Some 15 companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal plan to jointly work on a standard for blocking phishing e-mails by verifying that they come from legitimate companies. It seems obvious that trusted, legitimate companies could come together to do this, but it’s only started happening in the last 18 months.

DMARC.org – or the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance – is a new white-list system will be available for use across the Internet.

The other companies in the DMARC working group are AOL, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, American Greetings, LinkedIn, and e-mail security providers Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path, and Trusted Domain Project.

The move follows an announcement in November that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Agari were authenticating emails from Facebook, YouSendIt, and other e-commerce companies and social networks.

DMARC said the anti-phishing initiative has actually been going on for the last 18 months.

According to Google, about 15 percent of all e-mail comes from members of DMARC, but by published their DMARC records, these records can not be domain spoofed. This makes the anti-phising group much more effective at stopping criminal gangs from using phasing to dupe unsuspecting users.

DMARC.org plans to submit the DMARC specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardisation.

So perhaps we’ll start to see the ending of phishing once and for all.

Y Combinator alum Curebit, an online customer referral platform that leverages social media for “word-of-mouth” advertising, has just raised $1.2 million in funding. The investors include 500 Startups, Karl Jacob, Auren Hoffman, Dharmesh Shah, Gordon Tucker, Alex Lloyd of Accelerator Ventures, and others.

The funding will be used for continued product development and a slight expansion to the team involving three new hires (two developers, one designer) to the company’s now five-person outfit.

Curebit, for those unfamiliar, works to optimize the referral systems for eCommerce platforms and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies (See previous coverage here).

The startup offers a few different ways for businesses to take advantage of its tools, the first being a post-purchase campaign that allows customers to share the details of the purchase on Facebook, Twitter or via email, as soon as the transaction completes.

“We figured when’s a better time than when you’ve basically voted with your wallet, saying ‘hey, I like this store,’” explains Curebit Co-founder Allan Grant.

Companies can also use Curebit’s technology to build standalone referral pages that are accessible at any time, or in one-off campaigns meant to further the reach of existing referral programs.

The startup says it now around 1,000 customers, including everything from smaller, e-commerce stores to larger customers like Giggle.com and a newly signed (but unannounced) top 20 retailer and a consumer foods company. The technology is also available as a plugin for 14 platforms, including Shopify and Magento.

By leveraging social media for the word-of-mouth referrals, Curebit’s customers see higher clicks and conversions than in traditional campaigns, where, for example, customers may have come in by way of ads. The referrals are like personal recommendations from friends, and often include a benefit, like a discount for the new customer, or for both the new customer and the friend who’s doing the referring.

When either the customer or the friend gets a deal via the referral, Curebit is seeing 15%-25% share rates. When the deal is double-sided (both people benefit), share rates are 45%-65%. Meanwhile, only 3% share using the standalone share button. Curebit also sees 1 to 5 clicks per share, depending on the product.

More unique products seem to do better than commodity products, notes Grant. And Curebit’s conversion rates are generally 2 to 3 times higher than traditional methods, and, in some cases, have been as high as 30%. Even better, Curebit’s referrals pay off in terms of dollars spent at checkout, too.

“The other thing we’ve seen consistently on just about every single site is that people spend more,” says Grant. “The average order amount is higher, and it’s not just higher based on how much the discount is – it’s higher even beyond that, even when you take the discount out.”

It’s the personal nature of the Curebit-powered recommendation that’s freeing people up to spend, it seems.

Exclusive - E-commerce platform company BigCommerce has set up a $2 million fund for developers. With the launch of the fund, the Sydney, Australia-based company aims to sway third-party developers into submitting their integration and application ideas for Web, mobile or desktop apps that make use of the BigCommerce API.

Caveat: investments in successful entries are capped at $20,000 per project.

According to BigCommerce, applications will be assessed on “their ability to drive more traffic to stores running on BigCommerce as well as their ability to integrate BigCommerce with existing systems and applications already used by business owners”.

BigCommerce currently integrates with more than 100 applications, including Facebook, eBay, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, SurveyMonkey and more.

@WalmartLabs, the digital technology division of the world’s largest retailer, is launching a contest today which uses crowdsourcing techniques to determine which items the company should stock in its stores and on its website. The contest, called Get on the Shelf, will be heavily promoted by all of Walmart’s social media presences, including Facebook, Google+ and, most importantly, Twitter.

The effort is meant to be just a “fun experiment,” but for companies itching to get their products placed on Walmart’s shelves – real or virtual – something like this could be their big break. Previously, getting products into a retail store has been at the sole discretion of the store’s buyer. This contest will eliminate that barrier by giving anyone and everyone a chance to have their products chosen through an online selection process.

For consumers, the idea is to vote on the products you would want to see sold at Walmart via the Get on the Shelf URL, which features videos of the contest applicants’ inventions. Any product in any category currently covered by Walmart is eligible. There’s also, of course, a bunch of fine print. The contest debuted a sneak peak a few weeks ago, and now already has over 60 entries, including a new hot sauce, games, an iPad pillow, pet items and more.

Videos submissions are open until Feb. 22, then the first round of voting will be March 7-April 4. Finalist voting will be April 11-April 24. From the three top contestants, a grand prize winner will be chosen. (The contest is U.S.-only.)

This sort of crowdsourced buying experiment is possible because of @WalmartLabs, which operates something like a startup within the much larger organization that is Walmart. The division is also now home to a number of acquired startups itself, including  Kosmix, OneRiot, Grabble and most recently, Small Society. Over the holidays, @WalmartLabs launched the “Shopycat” Facebook app, one of the first consumer-facing product launches from the group.

Thumbtack, which operates an online community marketplace where people can easily list and book local services, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding, TechCrunch has learned. The round was led by Javelin Venture Partners, with MHS Capital and venture capitalist Tim Draper participating.

Founded in 2009, Thumbtack aims to “make hiring a service professional as easy as it is to buy a book on Amazon.com”. It’s up against startups like Redbeacon and OpenChime, among others.

It seems users have had no trouble finding their way to their website. Thumbtack says a new user has signed up every minute of every day for the last six months, on average.

The company also says 240,000 local merchants (carpenters, life coaches, wedding photographers, babysitters, math tutors, makeup artists and whatnot) have listed on Thumbtack.com to date, or roughly half as many registered merchants one can find on review site Yelp.

Thumbtack currently has 8 employees but plans to use the additional capital to hire more.

The question of how music will be distributed in a year, five years, or ten years, is an open one. The landscape has been altered so drastically over the last ten years that the only thing that seems sure is that major changes will continue to come.

Bandcamp hopes to be part of those changes, and they’re showing healthy growth: the site pulled in a million dollars in sales just in December. Not, of course, much of a challenge to the sudden empire of iTunes and the inverted economics of streaming services of Spotify — but the Bandcamp approach to the distribution question is building legitimacy.

The post commemorating this one million in one month mark also has some interesting stats. They started tracking referrers and found that quite a few people were actually coming to Bandcamp after searching for a way to pirate an artist’s music. Bandcamp popped up in the search results, they followed the link, and ended up paying for the music instead of pirating it.

Gabe Newell of Valve has said that piracy is a failure of service. In the case of someone searching for and finding a torrent or zip of an artist’s music, the failure is a failure to interject with a legitimate option. It’s helpful that Bandcamp offers torrent and FLAC downloads, as these tend to snag pirates looking for those very things. Legitimate services need to cater to pirates not because they must lower themselves to the level of criminals, but because that is the price of failing to address the needs of users.

