This will be the first time vente-privee, which translates to “private sale,” will enter a non-European market. The site is expected to launch late this year, and like its counterpart in France, will offer designer apparel at low prices for limited amounts of time to people who sign up for a membership.

Vente’s move to the U.S. was expected. The joint venture with American Express was not. One might even go as far as to call the match-up perplexing. (Maybe we should warn vente-privee now that American Express is a credit card-issuer and not some sort of patriotic speedy deliver service, like FedEx or UPS!)

As part of the agreement, the two will be equal partners. However, terms of the deal were not disclosed, such as the size of investment or the kinds of resources the companies would be required to contribute.

To be sure, vente was wise to enter into a partnership for its North American debut. It’s the American Express part that’s easy to get hung up on.

Despite vente-privee being more than a decade-old and well established in Europe, it will be walking down an already crowded catwalk. Many start-ups here have done a good job imitating vente’s model and making it its own. Perhaps its closest competitor is Gilt Groupe of New York, which just raised $138 million. Also a contender is ideeli, which just lined its pockets with $40 million in cash. Others with offerings include Amazon and Nordstrom.

Earlier this week, Gilt’s CEO Kevin Ryan downplayed the significance of vente’s impending entrance in an interview with me (like a model would diss another model’s photo shoot).

“There’s only one player in the world to watch,” he said. “But if you weren’t covering this business, you would have asked ‘Who? I never even heard of them.’ That’s the reality, and for them to enter, they’ll have to set up warehouses and sign up members. Basically, you are a start-up…I don’t worry about international players, even ones that are bigger than we are.”

American Express presumably won’t be able to help vente with warehouse space, but the two claim to have a few synergies. In a press release, American Express Enterprise Growth President Dan Schulman said that both brands have a heritage in the luxury market and place a high premium on delivering quality customer service.

Schulman has been busy heading up American Express’s two-month-old digital payments platform, as of recently. He characterized the joint venture as helping the company reach a new audience. Earlier this week, American Express started working with SCVNGR’s LevelUp app to help redeem coupons at a few Levi’s stores.

Founder Jacques-Antoine Granjon didn’t reveal anything more in his statement, either: “The brands where we have strong relationships are excited about extending their offerings into the U.S. market through this joint venture. There is no question that American Express was our partner of choice. As leaders in B2B and B2C market approaches, we will now combine our skill sets to deliver experiences that are unmatched in the U.S. market.”

But Sittig is now back at the mother ship, having rejoined in January with the title “product architect,” as Kim-Mai Cutler at Inside Facebook reported Friday.

This comes at a time when Facebook has more than 2,000 employees, plans to move to a corporate campus within the next year and says an IPO is likely in 2012. It’s a lot different from when Sittig first joined in 2005.

Sittig had been away from the company only six months before accepting an offer to return. He told NetworkEffect that he felt the outside world lacked the “scale and ambition” of Facebook. Plus, he was lured by some of Facebook’s recent hires: Sam Lessin and Justin Shaffer, brought in through the acquisitions of their companies Drop.io and Hot Potato, respectively (both of which occurred while Sittig was away).

Here’s Sittig’s explanation:

I left Facebook last June because I’d been there for five years and wanted to see what else I could apply myself to. I didn’t expect at the time that I’d head back.

I spent my time off advising companies and looking for new ideas. But for each idea I wanted to build myself, I kept realizing that Facebook was the only place with the scale and ambition where I could build my ideas successfully.

So that, combined with the steady influx of talented people like Sam Lessin and Justin Shaffer, convinced me to say yes when I was approached with an offer to rejoin.

Prior to Facebook, Sittig worked at Napster, after it bought the Mac client Macster that he had helped develop. He studied philosophy at UC Berkeley. Sittig has made angel investments in companies such as Hearsay, which makes corporate social media management tools.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Dorian Howard found that out the hard way when her small e-commerce start-up, Milk & Honey, crashed after E! reported on Monday night that celebrities–such as Ginnifer Goodwin of the HBO Series “Big Love,” Busy Philipps from ABC’s “Cougar Town” and Disney star Selena Gomez–were using it to design their own shoes.

