TechCrunch
Wish, The App For Logging What You Want, Launches A Complementary Gifting Feature
Well, folks, it’s September. The holiday gift giving season is ON!
Wish, the mobile shopping app that lets users create lists of items they would like to purchase later, has launched Gifting, a feature that enables others to purchase and ship products to their friends. It draws from users’ existing wishlists and uses them to predict other items they would like. It’s a frazzled gift giver’s dream.
Gifting has been part of the plan since the inception of the app, Wish CEO Peter Szulczewski said, which makes every bit of sense, since it’s the natural other half to wishlist creation. At this point, Wish is seeing half a million people on the app daily, at an average session length of 29 minutes.
According to Szulczewski, sending presents was already a use case among Wish users prior to the feature’s launch this week. In looking at transactions, the team realized that people were requesting different shipping addresses for their purchases in order to send items to their friends.
In addition to allowing users to create and share targeted wishlists (the easiest way to get it right), Gifting also predicts items that friends most want and uses social integration to notify users on their friends’ birthdays.
“We use collaborative filtering in the same way that Amazon.com uses it,” Szulczewski said. “People that buy this will also buy these items.”
As Szulczewski explained, the Wish demographic skews toward the young and female. Gifting is a way to access an older demographic, like fathers who don’t really know what to buy their daughters, nieces, or granddaughters. While there are a slew of gifting apps out there — like Giftly for gift cards, the locally-focused Yiftee, Karma, and Wrapp — the fact that Wish draws on pre-existing knowledge of the recipient’s likes ups the giver’s odds of nailing it.
Wish has been bulking out its features this summer, having launched Wish Closet in late July to provide users a platform to resell their clothing. The plan is to grow internationally. Currently 55% of usage comes from North America, although there are growing communities in Europe and Latin America, which Szulczewski said present huge opportunities to grow the brand.
Microsoft Extends Its Trade-In Program: $200+ For Your “Gently Used” iPhone 4S, 5
Microsoft wants to take your Apple product off your hands, today expanding its trade-in programs to allow owners of dated iPhone hardware to cash in their now-passé electronics.
If you own an iPhone 4S or 5 that is “gently used” and not much worse, Microsoft will offer you no less than $200 for it. The kicker? The funds come in the form of Microsoft Store credit, so you are trading in your Apple hardware for the chance to buy Microsoft goods.
What does Microsoft want? That you drop that iPhone off with them and wander out with a Surface 2 pre-order or a Lumia Windows Phone handset. Microsoft has cash and wants market share; this is a natural outgrowth of those two facts.
Microsoft also has in place a deal that will grant store credit for iPads. In short, if you have an Apple device that Microsoft competes with – recall that Microsoft doesn’t build PCs that are not tablet-based, through its Surface line – it wants to buy it from you and get you onto its own hardware.
In a way the move is ballsy: Microsoft is betting its own money that you will be content with its wares after a long stint on Apple silicon. And it is paying to make the wager. Precisely what Microsoft intends to do with all its accumulated Apple hardware remains opaque.
Microsoft is in the process of purchasing Nokia’s handset business, and recently announced new Surface hardware that replaces its first-generation attempts at OEM supremacy. Expect more moves like this to support Microsoft’s yet-nascent devices business.
Top Image Credit: brett jordan
Former Microsoftie And Googler Lucovsky Leaves VMware For New Project, No Word On Chairs Thrown
VMware VP of Engineering Mark Lucovsky is leaving the virtualization giant for a ‘new chapter’ he’s referring to as ‘#nine’ on Twitter. Lucovsky has been with VMware for around four years and before that held positions at Google and Microsoft.
VMware told GigaOm that “during his more than four years at VMware, Mark Lucovsky has been an important contributor to the company’s developer efforts as a Vice President of Engineering, including his work to help establish VMware’s Cloud Foundry which is now part of Pivotal. We thank Mark for his contributions and wish him well.”
At Google, Lucovsky served as an engineering director working on its API strategies. Since he went there from Microsoft, where he worked on Windows NT, a lot of people read into his hiring as a harbinger of a ‘Google OS’. Lucovsky spent 16 years at Microsoft working on a variety of projects including the ‘open web’ project HailStorm, which never quite materialized. He was awarded the title of ‘Distinguished Engineer’.
Though he worked on many projects during his Microsoft tenure, the most memorable anecdote of his career there undoubtedly came when he told CEO Steve Ballmer that he was going to leave for Google. A statement given in a corporate poaching case between Microsoft and Google back in 2004 paints a vivid picture:
Prior to joining Google, I set up a meeting on or about November 11, 2004 with Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss my planned departure….At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: “Just tell me it’s not Google.” I told him it was Google.
At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.” ….
Thereafter, Mr. Ballmer resumed trying to persuade me to stay….Among other things, Mr. Ballmer told me that “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.”
Lucovsky only used the cryptic hashtag to indicate what he might be up to next, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled for more. It is doubtful any chairs were thrown when Lucovsky turned in his notice after 5 years with VMware.
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