Someone wants to download some tracks by an artist. They search, and one above the other are results from a torrent site, and the official site — perhaps on Bandcamp, perhaps with a pay-what-you-like deal. Hardened indeed must be the pirate who won’t even pay a buck to support the artist. And at that point the legitimate distributor has done what they can, and although it was a lost sale, it was also an extra opportunity. Making your product available when your customer wants it, and for a price they are willing to pay, are necessary and often sufficient for a sale.

Google can help here, though Bandcamp and others need to help themselves on discoverability as well. Bandcamp works as the de facto distribution stream for a number of artists, and as it grows in legitimacy it can be made more reliably part of the curated search results. There’s no reason why Google shouldn’t detect the “Sufjan Stevens” part of a “Sufjan Stevens album torrent free” search and provide some relevant information — not sponsored, mind you, just relevant — like the official fan page, Facebook page, and Bandcamp page.

Of course, even the current situation is in flux. Independent payment systems like Dwolla and Square might spell doom for the likes of Bandcamp, though they are not strictly in the same business. But the two (that is, specialized payment and distribution networks, and spot transaction processors) are as likely to complement each other as they are to clash. The media distribution engines of the last 10 years, indeed the last 50, are leaving a large vacuum behind them. Think of the vacuum that will be left by Paypal and Visa.

You want the best price on things you buy second hand, but finding out how much you should pay is a hassle. Removing this friction from a lucrative part of the purchase funnel is the goal of Priceonomics. The first startup out of the winter 2012 Y Combinator batch, Priceonomics has crawled the web to compile its next-generation price guide. It launches today featuring 10 million prices on 50,000 products, and plans to expand across verticals soon.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you want to buy a TV on craigslist, a bike on eBay, or something from the TechCrunch holiday gift guide. Visit the site and search for the product. Priceonomics returns an estimate for how much you should pay for it along with a range of prices it’s crawled. It then displays listings of people selling it. Filter by keyword, proximity, and price to narrow the results. There’s also value to sellers, as they can check how they should be pricing their own products.

Most listings I clicked had already been sold, but the site is designed for you to discover what you should pay, not necessarily where to buy. If you can wait a little while, enter your email address and Priceonomics notifies you when the product is posted at a great price.

There’s also browsable price guides for specific product types. You could click Computers->Apple->MacBook to discover you should pay about $1000 for this used laptop, or at least somewhere between $682 and $1,318. Currently the site features 71 product types across categories like transportation, cameras, computers, phones, and TVs, but more are on the way.

Used product price guides aren’t new, especially for cars, but Priceonomics does it right. I love how quick and clean the site is. It’s so refreshing compared to slogging through Google product search results. My only gripe is that I have to click a listing to find out if it’s already been sold. With time I’m sure the founding team of CEO Michael Flaxman, CTO Omar Bohsali CTO, and Rohin Dhar will sort this out and highlight active listings.

Because it fits into the purchase funnel at the stage where people are clearly trying to buy something, the site has big monetization potential. Featured product guides for brands, sponsored search results, traditional display, lead generation, and affiliate links would all work.

While the rest of the Winter YC class will launch soon, Priceonomics made a smart push to get out the door today. It may have missed the pre-holiday shopping blitz, but there’ll be plenty of people looking to spend cash gifts or find out whether they should return a new product and buy used instead.

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Evolver.fm Editor Eliot Van Buskirk, who has covered and occasionally anticipated music and technology intersections for under 15 years for CNET, Wired.com, McGraw-Hill, and The Echo Nest. He plays a bass, rides a bicycle, and lives in Brooklyn.

Once upon a time, we bought our concert tickets from a good old-fashioned cashier at the local box office. As time went on, we took some of the work out of the hands of the cashier and started buying our tickets at home — on the Web. (For a fee, mind you.) And if what we’re seeing today is any indication, the next step in the evolution of the box office? Facebook.

Ticketfly’s Facebook ticketing app, which launched last week, aims to boost sales by letting people know when their friends buy a ticket. The big idea is to complete the ticket-buying circle — from finding out about a show to buying a ticket — without ever sending the Facebook faithful outside the confines of their favorite social network.

This could quickly become a big part of the ticketing market. Facebook’s artist pages are putting up old-style MySpace numbers as fans increasingly look to Facebook for artists they already know, and others they want to learn about. On top of that, many music services send, or “scrobble,” listening activity to the social network. All of that musical activity makes Facebook a smart place to sell tickets.

This marks the first time users will be able to buy show tickets on a Facebook artist page without being funneled to an external site, such as Ticketmaster, says Ticketfly, which was a Facebook Connect launch partner. Artists (or their people) install the app on their Facebook artist pages, where it relies on Facebook Connect log-ins to authenticate users.

If the band (or whoever else controls the app) activates its “Facebook purchase amplifier,” and you buy a ticket, your friends can find about it, perhaps to join you at the show or catch the same band somewhere else.

“It took a couple of minutes to load the purchase app,” said Eboni Jones, who does marketing and communications for Parish Entertainment Group, a beta partner of the service. “When you use the Ticketfly marketing tool’s ‘Facebook Purchase Amplifier,’ your ticket sales definitely increase — and you leave it to the fans.”

“The fans help sell tickets, which pretty much frees you up to work on other aspects of your business,” she continues in the above video (via Ticketfly). “We’ve been able to sell tickets out and we’re just able to manage our inventory a heck of a lot better.”

This news comes on the heels of a big acquisition of consumer analysis firm BigChampagne by ticketing and promotion behemoth Live Nation Entertainment of the media. Like Ticketfly’s new Facebook integration, this purchase will almost certainly help Live Nation Entertainment (formerly Ticketmaster and Live Nation) sell more tickets by understanding what people are up to online.

“This acquisition strengthens our commitment to be the leader in Artist-to-Fan data,” said Live Nation Entertainment CEO Michael Rapino in a statement. “BigChampagne’s expertise will accelerate our mission to drive deeper fan engagement throughout Live Nation driven by world class data technology.”

Meanwhile, Ian Hogarth, CEO of Spotify’s launch partner, Songkick, told us that he anticipates a boost in his company’s generation of ticket leads to sellers such as Live Nation and Ticketfly.

“What’s so exciting to me is the level of seamlessness,” said Hogarth. “In a single click, Songkick will scan all the music in your Spotify playlist and build you a personalized calendar [from] every single concert in your city.”

Spotify, of course, was the biggest launch partner of Facebook’s new music initiative… which also relies on Facebook Connect.

The future of ticket sales is already happening. It’s all about promoters knowing what you like based on the music you, and everyone you know, and everyone else, are listening to; pushing tickets through friends and artist pages over social networks you’re already using to share cat pictures and political statements; and, if all goes as planned, selling even more tickets when your friends see all the fun you’re planning.

Regardless of what fans might think of sharing their ticket purchases with friends, or having listening habits used to pitch stuff, this can only be a great thing for artists, who notoriously rely much more on box office receipts than they used to. As for music fans, once again, social butterflies — the people who are most comfortable with sharing activities and watching their friends’ activities — stand to benefit the most, as the market shapes itself around their habits.

Despite its struggles of late, Netflix is still one of the most popular sources when it comes to online streaming of movies and TV shows. (Although things may change if it’s acquired by Verizon.) For many of us, the Netflix queue is our go-to source for bookmarking films that we’d like to watch at a later date.