In the 48 hours after the segment, Milk & Honey’s servers slowed to a crawl as thousands of women tried over and over to order something special that no one else had.

“Our site went bananas,” Howard said. “No one can order shoes because it’s totally crashed….I had no idea how much bandwidth we had. I’m a shoe designer. I don’t speak tech.”

The site, which is back online as of this morning, was founded by Dorian, who lives in Los Angeles, and her older sister, Ilissa, who lives in Hong Kong. It’s Ilissa’s job to manage the cobblers who bring to life the crazy shoe combinations people come up with.

Woman can pick from pumps or flats–round, pointy or peep toe, sling backs and closed backs–and from a variety of colors and textures, from leather to faux snake skin. Metallic studs and bows are optional. Each pair ranges from $200 to $325, depending on complexity.

Popular right now are nude-color shoes “because they go with anything in winter or summer, and they make your legs look really long,” Dorian said. A close second is red glitter.

Over the past six months, the self-funded sisters have flirted with the realities of building a business from scratch.

During slow months, they were convinced they “were the only people in the world that cared about customized shoes,” so when the servers crashed with people actually wanting to buy, Dorian stayed up all night tracking down server administrators on the other side of the globe who were still awake and could recover their site.

“We’ve had a few people who’ve called or were able to order over live chat, but we haven’t been able to process orders,” she said.

While the site was down, they added 1,500 Facebook fans, so hopefully those fans will come back to buy later. But in the frenzy, Dorian forgot completely about their Twitter community.

The urgency of the matter was heard audibly Tuesday afternoon, as users accessing the server caused a constant pinging in the background. “It’s amazing, it’s great, it’s what we are dreaming of,” Dorian said.

The sisters, who were previously in the film industry and toy business, have learned a lot of lessons. “At least we are consistent,” she joked. “We fuck up everything the first time, and then the second time we knock it out of the park.”

At times, they were close to the brink. “If we didn’t hit our number in December, we might not be in business today. We hit it by one [pair of shoes], but January exploded, and we hit our first-quarter goal in the first month of January.”

Next up, the two are considering talking to investors to help open a boutique so women can design their shoes in person. They also have their eyes on creating a spring collection.

“We wanted to see how long we could get away on our own. We are pretty close to our limit. It’s been tight, but it’s been working. I wash my own car now, and I mow my own lawn.”

“The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates–Bill was brilliant too, but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do that. Steve believed in perfection….When I think about different kinds of CEOs–CEOs who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal negotiators, great people motivators–but the great skill that Steve has is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing.”

– John Sculley, one-time CEO of Apple, offers his insights into the secrets of Steve Jobs’s success in a long interview with “Cult of Mac” author Leander Kahney.

Who: Ben Zotto, lead everything (it’s a one-man shop).

Ben was at Microsoft and worked for Xoopit, the email-enhancement start-up acquired by Yahoo (YHOO).

What: Ben’s Penultimate brings a Moleskine notebook-style user interface to the iPad. He just released an update that allows you to rest your palm on the screen while writing, the same way you might with a pad and paper.

Why: It has been in the top tier of the Apple (AAPL) App Store for weeks.

Where: cocoabox.com (Web site); @cocoabox (Twitter); San Francisco (analog place)

Who Else: Apps like PaperDesk and Idea Boards use the pen-and-surface interface. Penultimate does drawing a little differently, though. Ben says it’s about the ink.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: I’ve been pretty privileged. I was a short-term photocopy runner for the Junior World Ice Hockey Championships in Geneva when I was in my teens. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t suppose it played to all of my strengths.

School Days: I grew up in Boston, but we moved to Switzerland during my high school days. I left eighth grade in Massachusetts, maybe never before having left the state. And within a month of arriving in Geneva, we were on a history class trip to Florence. It was awesome.

Geek Crush: There are a lot of guys from my Microsoft (MSFT) days who are my programming heroes. Guys like Tracy Sharpe and Dinarte Morais. I’m also a big fan of Wil Shipley.

