6 Can’t-Miss Stories: The Rise of Social Shopping, Massive Tech Deals, and How To Squat at AOL HQ
Since we’re coming off a long weekend, here’s a little amuse-bouche to start off your hectic work week. Our latest round-up stories from the past few weeks that you might have missed…
1. Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL
We all know startups inspire their employees to work long hours and give their all. They attract creative improvisers and people who will go to crazy lengths to get their businesses off the ground. Well, 20 year-old entrepreneur Eric Simons just one-upped them all: he spent two months squatting — undetected! — at AOL’s Palo Alto campus, eating the food, using the gym, sleeping on the couches, and building his startup. You can’t make these things up… Read more >
2. A Massive Few Weeks in Tech Deals
The tech industry’s equivalent of the rapture – the Facebook IPO – is behind us. For those of us left on earth, there were lots of other deals of note in the past few weeks. First off, enterprise software giant SAP snapped up Ariba, a cloud-based spend, invoice and payment-management company, for $45/share, valuing Ariba at $4.3 billion. Following on their acquisition of SuccessFactors, the deal is the latest indication that even those companies most entrenched in the traditional business software model are gearing up to be major movers in the cloud. Then, there was Pinterest’s $100 million funding round, lead by – interestingly enough – Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten. And of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our own milestone this past Thursday as we team up with BazaarVoice to bring the power of customer insights and social commerce to the next level.
- SAP to buy Ariba, boosts cloud bet
- Rakuten CEO on the $100M Pinterest Round: We Want Pinterest Users to Pin Images and Buy Using Our ID
- Bazaarvoice to acquire PowerReviews for $151M
3. Nearly half of consumers to be “social shoppers by 2021″
In news from across the pond, Barclays research just released a report on the rise of the social shopper. We wouldn’t say there are any truly earth-shattering insights, but it’s yet more validation of a trend that we’ve been driving for years. Quoth Barclays’ Head of Retail and Wholesale: “When someone you know and trusts makes a recommendation it’s extremely powerful and we’ve seen that the social shopper isn’t afraid to express online how much they want, love or dislike a product or service. This in turn creates a feedback loop on a product or brand. As more people post reviews, more people read them and, in turn, they give their own feedback which is picked up by a new group of consumers. Retailers should be exploring ways to tap into these communities in order to create more personalised shopping experiences”. Why, yes! We couldn’t agree more. Read More >