One new startup, called Plexus Entertainment, wants to take the Netflix formula and apply it to a broader scale. In the big picture, Plexus’ goal is to connect films and filmmakers with their audiences, so to do that, they’ve launched “Watch It” in public beta to allow users to keep track of movies they’re interested in, where those movies are playing, and to be proactively notified of all the different ways to view those films. Huzzah!

Essentially, it’s a Netflix queue for movies on the Web — for both major studios and indy productions — as Watch It allows users by way of a simple search to find the quickest way to watch their favorite movies, whether they be in theaters, on DVD, Blu-ray, online, or on demand.

Of course, to build this sort of universal bookmarking system for digital content, Watch It is pushing beyond simply being a standalone site, as it is today launching “Watch It” buttons across film sites, including video portals, the websites of filmmakers and film studios, social media pages, fan sites, and industry trade publications.

From theaters to streaming movies on demand from Amazon Instant Video, VUDU, and iTunes, the Watch It button enables users to create and maintain personalized queues of movies they want to see, with a range of tools for sorting and filtering those movies that they’ve queued. Watch It is also leveraging social networking by allowing users to share their movie choices with friends via Facebook Connect.

While there are umpteen different buttons spread across the Web that allow sharing and self-expression around digital content, Plexus Founder and CEO David Larkin sees Watch It as a first for the movie industry. From the business side, Larkin sees the Watch It button as a potentially valuable direct marketing tool, as Watch It users will be able to receive alerts when movies they are interested in become available on their selected services.

Plexus will also be able to mine and aggregate (non-personally identifiable) consumer data to provide some valuable analytics for movie marketers and promoters. Having worked in the film industry as both a producer and director (he produced “Made In China”, which won the Audience Award at SXSW), Larkin says that the industry remains a fragmented beast, and filmmakers still have no real way of finding out whether their films are reaching their intended audiences — especially for indy producers and filmmakers.

So, for media partners, Larkin thinks that an easily install-able and embeddable button can be a great tool for reader engagement, as well as a source of commerce, whereas for the film industry itself, Watch It could become a unique CRM-like platform.

Traditionally, when reading an online movie review, for example, there’s been no easy way to create action based on that interest, so embedding a Watch It button in a movie review, on blogs or other related content sites, allows readers to click and view all the available options, across digital platforms — or to go buy tickets to see the movie in theaters. Of course, the likelihood is that you won’t be able to watch the whole movie right then and there, which is where the Watch It queue comes in, allowing you to watch a trailer, but save full viewing for later in “wish lists”. The site will then send you email notifications when a movie has transitioned from theaters to Netflix or On-demand, as the app is updated throughout the movie’s release cycle.

In terms of future applications, as one might imagine, Larkin sees potential for the Watch It model in music, TV, books, video games, and beyond.

Larkin said that film industry execs have expressed anxiety over the Watch It formula potentially cannibalizing ticket sales — something that scares the bajeebus out of a stodgy industry. But the CEO is convinced that his model will put Watch It in “the catbird seat” to watch as legacy cash flows transition to a home theater experience, where channels like Blu-ray players have higher profit margins. Inevitably, he says, the industry is going to move fully into an IP-delivered framework, which certainly sounds like something you’d hear from Reed Hastings.

The truth is, when you hear about an indy film at, say, a film festival, there’s a lot of initial buzz created around the movie. Of course, it may then take months for the film to reach theaters, and in the meantime, it loses the attention of most of its audience. Filmmakers have to start, then, from scratch when marketing their film, and it if its operating on an indy budget, there’s likely not much allocated for marketing spend.

Whether or not “Watch It” wins the day is not important, but certainly services that offer consumers better ways to stay up to date on a film’s release cycle and give them one-click tools by which to queue and stream their favorite content is a no-brainer.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Couponing has been around forever, but the popularity of digital offers, daily deals, and group buying is fairly new. We’ve gone through the honeymoon period, watched the meteoric rise of Groupon, its overvaluation, IPO — and thankfully, through it all, we’ve seen increasing scrutiny on the space, especially over just how profitable daily deals actually are for local businesses.

The debate has raged over the daily deal model’s clever repackaging of old ideas and just how valuable the Groupon model is as an advertising mechanism for local merchants. Rocky was probably a little overzealous in saying that Groupon is poised for collapse, but there is no doubt that there are holes in its business model, just as there is no doubt that there are upsides to the model as a whole, both as an advertising channel and a tool for customer acquisition and retention.

In the end the scrutiny is essential, just as it is to find a middle ground — falling into the extremes of “daily deals are the best!” or “the daily deal industry needs to die!” misses the point that offers and daily deals can work, but only if they’re structured correctly. Otherwise, they can go wrong and go wrong quickly.

As Arash pointed out in his post this summer, the horror stories over daily deals often come from merchants who negotiate poor deal terms, don’t track redemption or customer spend, and don’t understand the economics of running a daily deal. Dr. Dholakia’s thorough analysis puts some numbers to the current flux in the daily deal industry, pointing out that 72.8 percent of merchants indicated openness to considering a different daily deal site.

Merchants are open to trying your site’s model if you can prove that you have their best interest in mind and can structure deals that can help them retain customers and offer them more than a simple 50/50 split of profits. That’s how they can differentiate their value propositions.

There may not be a cure-all model, but for the space to remain healthy going forward, it’s important to pose some prescriptions for merchants on how to structure daily deals so that they can get the most out of them. It’s an important conversation to have, and I hope you’ll weigh in.

The Dealmix, a new daily deal aggregator and deal map founded by former Googlers to bring “a bit of organization and simplicity to the wild and wooly deal market”, has created an infographic for local businesses on how to design profitable deals and make them work.

Check it out and let us hear your feedback. Let’s make this industry better.

Following Radiohead into the wild world of micropayments, comedian Louis CK is offering his latest concert film, Live At The Beacon Theatre, as a DRM-free download or stream for $5.

Once payment is tendered, downloaders can both stream and download the movie twice. Once those four chances are used up you have to pay again, although because the MP4 file is DRM-free there is nothing stopping you from watching again and again, projecting it on a building across the street, or making a tiny flip book of Louis CK excerpts. However, Louis does ask that you not “torrent” his film:

While I’m sure this is already available on the pirate boards, it’s a bold step for a comedian to break with the traditional models of distribution and it’s a testament to CK’s understanding of his young, plugged-in audience. Given that his eponymous television show is probably the best thing on TV since Freaks & Geeks and that his comedy is top notch, it behooves you to check it out.

Today, December 10th, Amazon is offering a very special deal you’re going to love and your local brick-and-mortar retailer is going to hate. Use its PriceCheck mobile app and get 5% off your purchase, up to $5 at a time, as many as 3 times. Why the discounts to use PriceCheck? The app is designed to get you to visit local shops, try out a product, submit valuable pricing data to Amazon, leave without buying anything, and make your purchase on Amazon instead.

Actually scanning an in-store item isn’t technically required to get the discount, though Amazon doesn’t make this clear at first. The webpage for the deal states “Get a 5% discount just by checking a price”, but you can check a price by typing in a product’s name from home without submitting a local price. If you read the terms it says “In-store price submission and location confirmation are optional.”

Amazon explains the local pricing data helps it offer competitive prices. That’s exactly right. Because it offers such a wide range of products and makes the real money from hooking users on its shopping experience, Amazon can afford to lower its prices to beat out brick-and-mortars. PriceCheck helps it identify which products it needs to put on sale, and the one-day discount will get shoppers used to looking on Amazon for these deals.

Now, I’m no luddite. Efficient technology’s march over old models is natural and inevitable. But using shoppers to gather reconnaissance on its offline enemies is pretty aggressive. It also promotes show-rooming where users get the benefit of checking out a product in person, but then neglect the shops that pay overhead to offer that service.