It’s something about his combination of making beautiful and functional software and being fiercely independent–you know, a coffee shop denizen–that I’m attracted to. I actually found the designer I worked with on Penultimate through him.

Gadget Freak: I don’t carry a lot of gadgets. I am pretty picky about my work set-up, though. I use an Apple extended keyboard from the 1980s with the heavy-duty key switches that I rescued off eBay (EBAY) and the Microsoft optical IntelliMouse, which is, for my money, the best mouse developed so far.

Early Internet Memory: Right after I moved to Switzerland, I had a friend back in Boston who would email me. It was probably 1992, so it wasn’t really email. He found some dial-up number at MIT that had an open gateway.

It wasn’t obvious then how you would send an email to an internal address where my dad worked. It was one of those early u-u gateway/bang-this/bang-that things. He finally figured out how to get it to work, and my dad’s secretary would print out these letters from my friend Micah back in Boston.

That was how I heard the news from Massachusetts for a little while. Micah is a recent recipient of a Ph.D in computer science from UPenn. Not a fool.

Bio in 140 Characters

Ben had an international childhood. He has worked at Microsoft, Xoopit and Yahoo. He writes software that he hopes is beautiful and useful.

The Five Questions

How long have you been developing Penultimate? Why is it a killer app when so many others don’t seem to be?

Originally, I developed an app called Handwriting for the iPhone. There was potential there, with the touchscreen, to give a personal touch to messages through handwriting that wasn’t there before. For that reason, I spent a lot of time working on the graphics math for the ink.

I wanted the input to really resemble the handwriting of the user. It turns out that getting digital ink to look real is a really subtle thing. I spent a lot of time getting it to move right, getting it to feel smooth and whatnot. I finally got it where I was happy with it.

I released the app and basically, nobody bought it.

People responded well, but I realized that anyone who used the app would only use the surface that they could see within the bounds of the iPhone screen, even though I made it so that you could scroll around easily to get a bigger surface for writing.

Size was clearly an issue.

The iPad coming out meant that all of a sudden something that was just more of a single tool like handwriting could be scaled up into an app with real uses, and all it took was more screen real estate.

Steve Jobs, in his iPad release presentation, said that if they’d added a stylus, they’d have gotten it wrong. Does the success of your app fly in the face of that vision?

It’s funny, I’d never heard that until now. I didn’t watch that speech.

When the iPad came out, I got this vision of doctors walking around making notes, and it looked like there would be lots of use cases where a keyboard just wasn’t ideal.

People would need to input info standing up, while moving and in portrait mode. From the pictures, it wasn’t clear the keyboard would be great for that.

I developed Handwriting and Penultimate to be used with your finger, and that’s how I use them most. And I think Apple has good reasons for not pushing that. They could have developed handwriting recognition, but for them, that draws away from what they are really trying to sell.

Handwriting recognition is really hard, and as soon as you do that and say you are going to do it with a finger, you have people saying, “Why doesn’t this thing recognize my handwriting better?”–instead of marveling at all the amazing things you can do with the platform.

Have you faced issues from Apple, developing a popular app that goes a little against the grain?

I’ve heard complaints about the App Store, but I’ve had a pretty good experience so far. It usually takes them about 48 hours to approve updates for my stuff. That said, there are some hardware things I’ve run into.

A big one is trying to get palm rejection in my app so that you can place your hand on the screen to write and not have it register as a touch.

On the iPad, Apple doesn’t expose those drivers to developers. On the MacBook, for instance, you can hook in the driver and get all the data–the width of the touch, rotation, everything.

All that is closed off for the iPad, so getting the natural handwriting position has been really challenging. I’m playing with that right now because it’s been one of the loudest requests.

You are embracing this use case that Apple seems to wish wasn’t there. What other requests are you getting from users who want to be able to write on their iPads?

I think form-filling is a big one. There are apps that do that, but their ink technology isn’t as good as mine, which is why I think I get those requests even though there are other apps in the field.

I got this great email from the head of a police department, who said that out in the field there are all these forms he has to fill, and he wants to take them with him and not have to bring paper.

