TechCrunch
Alibaba Bans Messaging App WeChat, Pushes Weibo Instead
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A fleeting affair between two of China’s biggest tech successes has ended acrimoniously after e-commerce giant Alibaba banned sellers from using Tencent’s popular messaging app, WeChat.
Hours later the e-commerce conglomerate announced a tie-up with microblogging service Sina Weibo — in which Alibaba owns an 18 percent stake.
Alibaba, which is reportedly eyeing a $100 billion IPO later this year, suspended seller-side services using WeChat after a faction of sellers used the messaging app to harass and disturb users, spokesperson Florence Shish said. They also attempted to lure customers outside of the Taobao marketplace and Tmall.com payment process.
“We encourage our sellers to conduct their marketing activities in a safe and legitimate manner,” Shih said.
Tencent could not be reached for comment, but a spokesperson told Bloomberg that it won’t comment on other companies’ affairs.
Alibaba’s Shih said that from August 5 the company plans to allow Weibo users to directly purchase products from its popular online shopfront, Taobao. Sellers will gain access in due course.
Weibo registered more than 49.8 million daily active users between December and March, while, by May, WeChat boasted 194 million monthly active users.
Mark Tanner, founder of Shanghai-based digital research agency China Skinny, said it was inevitable the two tigers, Alibaba and WeChat, would fight for the same prize: China’s mobile commerce crown.
“Weibo competes for many of the same users and usage as WeChat, so Alibaba is obviously going to be pushing Weibo, rather than a competitor,” Tanner said. “We’ll see more and more integration of Weibo and Alibaba’s assets going forward.”
“mCommerce is about to get very exciting in China. “
Amazon Experiments With Its Own Take On Pinterest Called “Amazon Collections”
Amazon has quietly launched its own direct challenger to Pinterest with the debut of a feature called “Amazon Collections.” It’s a more attractive, image-heavy website where consumers can save, share and discover new products by browsing those others have saved. Like Pinterest, users create separate lists, called Collections, such as “Want List” or “Fashion,” for example, and they can find and follow other users who share their same interests through the service.
The company had been testing this feature beginning with a number of bloggers ahead of a larger, public debut, and some of those with early access have already detailed their experiences using the site to put together outfits, or other initial impressions. Some were even paid to be advisors. The earliest references we’re seeing from beta testers writing about the service were posted in late April.
Today, the link to “Your Collections” appears in the list of options when you hover over “Your Account” from the drop-down menu on Amazon.com’s homepage, which gives the service a more prominent placement on Amazon’s site.
Initially, all users start off with a few empty collections (“My Style,” “Want List,” and “Possibilities”) but you can make your own Collections, too. To add an item to a Collection, you simply click on an “Add to Collection” button below the product image on Amazon.com’s website. However, because Collections is a new feature, this button has not yet been rolled out to all the products on the site at this time.
To work around this problem, Amazon provides a “Collect” button that can be dragged to your browser’s bookmarks bar, letting you add any product on Amazon to your collections. This does not appear to be a way to “collect” non-Amazon products at this time, though, as nothing happens when that buttons is clicked off-site.
Users can add descriptions for their saved items, edit or remove them from their lists, or even delete entire collections at once. The service also offers a way for users to browse through default categories like Books, Men’s Fashion, Movies, Music, Women’s Fashion, Featured, and more, all of which are laid out in a Pinterest-inspired image pinboard format where there’s heavy emphasis on the item photo and little other info besides the product name and a “heart” button for favoriting things. In order to see pricing and further product details, you have to click through.
Currently, Amazon Collections’ friending and following model is limited — the site shows the popular items others are pinning to which boards and when they posted those items (e.g. “3 minutes ago”), and you can then click on those users’ names in order to follow them on the service. But there doesn’t seem to be an option for discovering your friends who are on Amazon Collections, such as through address book upload or Facebook integration.
This is not Amazon’s first experiment with providing consumers with an alternative way to shop its site, we should point out. In years past, it has launched a number of other product visualization tools, like its 2008 grid-like storefront Amazon Windowshop, which later arrived on iPad in 2010, or its 2011 dabble in augmented reality via Amazon Flow. It has also worked to make the site more social, through integrations with Facebook for tracking birthdays or figuring out what things Facebook friends want as gifts.
But this is the first time Amazon has gone so far as to boldly duplicate the overall look-and-feel of a competing service, which, to some extent, validates the traction Pinterest is seeing with e-commerce referrals. The move also comes at a time when Pinterest has been beefing up its e-commerce efforts, with new tools for online retailers, including web and mobile product pins, analytics, personalized recommendations, and, just today, price alerts.