There’s little that brick-and-mortar stores can do to stop this. If they berate people for scanning their products with PriceCheck, they’ll just push them right into Amazon’s clutches. Shoppers will have to decide whether to take the discount, or support their local mom-and-pop or even their local Walmart which at least keeps jobs nearby. But in this economy, most people’s allegiance is to their wallet.

On Friday, a little-known Swedish ecommerce payments company called Klarna raised a massive $155 million round from DST and General Atlantic. Its previous round was a scant $9 million in May, 2010 when it was discovered by Sequoia Capital and superstar partner Michael Moritz took a board seat (yes, he actually flies to Sweden for the board meetings). “This is the public financing of twelve years ago,” Moritz tells me, “it is just done privately.”

Klarna’s mega-round fits into a growing trend with successful internet companies that build out a substantial business on a few million dollars, then don’t take on any more money until they do a huge round. Examples include Dropbox, which recently raised $250 million after only raising $7 million before, and Airbnb with its $112 million round (Sequoia was an early investor in both of these as well).

These are also starting to be called shovel-in rounds because investors shovel in the money once it’s clear the company is a winner. The buyers in these “pre-public investment rounds” are the same investors who would have previously bought IPOs, funds like General Atlantic, DST, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Tiger, and Wellington Capital. It is global capital chasing returns.

Klarna could have gone public. It is on track to double revenues to about $120 million this year, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski estimates. And it’s been profitable on a pre-tax basis since 2005. It has 600 employees and clears $2.5 billion worth of e-commerce transaction through its payment system.

“I think overall it is better for businesses to stay private because you have more latitude,” says Moritz, “more freedom. The inevitable mistakes made during the hurly burly of developing a business are not penalized by people who do not understand it.” Moritz is a patient guy. He knows Sequoia will get its return down the line.

The company makes it easier for consumers to complete e-commerce transactions by allowing them to pay after they receive the goods instead of when they order them. It solves the abandoned shopping cart problem. Using sophisticated machine learning and other techniques, Klarna tries to figure out the risk of somebody not paying. It essentially extends consumers credit by paying the merchants. Then the consumers pay Klarna. “We want to separate buying from paying,” says Siemiatkowski. “Paying creates a lot of friction.

The only information a consumer needs to provide are her names, address, and email—not even a credit card number. The fraud rate is very low, says the company, because they use all sorts of data—from traditional credit checks to what items you are buying to how you enter your email address—to assess risk. The key thing about Klarna’s model is that the first purchase is always the riskiest. Once a consumer has paid Klarna for a purchase there is a pretty good chance they will pay again.

The service started in Sweden (where 20 percent of all e-commerce sales already go through Klarna), then spread to Norway, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and most recently Germany (where it is growing at more than 1,000 percent annually). “When we started it, people said it was a Swedish phenomenon,” recalls Siemiatkowski, “then a Nordic phenomenon, then a Nordic-German phenomenon. We think this can work in basically any geography.”

But Klarna can become a multi-billion dollar company if it just conquers the rest of Europe. “The greater European theater is obviously an enormous market,” notes Moritz. “For American companies, Europe, despite its importance, is always a second act. For Klarna, Europe is its most important market, and that flavors everything.”

And its European roots may serve as an advantage as it expands there. Moritz adds: “Weirdly enough, payments is an easier business in Europe than U.S. because of the EU. Once sanctioned in one member state, you have freedom to roam elsewhere.” Whereas in the U.S. there are state-by-state laws and regulations to contend with.

Finally, Klarna takes over the whole payments stack. Its fees are not split up between issuing banks, payment gateway providers, and the digital wallet. It delivers all of those services and keeps all the payment fees itself, which can vary between 1.5 percent and 2.5 percent.  But the fees are not so important because Klarna promises to actually boost sales by removing barriers to buying at checkout. Merchants who adopt Klarna end up seeing as much as half of their checkouts paid through the service, as opposed to 5 percent to 10 percent for other “alternative” payment services like PayPal.

This week at the Le Web conference in Paris, Foodie.fm will be formally launching its personalized social shopping platform for groceries. The Finnish startup basically aims to better inform shoppers about the food they buy, and help retailers communicate directly about the groceries they sell.

At the core of Foodie.fm is a recommendation system, which the company says relies on patent-pending technology, that learns from a user’s eating and purchasing habits, and suggests recipes and groceries that match his or her ‘taste profile’. The system takes into account personal preferences – think food allergies or intolerance, budgetary restrictions and predilections.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

Amazon this morning announced the fresh availability of an Italian-language Kindle, and the opening of an Italian Kindle Store, offering customers over 16,000 Italian-language Kindle books. The same thing is happening in Spain, obviously with a Spanish-language Kindle and a custom Spanish Kindle Store (over 22,000 titles).

In addition, Amazon announced that authors and publishers in both countries are now able to make their books available in the new Amazon.es and Amazon.it Kindle Stores using its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform (Spanish / Italian).

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

According to eGaming Review (note: the story is theirs exclusively but sits behind a paywall), Facebook is engaged in exploratory talks with a number of UK operators to open its platform to real-money online gambling, maybe even as soon as in the first quarter of 2012.

Citing sources familiar with the discussions, eGR reports that the social networking leader is considering offering an initial eight ‘licences’ to as many UK operators looking to roll out such gambling apps on the Facebook platform.

According to eGR’s sources, Facebook has begun staffing up for the launch and support of real-money gambling ventures in the UK, where online gambling is properly regulated, after initially aggressively promoting the use of Credits to online gambling service operators. We’ve contacted Facebook for confirmation and will update as soon as we hear back.

For the record: in the United States, online gambling is essentially considered to be illegal in most states, though legalization efforts are underway (for some background, check Wikipedia).

When we talk about real-money online gambling, that basically means gambling on the Internet just like you would in an offline casino, for example, betting or depositing real money to win real money, and not just to play for fun or to cash in by means of digital goods or virtual currency.

UK-based operator names that are circulating, still according to the report published by eGaming Review, are those of Gamesys (which owns sites like jackpotjoy.com, botemania.com and iwi.com) and online casino, poker and bingo gaming giant 888 Holdings.

Facebook has reportedly held exploratory talks with approximately 20 online gaming experts, consultants and social gaming entrepreneurs at the end of this Summer, and eGR claims that the discussions have now moved to facilitating a near-future launch of real-money gambling apps on the Facebook platform.

When this would happen, how players would verify their age and identity, which payment solutions Facebook plans to deploy for handling real-money play, or any details around the revenue split between Facebook and gaming operators, are all aspects that appear to be still very much unclear.

eGR speculates that Facebook might see the UK as a testbed before rolling out support for real-money online gambling apps on its platform in additional countries later on.

Facebook used to have a strict policy in place when it came to advertising online gambling businesses on its platform. This only changed recently, when Facebook openly relaxed its rules.

Currently, Facebook’s advertising guidelines outline that “ads that promote or facilitate online gambling, games of skill or lotteries, including online casino, sports books, bingo, or poker, are only allowed in specific countries with prior authorization from Facebook”.

Editor’s note: Scott Silverman is the co-founder and VP of Marketing for Ifeelgoods, Inc., a digital goods incentive platform. Prior to Ifeelgoods, Silverman spent more than 10 years as Executive Director of Shop.org and is one of the creators of Cyber Monday. You can follow him @scottsilverman.