There are all kinds. I got mail from a roofing contractor who wants to be able to snap his drawn lines to a grid to draw quick plans.

I’ve got friends who are doctors who think it’s a great idea, but say they could never use it because of HIPAA.

There seems to really be a lot of uses for being able to write by hand and make notes in this very natural way.

You worked in regular software before you did this. What is fundamentally different about developing for this platform? What are people missing about that?

I think a big difference today is that people expect updates much faster than before. It’s fundamentally different than shrink-wrapped software world, where you would spend lots of time making and refining a product, packaging it and shipping it out.

Today, people expect to see some kind of update or fix every couple of weeks and they expect them to be free. If you don’t issue an update for a while, people might begin to think you are dead.

Because the mobile platform apps are these single-use things, there is a perception that they are smaller or more simple and that therefore there is an entitlement to future updates. It’s great for users but really hard for developers.

There’s this ever-present question: “How much software is ‘three dollars worth’?”

The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100528/almost-famous-ben-zotto-of-cocoa-box-design/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100125/more-stuff-you-wont-see-on-tablet-day-conde-nast-magazines/ http://allthingsd.com/20100125/more-stuff-you-wont-see-on-tablet-day-conde-nast-magazines/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:22:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=15487 I got a great glimpse of the future of magazines last week. It’s the March issue of Wired, transformed into a digital edition that takes full advantage of the Apple tablet we’re going to see Wednesday.

I’d show you a video demo, but Wired publisher Condé Nast is keeping it under wraps for now. But not because the company plans to show it off at the Apple event.

It doesn’t.

Like just about everyone else in the media world, Condé Nast executives think they know what Steve Jobs is going to unveil, but they’re in the dark when it comes to details. The demo they showed off at an industry dinner was much more advanced than the one they showed off in November. But as beautiful and engaging as it is, the demo is still just a demo.

I should note here that the Condé guys–along with the Adobe (ADBE) team helping them–are appropriately proud of their demo. They point out that it is built on live code, as opposed to Flash movies they and other publishers have shown off in the past.

But as Adobe design manager Jeremy Clark told me last week, Condé Nast can’t build a digital magazine for an Apple tablet–or a Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) tablet, for that matter–until it gets its hands on one, and it hasn’t done so yet.

Which is why when you do see the first Condé Nast products on the tablet later this spring, they are likely to be supersized editions of the GQ app it is already selling for the iPhone and iPod touch and not the more ambitious stuff Wired is working on.

Condé executives have talked to Apple (AAPL) about their intentions to build tablet-ready magazines–as have executives from Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc.–but those conversations are pretty much one-way affairs, sources tell me: The magazine guys tell the Apple guys what they’d like to do, hoping for some kind of guidance from the Apple guys. And the Apple guys listen politely, but don’t say much.

This applies to both technical stuff–the Condé guys don’t know if Adobe’s AIR platform, which they used for their demo, will work on the tablet–as well as big-picture business questions. For instance, Condé would like to sell tablet magazine subscriptions directly to consumers, without having to work through Apple’s iTunes store. And through an Apple proxy, the publisher has communicated that desire to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, I’m told. No word back, though.

Again, you can extrapolate this scenario for all but a select few media companies. Even for some that you’d expect to be on board for an Apple launch. Disney’s (DIS) ESPN unit, for instance, is sending representatives to the Wednesday event, but won’t be participating, sources tell me.

The good news for Apple’s would-be media partners: All of this should become much clearer by Wednesday afternoon.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100125/more-stuff-you-wont-see-on-tablet-day-conde-nast-magazines/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091005/apple-woolworths/ http://allthingsd.com/20091005/apple-woolworths/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:01:31 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=25922

“• It is a stylised ‘W’ for Woolworths with the addition of an abstract leaf symbol representing fresh food;
• It is reminiscent of one of the most famous Woolworths logos of the 1970s;
• It represents a person–as in ‘The Fresh Food People’ and the Woolworths focus on its customers.”

– Woolworths announces its new logo.

