AllThingsD » Compete

Fashion Community Strutting User-Generated Trends Down the Catwalk

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 02:58:14 +0000

Fashionistas may roll their eyes at the effort, but Polyvore is trying to make designing and merchandising apparel more data driven–and presumably less arbitrary.

To do so, the online fashion community will be crunching user-generated data to roll out analytical tools for designers and retailers. Think Quantcast or Compete, but for the fashion industry.

The beta tool, called Style Analytics, will be free and openly available to anyone on Polyvore’s Web site. It’s expected to launch officially tomorrow afternoon.

The data points are coming from its community of users, who create virtual outfits–or what they call “collages” of clothing–by mixing and matching shirts, pants, dresses, shoes, skirts and accessories from around the Web.

Jess Lee, Polyvore’s co-founder and head of product management, said it will show what’s trending, so brands can make better decisions. Specifically, it shows how consumers associate your brand, for instance, with Abercrombie & Fitch or Juicy Couture.

“The fashion industry, from designing to merchandising and marketing is inefficient and not data driven,” she said. “Our goal is to open it up and make it more democratic and more data driven.”

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has raised about $8.7 million in venture capital since 2007. Each month, its two million registered users create one million collages that generate 140 million page views.

Venture Capital's Most Trafficked Web Sites

Scott Austin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:30:21 +0000

Venture capitalists often invest in start-ups whose business models are dependent on Internet traffic, or in companies whose technology is geared toward delivering those eyeballs. But how good are VC firms at bringing in their own Web site traffic?

Larry Cheng, a partner at Volition Capital (formerly Fidelity Ventures), has ranked 150 venture firms based on their Web sites’ average monthly unique visitors for the fourth quarter, as scored by Compete. This is the second list of its kind compiled by Cheng, who has previously ranked individual VC blogs using the same data.

So who’s at No. 1? It’s not Sequoia Capital, perhaps the best-known venture firm, which ranks at No. 2 with 22,441 uniques. Nor is it the venerable Bessemer Venture Partners, famous for publishing an “anti-portfolio,” coming in at No. 3 (14,825).

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The One-Year Report Card of Yahoo's Carol Bartz–Deal-Making: Incomplete

Kara Swisher — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:24:13 +0000

Sorry for the break in grading Yahoo’s Carol Bartz on her one-year anniversary as CEO.

But BoomTown was swanning around the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this weekend, went partying with those boozy Hollywood types and ended up in Provo with the crazy gals from “The Runaways”!

I wish! Actually, running away from issuing any grade for deal-making for Bartz is a pretty good way to put it.

Because today, after much thought, I have to give the Yahoo leader an incomplete for deal-making.

That’s because the only deal that truly counts–the search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft (MSFT) struck in July–has still not been approved by regulators.

More to the point, no one will really know what it means for Yahoo (YHOO) until the company finally embarks on the biggest bet of its recent history.

And that answer is many, many quarters away.

I began handing out marks to Bartz recently, after she gave herself a B- for overall performance for the year since she took over the troubled Internet giant.

But I decided to be more specific, splitting the grades for Yahoo in 2009 into five categories: Management, financials, product innovation, deal-making and moxie.

I awarded Bartz an A- for management, a C+ for financials and a C- for product innovation so far.

And as much as I would like to give a definite grade for deal-making, she has made no other deals of major consequence on which to base a grade.

The deal to integrate Facebook Connect and Twitter? A catch-up long past due and not as impressive as similar ones by Google and Microsoft. The sale of Zimbra and other assets? Essentially, cleaning up. A few minor acquisitions? No needle-movers in the lot.

Thus, the only deal has been with Microsoft, which is indeed a very big deal.

And it is, as I said, incomplete, although not to everyone.

Some thought the deal, which Bartz said she should have made sooner, was the best that Yahoo could pull off after the disastrous attempt by Microsoft to buy Yahoo for upward of $40 billion collapsed and left egg on everyone’s face.

With Google (GOOG) and Microsoft gearing up for a costly search war and no chance of Yahoo ever regaining any kind of tech advantage, the argument in favor goes, Bartz opted to get some kind of leverage while she still had some.

On many levels, that makes a lot of sense. And if it works, the deal will surely help improve Yahoo’s bottom line, cutting expenses in the search technology arena drastically and, the company hopes, giving it the ability to compete better in the marketplace by combining Yahoo and Microsoft search against the Google behemoth.

Presumably, if Yahoo can innovate in search experience and add to share, all is not lost.

But a lot of people certainly don’t like the deal, citing a variety of problems, especially the fact that Yahoo has essentially turned over all search monetization to Microsoft and traded away a big part of its business with no financial guarantees.

In fact, Bartz said in an interview with me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference–months before she struck it–that she would want “boatloads of money” in any deal with Microsoft (see that video below).

[ See post to watch video ]

At the time, most people thought she meant a gigantic upfront guaranteed payment for handing over search to Microsoft, which she did not get in the final deal.