When the term Cyber Monday was coined in 2005, the Monday after Thanksgiving was the 12^th biggest online shopping day of the year. That year, Facebook had 5.5 million users and Twitter didn’t exist. In 2010, Cyber Monday was the #1 biggest online shopping day of the year, with sales topping $1 billion. I believe the growth of social media and the importance of Cyber Monday are correlated because peer -to-peer sharing of deals and owned marketing channels like Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts are bringing promotions directly to where users spend their time online.

The red line is where Cyber Monday ranked among the top online shopping days (from comScore press releases) for that year. Aside from 2008, which is an outlier due the recession, there is a trend in Cyber Monday popularity growing along with Facebook users.

As background, Cyber Monday was coined in 2005 by e-commerce industry group Shop.org while I was its executive director. The trend was identified through data from online retailers who in in previous years had seen spikes in sales the Monday after Thanksgiving. It seems that people go online to continue their post-Black Friday shopping for items they didn’t buy, perhaps because they wanted to research them more thoroughly or buy them out of the sight of the intended recipient.

There is an argument about the impact of social media on retail sales. Some are skeptical, saying social isn’t as effective as email marketing or paid search advertising for customer acquisition. Others think the shift to social advertisements and viral marketing is just starting to take off. The debate will surely continue as researchers struggle to identify the perfect science for measuring its effect. Ironically, data about the impact of TV and radio ads remains just as elusive, yet broadcast advertising continues to command a disproportionate amount of spending.

But retailers are successfully building their presences on social networks. The 25 U.S. retailers with the most fans on Facebook had a combined 259 million fans in October. During the holiday season, these fans will find deals from retailers who’ve invested in social. Retailers hesitant about social will be less likely to attain sales from these users as their competitors profit.

According to Shop.org, 29 percent of consumers will check out a retailer’s Facebook page as part of their online holiday shopping this year.  Of course, these are just the people who say they’ll seek out this information and it doesn’t take into account the number of people that will see sales and promotions from retailers in their news feed.

Data aside, there is no question that social media is having a profound impact on the way we shop. Today, we depend on our social networks to tip us off to the best deals and sales. Only two or three years ago this was not the case.

Mobile is growing as a medium for ecommerce, with users sourcing deals from their phones and tablets before visiting physical stores according to a new study by Usablenet, The company which powers mobile sites for 100 top U.S. retailers including JCPenney, Aeropostale, and REI tracked 18 million page views and 1 million mobile users over Thanksgiving and Black Friday. It saw mobile traffic to its clients was up 60% from the same period last year, with Thanksgiving sending more traffic than the following day. Usablenet also found that iOS devices accounted for 42% of the traffic, trumping Android, and trouncing the tiny traffic from Windows and Nokia devices.

Earlier today, Leena reported that Black Friday online retail spending was up 24.3% this year, and that mobile increased it share of total traffic and sales. In addition to driving sales directly, though, mobile is facilitating offline sales and product pick-ups. Usablenet tells me, “Thanksgiving activity focused on finding and purchasing deals such as deals of the day, driven from email marketing along with high usage of the purchase online and pick up in-store option.”

On Black Friday, mobile usage centered around finding store locations, browsing reviews, and accessing previously saved wish lists while people walked aisles at their local merchants. These insights can help retailers plan for next year. They should look to send out email marketing and deal notices early on Thanksgiving, as that’s when people make decisions of where to shop. This could work better than distributing promotions right at the start of Black Friday when customers may have already set a shopping agenda.

Traffic by mobile operating system also mirrored sales, with iOS taking the biggest cut, but less than last year. Android is creeping up, accounting for 34% of mobile traffic up from 28% in 2010. BlackBerry still represents a respectable 15% of mobile traffic, while Windows and Nokia each made up less than 3%. If this trend continues, by next year it may be just as important for big retailers to offer Android apps as iOS ones.

Fire sales turned into a firestorm for Walmart this morning as the company’s web servers buckled under Black Friday traffic. Shoppers from around the country waited until the middle of the night for sales only to experience broken checkout pages, emptied shopping carts, and login errors. This caused their desired items to go out of stock before they could buy them, leading to mass frustration and ill will towards the discount store chain. Meanwhile at its physical stores, 20 people were pepper sprayed by a fellow customer, and 2 people were shot outside separate locations. Walmart will need to sort out its servers in preparation for the upcoming Cybermonday blitz or it risks losing customers to Amazon.

We’ll let traditional news outlets cover the offline violence and focus on Walmart’s web fiasco. Disgruntled online shoppers flocked to the GottaDeal.com forums to voice complaints about Walmart’s website problems. It’s unclear exactly how widespread the issues were, but the forums had complaints coming in every minute at one point last from customers in Florida, Mississippi, and New York.

Many expected deals to go live at Midnight local time only to have to wait up until 3am EST. Visitors then feverishly filled shopping carts but suddenly found them empty when they went to checkout. Others were confronted with the error message “We’re having temporary difficulties arriving at the destination you requested”. Login problems also arose, with users being asked to enter their credentials when already signed in. One customer reported that they complained about the checkout disruption on Walmart’s Facebook Page but later found their post deleted.

The entire Walmart site does not appear to have crashed. By keeping the site up despite the issues, Walmart may have sought to conceal the errors and avoid press coverage of the discontent. Loyal customers said they hadn’t had such problems since 2006 when Walmart experienced a similar breakdown of its site. The company pulled in $418 billion in revenue during the 2011 fiscal year, so today’s disruption could have cost it a lot of money.

While it might be too late to save Black Friday, Walmart better be scrambling to fix its website for Cybermonday, the biggest online shopping day of the year, just 36 hours away. The corporation acquired two startups Kosmix and OneRiot this year and formed its Silicon Valley-based @WalmartLabs in an effort to improve its ecommerce offering. However, it’s competing with powerhouse Amazon, whose cloud hosting division may protect it from the outages that plagued Walmart today.

If the errors persist on Cybermonday, shoppers may seek out a more reliable ecommerce solution. When customers post “I’m so frustrated I’m going to cry” and “an hour and a half of nonsense. shame on you Walmart!”, something has to change.

It’s Black Friday in the United States, but Amazon this morning revealed a couple of deals that it will be running from Cyber Monday and/or the next few days (specifically, starting at midnight on Sunday, November 27, through the end of next week).

Just like today, the company will sell a $79 Kindle, a $99 Kindle Touch, a $149 Kindle Touch 3G and a $199 Kindle Fire. It again points out that the latter device is “currently the best-selling item across all of Amazon”.

On Cyber Monday, Amazon says it will introduce new deals on other popular products, and it offers a ‘sneak peek’ at some of the deals you can expect. Those that I assume will interest you the most are listed below:

- Sony Cybershot DSC-HX5V 10.2 MP Digital Camera: $199 (save $150)
- Pentax K-5 Digital SLR (Body Only): $999 (save $200)
- Microsoft Xbox 360 250GB Holiday Bundle (includes Fable III and Halo Reach): $199 (save $100)
- Nokia N8 (Unlocked): $299.99 (save $249)
- Monster Diddybeats Headphones: $59.99 (save $89)
- Save up to 50% off select VTech electronic toys

Amazon says last year’s Cyber Monday was its absolute peak day last year, with more than 13.7 million items ordered worldwide (or 158 items per second).

Jack Dorsey’s mobile payments startup Square is now processing $11 million a day in mobile payments, it was revealed today at the Techonomy conference in Tucson, Arizona. Host David Kirkpatrick threw the number out there as something Dorsey had told him backstage—the last official number was $10 million a day and Square may not be consistently above $11 million yet. Either way, this is up from $4 million a day just last July.