Amazon’s entry into more social, visualized product discovery may end up being bad news for another startup, Canopy, which only yesterday debuted a service that makes Amazon shopping more attractive and interactive. The company tells us they even noticed a few senior Amazon engineers using their site around two to three weeks ago and several more since, which prompted them to speed up their launch.
Startup Grind Partners With Google For Entrepreneurs To Aid Global Expansion
Startup Grind, a community for entrepreneur meetups, is partnering with Google For Entrepreneurs to provide global resources and technology. The organization has also added 10 new chapters, bringing its total to 54 chapters in 20 different countries.
Founded in 2010, Startup Grind organizes monthly events for each city’s chapter, featuring speakers such as founders from Pinterest, Atari and Y Combinator. Founder and CEO Derek Andersen says Google For Entrepreneurs will help Startup Grind expand internationally by providing access to distribution, Google technology and financial support. Andersen tells me he is aiming to reach a total of 100 chapters in the next 12 months.
The organization has no shortage of applications to choose from. Andersen tells me Startup Grind has received 350 inbound requests in the last year, of which 30 have been approved. Each accepted applicant becomes the director of a chapter, but must display “Silicon Valley values” first, Andersen says. This is part of his goal to expand the startup culture to other cities around the world.
“In the future, you will not need to be in Silicon Valley to be taken seriously as a tech startup,” he tells me. “I just see so many places with such a high caliber of entrepreneurs.”
The support of startups in other cities and countries is not a foreign concept. Google For Entrepreneurs has partnered with several other global entrepreneurship initiatives such as Campus Tel Aviv, 10,000 Startups and KStartup. But Startup Grind is targeted toward entrepreneurs who aren’t necessarily ready for admission into a startup accelerator or incubator. It is also primarily focused on its monthly fireside chats, of which it has held over 250.
Andersen says the monthly fireside is Startup Grind’s specialty. “We’re world-class at that one thing. We’re really bad at a thousand things, but that one we’re actually pretty good at,” he tells me.
While the application process to become a chapter director is rigorous, anyone can attend Startup Grind’s events. Tickets range from $10 to $20. The new chapters are Paris, France; Istanbul, Turkey; Cape Town, South Africa; Zurich, Switzerland; Manila, Philippines; Fortaleza, Brazil; and Waterloo, Canada; as well as U.S. cities Tampa, Las Vegas and Indianapolis.
All Eyes On Mozilla's Firefox OS As It Launches In Latin America
Firefox OS is Mozilla’s attempt to inject some open competition into the mobile space, which is pretty much a two-horse race at this point, with feature phones slowly losing more and more ground to smartphones based on Android and iOS. Mozilla’s mobile efforts make the move to a key market today, with the official Latin American debut of the Alcatel OneTouch Fire and ZTE Open.
The ZTE Open previously debuted through Movistar in Spain at the beginning of July and Movistar is behind bringing these two devices to Columbia and Venezuela. Pricing for both is at COP 199,900 outright in Columbia (roughly $100 U.S.), and at around $279 for the Alcatel, or $184 for the ZTE in Venezuela on a contract.
For those who haven’t been following, Firefox OS is a smartphone operating system based entirely on open web standards that Mozilla is positioning as a more open alternative for powering low-cost and mid-range devices in high-growth emerging markets. There’s little information available on the progress of Firefox OS’ European debut, but Latin America is arguably the more important market in terms of proving whether or not Mozilla has any hope of gaining a foothold among the ruling giants of mobile.
Firefox is also unique in focusing a big chunk of the OS functionality around search, and eschewing the need for a lot of dedicated apps. The whole point is to show off what a phone can do with web standards, so that’s not surprising, but it’s an interesting sales proposition for a company looking to compete with heavily entrenched app-based ecosystems.
The potential for Firefox OS is that it can provide OEMs and carriers hungry for a more malleable mobile platform an option that doesn’t involve the compromises that come with working with the incumbents in Android and Google. Apple and Google are in a powerful negotiating position, which makes carriers somewhat subservient to the platform providers, whereas as Firefox OS with its open standards gives carriers back a lot of control over the experience.
Now that the phone is available in a few more markets, hopefully we’ll start to see what kind of a dent it can make in worldwide mobile usage stats, if any, and that’ll tell us whether Mozilla’s attempt to challenge the big guys from the bottom up is working.
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