Wrote one Internet exec in a long email to me, expressing a typical sentiment I have heard time and again:

She would have been much better off to simply have sold the current Yahoo search biz to Microsoft along the lines of the deal Carl Icahn tried to broker the summer after the acquisition bid was pulled. The cut over could have happened much faster (just start running Bing results on Yahoo) and Microsoft would probably have given a revenue guarantee that would keep Yahoo whole on revenue per search for the traffic they generated. That would also have eliminated the sales overhead immediately, providing greater cost savings…She chose a middle-ground (classic Yahoo) and will end up with lower returns for the declining search business than she could otherwise have had.

Only reason she doesn’t get the F that [former Yahoo CEO and Co-founder] Jerry Yang obviously earned on this topic is that she did actually make a deal.

And, indeed, Bartz had to play the cards she was handed by her predecessors, and they were not good ones.

Still, Yahoo is now depending on Microsoft to innovate in search technology. If it does not or cannot, look out below in that category, even if Yahoo recovers in its stronger display advertising arena.

So, with Yahoo’s search share declining of late, even as that of Microsoft’s Bing grows, it is right to start worrying and be nervous.

Nonetheless, as much as I like to dole out grades and as much as Bartz’s detractors would like to say it is over, it’s probably fairer to wait and see what happens.

One thing is certain: Bartz has shown either amazing guts or an astonishing lack of foresight here.

But let’s save that particular grade–moxie–for tomorrow, on the day Yahoo’s fourth-quarter earnings come out and Bartz is front and center in the earnings call.

Speaking of moxie–a.k.a. ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb!–here’s the trailer for “The Runaways,” which just opened at Sundance:

S&P Sees Microsoft-Yahoo JV, Google-Apple Tensions

Tiernan Ray — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:15:24 +0000

‘Tis the season to make year 2009 predictions. Today, Standard & Poor’s analysts released their predictions for the Internet in 2009. Scott Kessler, Internet analyst with S&P, says Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) will “finally bury the hatchet” next year “and decide to join forces to better compete against Google” (GOOG). Kessler says Microsoft won’t buy Yahoo (well, they’ve already said they were no longer interested in that), but rather pursue a joint venture “related to search.” He thinks that could lift Yahoo shares, to which he assigns a “Buy” rating.

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Peggy Noonan, Lesley Stahl and Friends Raise More Money: Wowowow.com Gets Another $1.5 Million

Peter Kafka — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:40:07 +0000

The purse strings haven’t completely closed for start-ups looking to raise money–even niche Web sites that hope to stay afloat by selling advertising.

Wowowow.com, a site launched earlier this year, which targets women over 40, has raised a $1.5 million round led by Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group and the Rhime Group.

No word on valuation, but I’d guesstimate Wowowow.com’s investors peg its value in the high seven-figure range. The company has now raised $3.1 million in less than a year.

The five founders–former publisher Joni Evans, “60 Minutes” reporter Lesley Stahl; New York Post gossip columnist Liz Smith; ad exec Mary Wells; and Wall Street Journal political columnist Peggy Noonan–contributed $200,000 each in an initial round. Some of the company’s high-profile pals, like Whoopi Goldberg and Candice Bergen, later kicked in another $600,000.

Is that money well spent? We’ll see. Publishing is a tough business, even for lean Web operations, and advertisers generally steer clear of small sites. The company launched with a series of high profile sponsors; from what I can tell, at least some of them–like Citigroup (C) and Sony (SNE)–are still there.

And Pittman, the former MTV and AOL executive, has garnered new respect as a Web investor (Full disclosure: Pittman’s company invested in Silicon Alley Media, my former employer), so presumably he sees something there.

One plus: Wowowow.com is boasting rapid growth. The site, which launched in March, says it attracted 600,000 unique visitors last month. That number is much higher than outside estimates from outfits like Compete and Quantcast, but that kind of discrepancy is par for the course for any Web publisher.

In any case, if Wowowow.com wants to make a go of it, it’s going to need to attract at least one million uniques a month, a goal the company says it will achieve “early next year.”

BoomTown’s Kara Swisher dropped by the company’s New York offices earlier this year; here’s a video that documents her visit.

Good Job Not Buying Alexa

John Paczkowski — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:16:06 +0000

Compete must have used a fair bit of the $43 million in VC funding it’s raised since 2000 on marketing, because market research outfit Taylor Nelson Sofres is acquiring it–despite the “digital intelligence” company’s reputation for inaccurate Web site traffic measurements and its loss of $4.5 million on $14.9 million of revenue in 2007.

Under the terms of the deal, TNS will purchase Compete for $75 million in cash and another $75 million in performance-based earn-outs over the next two years.

Compete, which has long been overshadowed by metrics verterans like comScore and even newcomers like Quantcast, was overjoyed to be among the early acquisitions in the consolidation beginning in the Web-traffic analysis sector. After all, TNS might have bought Alexa. “Why are we excited about becoming part of the TNS family,” Compete execs wrote in a post to the company blog. “Because it means joining our click-stream data with TNS’s massive consumer panel operations, consumer research capabilities and ad-measurement databases on a global scale. Marrying online and offline consumer data with media spending and exposure is the holy grail of marketing. All of our marketer, agency and media partners will benefit from access to new consumer, brand and media research that will revolutionize how they plan and measure their performance. It’s a big, exciting vision that neither company could do on its own.”