The key to Square’s rapid growth in Dorsey’s mind is the same thing that propels Twitter: “We haven’t defined a lot of how people are going to use them.” He sees both as utilities which can be adopted to different purposes by their users, and that is what makes them so powerful. “We don’t want to make Square all about taxi cabs,”” he says. “And we don’t want to make Twitter all about celebrities and politicians.”

The other thing that Square and Twitter have in common is that they are both essentially communications technologies. Dorsey thinks of the receipt as a publishing medium (kind of like TWitter). “It is a communication medium between the business and the consumer,” he says. But normally it is something we throw away. That communication between merchant and payer is where the “exchange of value” lies. Payments is just something “we need to do” to create that communication.

Taking a swipe at NFC payments, he notes that they lack that communication layer. “NFC only gives the merchant the identity [of the consumer] after the transaction.” By identifying the customer when they walk in the door, as Square is trying to do with its new Card Case product, there is better chance to build loyalty by doing something for the customer before they even pay.

Asked about Twitter’s business model, Dorsey notes that Twitter’s ad products (Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends) are getting engagement rates “between 1 and 5 percent.”

He doesn’t call these ads. “We wanted to build a business model that felt like it was part of the network,” he says. “I don’t think of it as advertisement in the traditional sense.” Rather, he wants to “introduce you to something new.” Of course, if those Promoted Tweets were really as delightful as he makes them out to be, they would be clicked more than 5 percent of the time.

Online holiday shopping reached record levels in 2010. And e-commerce spending is up this year. All signs point to consumers spending even more online this holiday season. I sat down with executives from Google, eBay, PayPal and ShopKick to discuss the trends that are expected to emerge in the e-commerce space over the next few months.  They center around mobile, tablets, and deals.

PayPal has more than doubled its mobile payments volume since the 2010 holiday shopping season, and we haven’t even hit the thick of this year’s rush. eBay is projecting $5 billion in mobile payments volume in 2010 and this number could increase in the next few months. And Google projects that 15 percent of total search on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving and one of the biggest shopping days of the year) will come from mobile devices. Tablet devices are now a part of the online shopping experience and retailers are taking note. Clearly, all signs point to the fact that this could be the breakout year for mobile shopping.

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile

All of the companies I spoke to unanimously agreed that this would be the year of mobile for the holiday shopping season. Steve Yankovich, head of eBay’s mobile business operations and development, says he expects this to be the biggest year for mobile sales for eBay yet. eBay has said that the company expects to see $5 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2011, and this will be partly buoyed by a strong mobile presence in November and December.

PayPal’s Senior Director for Mobile, Laura Chambers, echoes Yankovich’s forecasts and says that merchants are even preparing for the onslaught of traffic to their mobile sites. A number of big retailers, such as Armani Exchange, Guess and The Limited have recently put PayPal’s mobile express checkout as an option for payments on their mobile sites as a way to help the conversion process. “We are seeing strong investments by online retailers for mobile shopping this year,” she says.

Chambers says that last year, the peak day for mobile payments for PayPal was December 12, with $4.7 million in mobile payments volume. Now PayPal is seeing $10 million in mobile payments per day, and we haven’t even officially hit the holiday shopping period. Clearly, the mobile payments numbers could even triple from last year to this year.

While many consumers may shop on mobile for their holiday purchases, the usage of product search, barcode scanning, and other informative apps will also play a big part in this year’s mobile shopping. eBay’s RedLaser barcode scanning apps have seen scans go up 50 percent over the past year. If you aren’t familiar with how it works, RedLaser will scan the barcode of a physical product and show you where you can buy it on eBay’s properties and where it is available in local store locations around you (via Milo) and for how much. The app has been updated with PayPal functionality so that users can actually buy the product directly from the app.

Another shopping app developer who has high hopes for mobile this holiday season is ShopKick. Co-founder Cyriac Roeding says that this year will be the year of mobile for physical shopping. For background, Shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free Android or iPhone app on their phone walks into a store. Once a Shopkick Signal is detected, the app delivers reward points called “kickbucks” to the user for walking into a retail store, trying on clothes, scanning a barcode and other actions. Kickbucks can then be redeemed across all partner stores for gift card rewards or for Facebook Credits. User can also receive special discounts on specific products at partners stores like Macy’s, Best Buy or Target.

Roeding explains that the cell phone is the only interactive platform you carry with you in a physical store, and retailers are looking to use the platform to help drive transactions. Clearly, a mobile rewards app that offers in-store discounts can help do this. “The internet has caused brick and mortar retailers more trouble than benefit over the past fifteen years. Now retailers are catching on to how the internet can help retailers—that’s where mobile comes in.”

Sameer Samat, VP of Product Management for Google Commerce, tells me that the search giant is seeing a growing number of users are making buying decisions using their mobile phone. “We are definitely seeing m-commerce conversions growing and becoming bigger over time,” he says. “But users are also using their mobile phone to search for products and find local availability.”

Samat says that Google has seen a 200 percent growth in mobile product search usage and Google Shopper app downloads over the past year. Shopper, which is available for iOS and Android, allows you to find product prices, reviews, specs, local inventory of products at nearby stores, and more.

As we mentioned above, Google is forecasting that 15 percent of total search on Black Friday. will come from mobile. “There’s no doubt that users are now making buying decisions using their mobile phone,” says Samat. “And we are seeing m-commerce conversions growing and becoming bigger over time.”

Tablets

As tablets have grown to be the go-to browsing device, the iPad, and other devices are also becoming a way to shop. And retailers are catching on to this trend. According to a National Retail Federation study, 20 percent of retailers have invested in tablet device apps this holiday season.

With this in mind, Google debuted Catalogs in August, an app for tablet devices that includes 200 catalogs from major brands including Anthropologie, Bare Escentuals, Bergdorf Goodman, Crate and Barrel, L.L. Bean, Lands’ End, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Pottery Barn, Saks Fifth Avenue, Sephora, Sundance, Tea Collection, Urban Outfitters and Williams-Sonoma.

The app is more than just a browsing experience. When consumers find an item they’d like to purchase, they can tap to find it in a store nearby or tap “Buy on Website” to visit the merchant online.

Google’s Samat says that “the tablet is the ultimate leanback experience and we see that playing a big role in holiday shopping as a replacement for the mail order catalogs you used to browse through.”

PayPal calls it ‘couch commerce’ and believes that tablet commerce will have a record year. PayPal recently reported that consumers who own both a tablet and a smartphone are significantly more likely (63%) to indicate increased overall spending on mobile purchases, versus owners of smartphones only (29%). Owners of both a tablet and a smartphone buy nearly twice as often as those who only have smartphones and more than 40% of dual owners made more than 20 mobile purchases over the past year, compared to only 12% of smartphone-only owners.

Forrester just released a report predicting a 15 percent increase in online shopping sales this year to nearly $60 billion, partly due to the increase in consumer-use of tablet computers for shopping.

Beyond Black Friday And Cyber Monday

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are historically the top-high-grossing online shopping days during the holiday season. But execs expect to see high volumes of online shopping on other days thanks to an increase in mobile shopping and deals.

Yankovitch tells me that eBay expects revenue numbers to be well over numbers that eBay saw last year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but expects to see more activity at times when people aren’t traditionally shopping.

The day of Thanksgiving is one of those days, says Chambers. Because people will have their phone everywhere (including at the table), consumers are expected to make purchases on the fly, especially on Thanksgiving evening. In fact, PayPal is predicting that after dinner on Thanksgiving Day will be the first mobile shopping spike this holiday season.

