Ideeli: it's Woot.com meets 'The Devil Wears Prada'
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Following in the vein of those rapid-fire, buy-it-while-it-lasts sites, Ideeli.com has launched its luxury shopping site and announced a round of Series A funding.
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You could call it the curse of The  Devil Wears Prada. While the hit movie about a fashion editor  from hell showcases dozens of high-end and mainstream brands,  the sweet smell of success isn&#039;t rubbing off on Wall Street.
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CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos riffs on one craze that the Internet bubble unfortunately could not kill.
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Shoppers visiting HomeDepot.com have been able to search for and view detailed content on home appliances on the site - now, they can order directly from the site as well.
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While Googleâs Jaiku purchase may not seem like an earth-shaking event, some say it is the start of a truly interconnected world, where a chunk of our existence will migrate online.
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Anyone eager to hire a globally known rapper might want to check out the Web site supporting Jay-Z's Hewlett-Packard commercial.
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Dan Farber: "It's not hard to imagine a contextual ad showing up every time you Twitter something. Twitter 'I am drinking beer with friends' and a Budweiser ad shows up. Now imagine the Twitter revolt." Oh yes there would be quite a revolt, a powerless one, unless there was an alternate service we could all switch to and then assuming we could get off our asses and actually switch. Yeah, we're good at screaming, but not too great at acting, here. I'm a bit of a Twit, myself, and I'd find it revolt-worthy if they tried to interrupt or punctuate discourse with product placements, but then Twitter's destiny is, imho, to be acquired by a phone company and sold as a feature that gives users a reason to use one brand of phone over another. Not as a way for advertisers to hitch their "messages" on our discourse. We've seen how well that has (not) worked with advertising on email. Not likely to work much better on Twits. Imagine if Nokia offered a cell phone with Twitter built-in, a checkbox for SMS users (default on?) -- "Do you want to send SMS messages to your buddy list?"  Don't you think the kids would go for that? (Maybe they can already do it, it's likely that I'm that cluelss.)
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Digital technology changes from workhorse to entertainer.
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When Richard Jalichandra became Technorati&#39;s CEO in October, the company, a blogging and Web 2.0 pioneer, had generated enough drama in recent years to rival a soap opera.Founded in 2002 and led by its charismatic founder and CEO David Sifry, Technorati was a central player in the dizzying rise of blogs, serving as bloggers&#39; preferred search engine and embracing the spirit and technology of the Web 2.0 renaissance.But by 2005, many of its most ardent fans had become regular and increasingly disenchanted critics, questioning everything from Technorati&#39;s ability to index and rank blogs properly to its business partnerships and decisions.Last year saw much management upheaval, as Sifry, Vice President of Engineering Adam Hertz, Chief Technologist Tantek Celik, and others left their posts, opening the door to new arrivals, including Jalichandra, who has broad experience with Internet startups and online media. (Sifry remains Technorati&#39;s board chairman.)IDG News Service talked to Jalichandra last week about Technorati&#39;s future and its biggest challenges and opportunities. The following is an edited transcript of the interview, conducted at the Social Networking Conference in Miami Beach, where Jalichandra gave a speech.IDGNS: Is calling Technorati a blog search engine too narrow a definition of what the company does?Jalichandra: Our heritage has been, is and will always be in blog search. We&#39;re one of only two real-time search indexes covering the blogosphere: us and Google. That said, one of the things we found people are doing on our site is trying to discover things that are going on in the blogosphere or follow conversations. So we recently added a discovery layer [called Percolator] on top of the search infrastructure so people can have more of a reading/browsing experience in addition to searching. Percolator&#39;s intention is to find out what&#39;s gaining attention either in blogs or mainstream media.IDGNS: The boundaries between blogs and conventional Web sites have blurred significantly in recent years. How do you tackle that challenge if your mission is to index blogs specifically?Jalichandra: Yes, there&#39;s a huge blur that&#39;s occurring. Mainstream media gets it now, and they realize that they can create a lot more content with participation from the community. Today, a lot of mainstream media articles are written on a blogging platform as opposed to a [traditional] content management system, and it&#39;s an interesting challenge.IDGNS: Has Technorati then become a much broader and more encompassing search engine?Jalichandra: That&#39;s absolutely true. Our audience has more than doubled in size in the last year, and so has the amount of data in our index. We&#39;re definitely collecting and serving a lot more information than we have in the past.[According to comScore, Technorati&#39;s traffic grew from 948,000 unique visitors in December 2006 to 2.8 million in December 2007. By comparison, Google&#39;s Blog Search declined from 398,000 unique visitors to 359,000 in that period, although Google also serves up blog results in other of its engines, like News, Images and general Web search. Meanwhile, Technorati says it currently tracks 112.8 million blogs and more than 250 million &quot;pieces of tagged social media.