Woolworths Supermarkets describes its new logo as “an abstract leaf symbol” intended to represent fresh food. But to Apple, the stylized “W” looks far too much like its own namesake fruit, which could be problematic should the supermarket chain someday decide to peddle its own brand of consumer electronics. And so Apple is petitioning IP Australia, the local agency that governs trademarks, to reject the Woolworths application for the mark.

It seems an overly litigious move, even for Apple (AAPL). As Hans Hulsbosch, the Woolworths logo designer dryly notes, “Based on this logic, they would have to take action against every fruitseller.”

That said, the Woolworths application is for a blanket trademark on a broad range of goods, including electronics, specifically “apparatus for recording, transmission or reproduction of sound or images…calculating machines, data processing equipment and computers…computer devices and computer peripheral devices…[and] computer hardware and software.”

While it might seem unlikely that the supermarket chain would ever manufacture devices, it did recently begin dabbling in cellphones, so it’s not entirely out of the question. Said a Woolworths spokesman: “While we can’t rule [computers, musical players, or other devices] out, we haven’t got any plans at the moment.”

This isn’t the first time Apple has challenged a trademark. Last year the company went after New York City’s GreeNYC campaign claiming its logo would create confusion in the marketplace. And in 2007, Apple settled a long-running trademark dispute with The Beatles’ parent company, Apple Corps.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091005/apple-woolworths/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090712/a-google-lawyer-waves-goodbye-lands-at-twitter/ http://allthingsd.com/20090712/a-google-lawyer-waves-goodbye-lands-at-twitter/#comments Sun, 12 Jul 2009 14:38:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9200 We’re used to seeing Google vets leave for Facebook. Now they’re headed to Twitter.

The buzzy microblogging service has just grabbed its highest-profile Google (GOOG) exec to date: Alexander Macgillivray, a deputy general counsel at the search firm, is coming aboard as Twitter’s top lawyer.

Macgillivray is best known as the lead Google attorney on high-profile intellectual property cases like its fights with book publishers, the Associated Press and Viacom (VIA). Twitter has yet to find itself mired in that sort of thing, but give it time.

Macgillivray is just the latest Googler to land at Twitter. Earlier this year, the start-up nabbed Doug Bowman, the search giant’s lead designer, to join the ranks of several other Googleplex veterans, including, of course, co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone.

There are lots of reasons to leave a big company for a scrappy start-up, but just to spell out one obvious one: If you’re into risk, there is a whole lot more upside at Twitter these days.

The company’s last funding round pegged its value at $240 million, and if it ends up being acquired in the next few years, that number could be much higher. But Google shares stalled long before last fall’s stock market collapse (click chart to enlarge):

[Image credit: Doc Searls]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090712/a-google-lawyer-waves-goodbye-lands-at-twitter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090626/just-imagination-running-away-with-apple-intel/ http://allthingsd.com/20090626/just-imagination-running-away-with-apple-intel/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:30:14 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=20301 Apple (AAPL) put some of the vast $28 billion in cash and short-term investments it has socked away to good use this week, raising its stake in Imagination Technologies. The $5.16 million investment nearly triples Apple’s original 3.6 percent stake, giving it 9.5 percent ownership of the British chip designer whose PowerVR graphics technology figures prominently in the iPhone and iPod touch.

Interestingly, the move follows an investment by another high-profile licensee: Intel. The chipmaker last week increased its own stake in Imagination to 14 16 percent, causing some to speculate that Intel (INTC) was prepping a takeover bid for the company. After all, Intel uses PowerVR in its Atom platform, which is crucial to its success on the mobile phone market.

Could these dueling investments set the stage for a takeover battle for the company? It’s certainly possible, but Seymour Pierce analyst Ian Robertson says it’s unlikely.

“Apple and Intel are investors not buyers,” Robertson said in a research note. “We do not expect either Intel or Apple to go beyond 15-20 percent in the short to medium term and we would be very surprised indeed if they were to attempt to buy Imagination. We note that both Apple and Intel have the resources to swallow up the company without chewing. We remind investors that Intel has a long history of taking and holding significant stakes in companies that it has seen as important to its further success–notably Micron and RAMBUS where its investment was not necessarily a guarantee of success for these companies.”

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