Another popular day has been the second Sunday in December, which is one of the last days where people feel confident that items will be shipped in times for the holiday. And Chambers says across the board, Sunday is the biggest day for mobile shopping generally.

Deals

There’s no doubt that deals, coupons and discounts will be a large part of the online holiday shopping experience, especially with the current state of the economy. According to the recent Forrester report, 58 percent of Americans say they are more price-conscious today than they were a year ago and nearly half believe they find better values online.

“I really expect consumers to be deal hunting this season,” explains Chambers. She says that PayPal, which has historically offered special deals for the holiday shopping season, will be bulking up on more consumer deals this holiday season.

Samat says that Google has always seen a spike for queries like deals, coupons, and sales during the holiday time and fully expects to see an increase this year. “The consumer desire for a better deal will help give certain product decision tools a big bump,” he explains. “People may take more time this year to find the best possible price.”

Deals could also include lucrative holiday shipping offers. In 2010, 45 of the top 50 online retailers offered some sort of promotional deal between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, most of which were a type of shipping promotion. And in 2011, Shop.org anticipates that a record 92.5% of online retailers will offer free shipping and not just as a Cyber Monday promotion.

Clearly, there’s plenty of optimism from retailers, and tech companies regarding online spending and shopping this holiday season. And this holiday season is somewhat unique considering the big bet that retailers are making on newer technologies, such as mobile, geo-location, tablets, local product search and more. The big question is how consumers will react to and engage with these technologies over the next several weeks.  It could be a very mobile Christmas.

A year ago, at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, PageLines announced the release of Platform, a drag and drop design framework for WordPress. The product offered some cool CMS design options, a drag-and-drop layout editor, and a fully configurable template builder for creating custom websites. PageLines’ Platform has since been downloaded 400,000 times and has become one of the most popular frameworks on WordPress.org over the last year.

Back at BlogWorld Expo today, PageLines announced today that it will launch version 2.0 of its framework on December 8th, which will include a nifty new marketplace: The PageLines Store. For developers, designers, or people who want to build cool websites without worrying about coding, this should be of interest. The store is basically an app store for “drag & drop” sections, plug-ins, sections, and themes — all of which have been built by developers for the PageLines community. Apps in the store will range from drag and drop sections that customize the style of a website to an integrated system for eCommerce or a community forum and other functionality.

For developers, the PageLines Store offers the opportunity to get exposure to several hundred thousand users, while taking a 70 percent cut of every sale. And developers get to set the price.

The startup is also announcing the PageLines Developer Community, Workshops and LeContest, which will all be “focused around educating and helping designers and developers become successful with PageLines”, according to the startup’s blog post. In terms of the contest, all developers have to do is build a cool plug-in, drag & drop feature, etc., and PageLines will select a few of the best entries to launch at LeWeb ’11 in Paris this December. For more info, check the contest out here.

As for PageLines v2.0, the new framework will include an improved layout editor, an intuitive UI, responsive design, dynamic color handling, and improved performance, says PageLines CEO Andrew Powers. The new framework will be sold via PageLines’ website, and the cost for a regular license will be $197. The developer version, which will include integrations for Mediawiki and Vanilla forum software, will be available for $397.

Let’s say you’re a first-time entrepreneur. You’ve got a great idea for a product or business, but you don’t know where to start. You don’t know any VCs or angels, maybe your company isn’t right for an incubator, but you want firsthand advice from experts on how to proceed. While there are tons of amazing online resources for entrepreneurs and there’s some terrific expert advice on Quora on an array of entrepreneurial subjects, little of this information is personalized.

This is one example of the value proposition of Evisors, a startup that is building a marketplace of expert advice. Founded in May 2010 by Harvard Business School grads Fredrik Marø, Marc Weiner, Dan Levy, and Wharton grad Christine Apold, Evisors offers on-demand advice, allowing consumers to go beyond their own personal and professional networks to search its database of experienced experts to directly schedule consultations.

The startup soft launched its marketplace in September 2010 behind the idea that cold calls and emails are often ineffective ways to build one’s expert network, and getting answers to your tough questions is far more difficult than it should be. In its early stages, as one can imagine, career and graduate school advice was Evisor’s first big seller, and the startup worked to bring former professors and admissions officers into its fold to give young people their industry expertise as well as advice on job hunting strategies, interview practice, resume and cover letter help, business consulting and career management, etc.

The Evisors network has since expanded to include three main categories: Admissions, business, and career experts, which now counts CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, experienced professionals and business consultants as members of its marketplace.

Earlier this month, Evisors further expanded its offerings to officially include an entrepreneurship network in an effort to give startups seeking expert guidance access to hundreds of entrepreneurs and business advisors. To find an expert, customers use the marketplace’s simple search interface to identify relevant experts, view their profiles and evaluate them based on their qualifications, user reviews, ratings, availability, and, of course, their hourly rates.

Once a users has selected an expert, they can schedule a phone consultation or submit an email inquiry. Experts set their own rates, which range from $30 to more than $500 per consultation depending on things like length of the session, the expert’s education level, career background and experience, and so on.

The startup’s entrepreneurship network features startup experts like investor and author Dave Berkus (best known for his “Berkus Method” of evaluating early-stage investments) who has participated in more than 80 tech investments over the last decade — as well as David Ronick, co-founder of the online startup incubator, Upstart Bootcamp.

Most of these experts, Evisors CEO Fredrik Maro told us, have full-time jobs, so the marketplace is not a primary money-making tool for first time business consultants. Really, it gives industry veterans an opportunity to give back to the community, interact with likeminded people, and share their hard-earned knowledge. That being said, the marketplace provides a nice complement to their salaries, with a few experts having earned over $10,000 over the course of the year.

For those looking for expert advice, there is also the opportunity to take advantage of free consultations, which are primarily a result of new experts joining the community who have been vetted by the Evisors staff but have not yet received a significant feedback rating.

Maro said that he sees Evisors as the next link in the chain after Quora, providing those in need of advice with a middle ground between the opinionators and, say, the mentorship (and equity-taking) of startup incubators. Maro also pointed out that Evisors eats its own dogfood, too — the startup has been using the advice of its experts to help grow its own business. And so far, this method of attack seems to be working, as the startup has seen the number of consultations sold in its marketplace grow nearly tenfold over the same period last year.

Up until recently, Evisors has been a bootstrapped, but today the company is officially announcing that it has raised $600,000 from Nebula Ventures (the VC arm of Universum Global, which owns sites like wetfeet.com and doostang.com), as well as angel investors like New York Angels.

Besides taking a small percentage of consultation sales, the startup is also monetizing through affiliate partnerships in which third parties host Evisors widgets to showcase experts relevant to their audiences. These sites earn a referral fee for each consultation sold that emanates from their platforms.

Through its strategic partnership with Nebula Ventures qua Universum, Evisors has partnered with job sites Wetfeet.com and Doostang, as well as company review site Glassdoor.com, among others.

With partnerships and new funding in its pocket, Evisors is setting its sites on becoming the online destination to get subject matter expertise. It still has a long way to go, but it’s off to a good start.

For more, check ‘em out at home here.

Ecommerce in China is ready to take off and, more important, it’s ready to reach great heights on its own terms. Lu Dong of La Mui, Haifeng Ye of Mbaobao, and Fangfang Wu of Greenbox are three ecommerce pioneers who are, as we speak, redefining online sales in China.