&quot;]IDGNS: Are the executive changes at Technorati now finished?Jalichandra: In the evolution of any company, and particularly startups, you have different skill sets for different stages. Our founder [David Sifry] is an amazing technologist, product evangelist and visionary, and he realized about a year ago that the business was getting big enough and that he needed professional media expertise, because at the end of the day the ultimate business model will be based around online advertising -- and he didn&#39;t have that background. Then, subsequently, we had some more people join the company with that kind of media expertise and, if anything, we&#39;re going to be throwing gasoline on the fire and adding a lot of people both on the technology side and the media and business sides.IDGNS: Will Technorati seek more funding?Jalichandra: There are some things we want to do to expand for which we might seek additional funds, but the great thing about where the business is today is we&#39;re sitting on a very large audience that allows us to monetize, so we&#39;re starting to see fairly significant increases in revenue, so that will also help fund some of the growth and expansion.IDGNS: Technorati remains independent and privately held. Will it be sold to a larger company?Jalichandra: My plan is always to build a great business, and those things usually take care of themselves when you build a great business. That&#39;s been my experience and what I intend to do now. You build a great company and either you&#39;re a great independent or somebody else finds a nice fit for you.IDGNS: What are some key goals for Technorati in the coming year?Jalichandra: The high-level objectives are to continue to provide a great user experience, and that&#39;s both search and discovery. On the business side, the objectives are simply stated: to build a monetization infrastructure to grow the business from the revenue side.IDGNS: You carry Google ads. Do you sell your own ads as well?Jalichandra: We do have our own sales force, and they&#39;re doing fantastically well. We recently hired a new VP of sales and a new VP of business development, and they&#39;re really working on building up that revenue machinery.IDGNS: What is your international presence?Jalichandra: We have a joint venture with Technorati Japan, and that&#39;s the only dedicated country-specific site. But in the blogosphere, language doesn&#39;t have a lot of barriers. We&#39;ve counted close to 30 languages that appear regularly in the index. So while we don&#39;t have a very big international focus, by the sheer nature of the blogosphere we&#39;re an international company.IDGNS: Any plans to expand your international presence?Jalichandra: Absolutely. The blogosphere knows no borders so eventually we&#39;ll get there, but we&#39;re still a 30-person startup.IDGNS: A lot of the content in social networks is trapped in those sites. Does Technorati feel it is getting locked out of indexing the content on those very popular sites?Jalichandra: It&#39;s not a concern right now. There&#39;s enough people writing content specifically on blogs as opposed to their MySpace or Facebook page. Typically what you find with MySpace and Facebook is that there isn&#39;t a lot of serious blogging. People are just making one or two sentence proclamations and not writing [in-depth] about a subject matter.IDGNS: Do you have any plans to increase the social applications or features within Technorati?Jalichandra: People have Technorati profiles today, and registered users always check out who is linking to them, so that&#39;s one way that a lot of bloggers use Technorati today. In the future, we&#39;re looking certainly at anything we can do to improve the user experience or the community aspects of it.IDGNS: Do you consider social-news sites like Digg and Slashdot competitors?Jalichandra: What people do on Technorati is different from what they do on Digg. Digg is a more participatory news experience, whereas a lot of people that come to Technorati are looking to just follow a conversation happening on the blogosphere about a topic. I have a feeling that, like me, people use both Digg and Technorati for slightly different things.IDGNS: What can Technorati fans expect to see this year in terms of enhancements to the site?Jalichandra: In December we launched topical navigation categories, and because we have such an amazing amount of data we can create very granular topical areas, so I would look for an expansion of topics that end up with their own channels and sub-channels to highlight the conversations going on in those subject areas.From a blogger standpoint, we also launched Blogger Central in December, and we started putting a number of resources there to be a one-stop shop for bloggers to find out what the latest and greatest and the best way to grow your blog and all that, with Technorati and non-Technorati material.IDGNS: Do you feel you&#39;ve got the spam-blog problem under control at Technorati?Jalichandra: It&#39;s never fully under control because sploggers keep finding new, creative ways. It&#39;s not just us. Every search engine has been spammed to death. We feel we do a reasonably good job of it, considering how much spam there is in the blogosphere. It&#39;s a big part of what we do.
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Restart the dot.com Dead Pool Technorati, the comically inept search engine, has redesigned itself again - knocking itself out in the process.â¦
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Several new Broadway-related Web sites have arrived with the potential and purpose of bridging the gap between the obsessed and the genuinely interested.
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An edgy Web 2.0 community site is the key to MIVA's salvation.
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Also: I, robot bartender. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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The PC maker takes to the runway at Macy's with its own brand of fashion show. Will status seekers bite?
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Welcome to the brave new world of interactive Web advertising.
