MedpayOnline with other services) get paid right away, too.
ReVolt
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Maybe taking a cue from 
PayPal has been making a big deal about convincing developers to build cool applications using its global payments platform. Today it added a little more incentive, by