“China is ready for ecommerce,” said Lu Dong. “People are moving to buying almost anything online.”

Haifeng Ye agreed. “We have a greater opportunity here in the Chinese market to make something new. In america the ecommerce market is quite established,” he said. “We can use ecommerce to build a new retail format.” He calls online sales a huge opportunity.

The three agreed that the biggest fish in the China ecommerce sea was Taobao and the importance of Taobao as a sales platform in China cannot be ignored. The company helps with settlement, logistics, and service and all three agreed that Taobao is “great.”

These entrepreneurs see things improving over the next few years and noted that ad rates have risen 30-50% while outside investment is down slightly but not enough to make these panelists worry.

Lu Dong said it best: “It’s important to raise money but it’s more important to make money.”

Phil Muncaster, V3.co.uk, Tuesday 19 October 2010 at 10:52:00

Online authentication firm VeriSign has launched three cloud-based services
designed to help online retailers reduce downtime, improve performance and
availability, and mitigate the risk of DDoS attacks and other threats.

Released in time for the busy Christmas shopping period, which can generate
over a third of annual sales for some retailers, the
eHoliday
Uptime bundle combines a DNS Availability, Network Availability and
Application Availability service.

DNS Availability features VeriSign’s managed DNS service to ensure web site
availability and reduce costs associated with maintaining DNS infrastructure,
according to the firm.

The Network Availability component uses VeriSign’s Internet Defense Network
to provide customers with a scalable DDoS monitoring and mitigation service.

Finally on offer is a real-time threat intelligence service from VeriSign’s
iDefense managed security services arm, designed to provide online retailers
with the information they need to block threats from malware and application
vulnerabilities.

“The DNS failures and DDoS outages experienced by many companies last year
emphasises the high cost of downtime during the holidays,” said Ben Petro,
senior vice president of VeriSign’s Network Intelligence and Availability
business.

“We want every company that depends on their web site for sales to have
access to best-of-breed offerings that defend against the primary threats to
availability.”

Ted Julian, principal analyst at Yankee Group, said that to be forced offline
in the festive season could lead to losses of millions of dollars for the top
online retailers.

“Ensuring availability should be a primary objective for retailers and online
businesses at all times,” he added.

The launch of the eHoliday Uptime bundle coincides with this week’s
E
Commerce Expo taking place at London’s Olympia. V3.co.uk will be
covering all the news from the show and we have a dedicated
e-commerce
blog for our event coverage.

Shaun Nichols in San Francisco, V3.co.uk, Tuesday 5 October 2010 at 04:01:00

The number of cyber crime operations emanating from Europe is growing,
according to security experts.

Trend Micro said that over the first half of 2010, Europe had surpassed both
Asia and the Americas as the top region for producing web-based threats.

The company said the rise in Europe-based threats may well be down to efforts
by the government in China to force local internet service providers to curb
illegal activities there, which
have
been credited with driving criminals to operators in Eastern Europe.

Trend Micro threat research director Jamz Yaneza told V3.co.uk that
the Chinese government’s campaigns do appear to have made an impact in overall
levels, albeit small.

“That is one of the reasons why the amount of spam coming out of China has
lessened,” said Yaneza.

“It is still one of the biggest, next to Europe.”

The report also found a trend towards localisation in online attacks. The
company found that in countries such as Brazil, botnet infections and phishing
attacks have been tailored to target smaller, local banks.

“Most of the bots target low-hanging fruits, and most of these are local
banks,” said Yaneza.

“A lot of these emails are being worded better by local individuals.”

In the coming months, Yaneza expects to see cyber criminals shift their
attention to emerging platforms. The researcher recommends that users patch not
only their operating system, but individual applications and plug-ins that
could be vulnerable.

“In the second half of this year we are going to see a lot more attacks using
zero-days and we are going to see gadgets and smartphones factor in,” Yaneza
said.

“My suggestion is for users to be a bit more aware and not think that just
because you are not using one of the most popular systems out there that you are
safe.”

Shaun Nichols in San Francisco, V3.co.uk, Tuesday 14 September 2010 at 21:25:00

Users searching from free music are laying themselves open to malware
attacks, according to McAfee.

The company said in a recent report on threats in digital media that while
the names of popular music groups may not necessarily pose a heightened risk,
searches with the words “free” and “downloads” raised the risk of a malware
attack sharply.

Dave Marcus, head of research and communications for McAfee Labs, told
V3.co.uk that the trend was spotted in mediums ranging from search
engines and social networking sites to torrent download services.

“It’s not the searching of the music in and of itself, it’s that use of the
word ‘free’ that seems to be what the bad guys are using.”

While the lure of free content has long been used to spread malware
infections, one emerging area is becoming a favourite hangout for attackers.

The company noted that social networking services such as Twitter have seen
sharp increases in malware activity. Marcus credits the trend to a combination
of URL shortening to hide malware links along with the wealth of information and
the ease of creating new accounts.

“People are just going buck wild sharing information,” he said of Twitter.

“It’s easy to build fake profiles and it’s easy to abuse shortened URLs.”

Of particular use to scammers is the service’s sophisticated tracking tools.
A malware operator can easily see the most popular Twitter subjects and then use
those keywords to create messages and links specifically designed to appeal to
popular subjects.

The result, said Marcus, is malware scams that can prove even more effective
than those
preying
on the Google Trends service.

To help reduce the risk of the attack, the company is recommending that users
stick to known and trusted music download services as well as keep browsers and
security software up to date.

Iain Thomson in San Francisco, V3.co.uk, Thursday 9 September 2010 at 02:34:00

Some 65 per cent of global internet users have been victims of online crime,
according to a survey of over 7,000 people by Symantec’s Norton division.

The
Norton
Cybercrime Report (PDF) found that Chinese users are most at risk, and that
83 per cent had fallen prey to computer viruses, credit card fraud and identity
theft. Brazil and India tied for second place, followed by the US with 73 per
cent.

The average online crime took 28 days to resolve and cost $338 (£219) per
person. Over a quarter of respondents said that the time such a crime took to
get sorted out is the biggest problem. Over half of victims said that ‘anger’ is
their first response.

“We accept cyber crime because of a ‘learned helplessness’,” said Joseph
LaBrie, associate professor of psychology at Loyola Marymount University.

“It’s like getting ripped off at a garage. If you don’t know enough about
cars, you don’t argue with the mechanic. People just accept a situation, even if
it feels bad.”

However, people have a very lax view of personal responsibility when it comes
to their own behaviour, the report found.

Nearly half of respondents said that it is acceptable to download a pirated
music track, and 24 per cent are happy to read someone’s email without their
knowledge.

Shaun Nichols in San Francisco, V3.co.uk, Friday 27 August 2010 at 02:07:00

Security experts are issuing warnings following the discovery of a malware
scam using email attachments.

The attack uses emails claiming to be from delivery service FedEx. The
message claims that the user was unable to receive a package due to an address
error and instructs users to print out an attached form to claim the package.

The attachment, however, contains a malicious .zip file which, when opened,
triggers the malware attack. Security firm Sunbelt Software
identified
the malware as zbot.

Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley said that the attack shows
an interesting twist on the common tactic of hiding malware trojans as email
attachments.

“Unlike many of the other Fedex-related malware attacks we have seen in the
past, the emails carry the message about the failed delivery in the form of an
image rather than text, possibly in an attempt to try to defeat more
rudimentary anti-spam filters,” Cluley said in
a
blog post.

Users are being advised to use common security best practices such as
avoiding suspicious messages and not loading unknown or suspicious file
attachments.