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Servers, e-mail applications, and other less-than-chic combinations of hardware and software typically inhabit the technology realm. Linen is rarely equated with LEDs, while discussing couture along with the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard is almost laughable.However, last Wednesday night at the Boston Museum of Science, the IT industry shed its wonkish ways and demonstrated that it can be in vogue during a fashion show that blended technology with threads. Seamless: Computational Couture featured about 20 designers and design teams from around the world who created garments and accessories influenced by technology.Like its counterparts in New York and Europe, this fashion show featured disc jockeys spinning electronic music, a sports celebrity and, of course, leggy models. And like every fashion show, this iteration featured a runway. A section of the museum with an open floor plan served as the catwalk. Models started their strut on the third floor, took the escalator to the second floor where they sashayed for a bit before boarding another escalator to the ground floor for more sauntering.The colorful fabric, avant-garde designs and crowd of 1,000 all blended harmoniously with technology, making the domain of the IBMs and Googles feel stylish and sexy.&quot;All of the technology is really there,&quot; said Christine Liu, who co-produced the event and helped found the Seamless shows, with this event serving as the third. &quot;The genius behind it is finding the application, the way it&#39;s integrated into the garment, the aesthetics of it, the motivation behind it, and that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re looking for. This sort of composite poetry.&quot;The applications of technology to fashion proved myriad. Featured designs included clothing that powers portable electronic devices, jackets for measuring Wi-Fi signal strength and displaying messages via LED (light-emitting diode) and a ring that applies a tech twist to showy jewelry.Cognoscenti debate whether fashion should place function or form first. Amanda Parkes and Adam Kumpf combine both principles by designing stylish garments that generate their own power. The duo featured a shirt in a dark cooper fabric with an off-the-shoulder neckline, turquoise trim at the neck and what appeared to be decorative buttons around the elbows and waistline. The buttons are actually coin batteries that store voltage created as the wearer moves. The shirt is woven with piezoelectric film fibers around the body&#39;s joints. These fibers convert the mechanical strain created by motion into electrical voltage. The stored power can be used to recharge portable devices, such as an MP3 player.Wi-Fi is used to connect to the Internet, but Jenny Chowdhury, a resident researcher at New York University, also uses the technology to illuminate her line of clothing, 802.11 Apparel. She uses hacked Wi-Fi detectors and LEDs, among other technology, in her designs. The detector picks up signals as a person walks, and rows of LEDs illuminate to indicate the signal&#39;s strength. On the jacket she presented, five horizontal fabric panels with a flower motif ran from the right side of the clothing to its center. The panels, transparent in some sections, allowed the light from strings of blue LEDs to shine through. One glowing row meant a weak signal while a strong signal lit up all five rows.In addition to technology, nature influenced Chowdhury&#39;s design.&quot;Since the beginning of time we&#8217;ve borrowed from the environment to decorate garments,&quot; she said. &quot;Since Wi-Fi is such a large part of the environment now, I thought I would integrate it in that same way. So that&#8217;s why there&#8217;s a floral motif on top of the bars for Wi-Fi.&quot;Fashionistas unanimously support the belief that clothes should make a statement. Barbara Layne&#39;s pair of black linen jackets truly execute on this concept. Messages and graphics are uploaded to the jackets and scrolled across an array of LEDs that are handwoven into the back of the outerwear.The garments can display separate messages individually. However, when magnets in the jackets&#39; cuffs connect, a third, different message scrolls from one jacket to the other. In an homage to weaving and the technological advances it represented, Layne displays the jacket&#39;s electronic components on the back.&quot;We&#39;re exposing the technology because we want to show integration between textiles and technology,&quot; said Layne, who is a professor at Concordia University in Montreal.Rappers sport bling and socialites wear diamonds. Thanks to Markus Kison, technophiles now have their piece of status jewelry. A small horizontal display on his Vanity Ring shows the number of times the wearer&#39;s name has been searched on Google. The ring comes with software that people use to enter their names and link to Google. The ring is updated with the latest tally after it is placed in its accompanying docking station.While this jewelry isn&#39;t on the market, Kison, who studied physics in Germany, cautions that the ring is only for special, Google-worthy people.&quot;So this ring is really about important people,&quot; he said. &quot;It&#8217;s really like this because no one would wear a ring with a thousand hits on it.&quot;Perhaps that is why Manny Delcarmen, a pitcher for the reigning World Series champion baseball team the Boston Red Sox, modeled Kison&#39;s creation.This fashion show may serve as a harbinger of the future, one that combines technology that allows Web access or powers PCs with what people wear to work or a restaurant. After all, Prada designed a cell phone and Marc Jacobs sold iPod holders. Watch the runway to find out.
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Online retailer Woot.com offers Microsoft's digital music player for $129, but "apologizes" to buyers who paid a higher price a month ago, offering them a $10 coupon.