When is a widget not a widget? That's the question I find myself asking this morning as I read about Mpire's official roll out today of 80 new widgets that variously package affiliate shopping and selling data from Amazon and eBay.
Mpire's collection of 75 widgets gives free access to packaged, historical Amazon and eBay shopping trend results across 15 popular categories, such as entertainment, sports, fashion, technology, games and youth/teens. Typically, consumers and eBay sellers have had to pay a monthly fee to find out what's hot or gaining in popularity.
The widgets are for publishers who are Amazon and eBay affiliates, and they are free to publishers. They republish semi-custom content about eBay and Amazon sales (ie, what's hot in certain categories) with the value proposition to publishers being a tool to drive more retail traffic through the affiliated site. The widgets won't be revenue generators for Mpire, Hulett told Techcrunch. The program is more about mindshare than about money.
John Cook at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a longer interview with Huellet and Mpire co-founder Dave Cotter who explains the retail widgets as an evolution in web advertising.
Maybe. Sales tracking data, particularly those that track information about market prices on eBay, are certainly valuable. And anything that increases sales is gravy to members of online retail affiliate networks. But is that kind of information broadly valuable to surfers? I'm not sure. Still the notion that actionable widgets represent an evolution in online ad networks is a compelling one.
Now if Mpire would only work some kind of social shopping component into the mix.
Speaking of social shopping, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning that eBay's acquisition talks with StumbleUpon have heated up, with a potential deal being priced at around $75 million.
Since its very successful purchase and integration of Paypal in in 2002, eBay's acquisition strategy has been a bit mysterious. I never understood what Skype had to do with running an auction house. But I get the potential core use of StumbleUpon-a social discovery engine: driving buyers to other things they might like but would never think to search for.
Discovery has the potential to solve enormous problems for online retail which today works most successfully when buyers know exactly what they are looking for but least successfully when trying to replicate the bricks and mortar experience of browsing and window shopping leading to impulse purchases.
Link Love:
Mobile Social Networks, Don't Go it Alone
Katie Fehrenbacher looks at mobile social network start-up InterCasting (whose consumer service is called Rabble). The company has begun selling business to business application through which: "carriers and web-based social network providers....can plug into Intercasting's gateway via APIs, and the service combines a server software and a handset client"
Buzzlogic Shows Which Bloggers Have Power, and Where
At VentureBeat, Matt Marshall offers an excellent, in-depth look at Buzzlogic's product-an enterprise-class (and enterprise priced) software for tracking the influence of certain blogs and the impact of blog buzz on products and services. Figuring out how to measure this stuff is crucial to the development of social media as an industry and Buzzlogic seems to be way out in front of the curve
Last.fm + YouTube = Last.fm Video!
Kristen Nicole at Mashable tells us about plans by the UK social music discovery company Last.FM to launch a video service this week.
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