At one point, our conversation turned to the idea of a Social Operating System, something that becomes an underlying platform for all things we do online, that creates continual connectivity between you and and all your friends. As I look back over Facebook’s history and excitedly toward its future, I think we can all say that Facebook has essentially captured that vision. It has presented to us a world where applications run on top of a social infrastructure and where our identities travel throughout our digital experience with us through Facebook Connect. I could not be more impressed.

The way the principles of the social operating system continue to evolve will have a tremendous impact on our society.

First, marketing will change. Friend-to-friend marketing has already shown its strength as the driving force of growth for companies like Gilt Groupe, Uncovet.com and Fab.com, whereby you earn credits with the site by referring your friends to sign up. The idea of shifting traditional marketing spend to continually incentivizing your customers to market on your behalf is changing the way I look at developing systems. The idea, though it sounds simple, has many ramifications. For example, it requires new software to be built with a new set of metrics in order to understand how friend-to-friend marketing is working. It would also lower the cost per acquisition compared to traditional marketing spends.

Second, it’s the influencers who will have most of the power. As we become more and more reliant on our social graph for discovery, the less and less dependent we will become on traditional media. This is one of the principles that drives Twitter, Pinterist and YouTube adoption. We can see how effective is it with companies like ShoeDazzle and BeachMint, which build product lines around celebrities and influencers online. By doing this, they immediately drive higher sales. I theorize these influencer networks will be the next ad networks, having the sway to move audiences to new services and drive sales.

Lastly, these new principles of social software design will prevail. Built on top of platforms like Facebook, they will quickly replace older systems. In the last big wave of acquisitions, we saw media companies and portals buying start-ups to bring innovation inside. I believe the next set of acquirers will be from a wider, more distributed set of buyers — ranging from consumer product brands to financial companies — who are looking for innovators building the next generation of solutions on top of the social operating system. (Looking at the staggering growth rate of the socially-minded site Fab.com quickly reminds us that products built with social grow faster than those without.)

With Facebook’s IPO, the general public will be even more vested in its success and thus help to further boost Facebook’s exponential growth. Facebook’s investors will, in essence, collectively help to drive forward the innovation of social operating system platforms. In addition, any companies that rely on Facebook’s technology or its platform — such as Zynga, Renen and Snap Interactive — should also see a lift in value. This wave of new technology companies will reinvent, once again, the way we live online.

Now that Facebook has gone public, I think we can call the era of Web 2.0 over. The social web is taking its rightful place as the new king.

Michael Jones is the founder and CEO of technology studio Science. The former CEO of Myspace, Jones is a long-time entrepreneur, building and selling numerous successful online and mobile businesses. He is also an individual investor in numerous private start-ups, and, in full disclosure, holds stock in some of the companies listed above.

Earlier this month, Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan downplayed rumors that the New York-based company was undergoing a massive restructuring.

He said that nearly all of Gilt Groupe’s 900 employees and business units would remain intact, despite reports that painted a fairly grim picture of the situation.

Today, Ryan confirmed that the final tally ended up being from 80 to 90 people, and that John Auerbach, who headed Park & Bond, its men’s full-priced apparel site, and Nathan Richardson, who ran Gilt City, would both be leaving, after a transition period.

All of the cuts are designed to get the company to cash flow positive by the second quarter, and profitable by the fourth quarter, Ryan said.

Additionally, Ryan said that Richardson and Auerbach, who was Gilt’s fifth employee, are leaving because both are better suited for running start-ups.

“I will be their No. 1 reference,” he said.

An internal memo announcing the departures is expected to be sent around later this afternoon.

On Friday, the cuts focused on Gilt City, the company’s daily deals site that, despite its high-end focus, was competing head to head with others, such as Groupon, LivingSocial and the many other clones in the market.

Ryan said there will be a lot of consolidation in the daily deals space going forward, but that in certain markets it remains a good business for the company, including New York, which is its most profitable division.

“I think you’ll end up with a smaller group of companies. There will be a couple of high-end players, like ourselves and Bloomspot, and then there will be a couple of verticals, like restaurants or kids, and that’s it,” he said.

As part of Friday’s cuts, the company confirmed that it will no longer have offices in Seattle, Dallas and Atlanta. Additional offices it gained through the acquisition of BuyWithMe, including San Diego, Houston and Philadelphia, will also close.

Customers in those markets will receive national deals, but only local deals that are sourced through a centralized sales team. Going forward, Gilt will have offices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Washington, D.C.

Earlier this month, Ryan had said he had only expected to lay off about 50 staffers, much less than the rumored 170.

On Friday, New York Magazine reported that more than 100 people were laid off, naming both Richardson and Auerbach as departing executives. It also reported that staffers, who once received a fridge full of snacks, would no longer have a daily supply of fruit, yogurt, cheese and Pellegrino water.

Over the past year, the company expanded quickly beyond its roots as a flash sales site, adding Park & Bond, Gilt City and Gilt Taste, a high-end grocery site. It continues to be in about seven businesses.

Some of the areas that were also restructured were the newer sites, like Gilt Taste and Park & Bond, which Ryan said took more resources to get up and running than it took to run on a day-to-day basis.

Gilt, which raised $138 million in capital last May, is on track for an IPO, perhaps as early as the fourth quarter, but more likely in 2013, Ryan added.

But it doesn’t use Facebook or any identifying information. Instead, Expedia surfaces the best deals found by other travelers, anonymously, for flights and hotel rooms, based on your location.

The site will list the best deals for three time periods: tonight, this weekend or next weekend. Customers can search for hotels or flights based on a couple dozen destinations.

For example, this weekend, nights at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers cost $113 and the cheapest flight out of Los Angeles tonight is to Seattle for $252 roundtrip.

The process is similar to other flash sales sites that sell apparel or other items at a discount based on inventory. Many other flash sales sites focus on travel, too, such as Gilt Groupe’s Jetsetter. However, there’s one big difference with this service. The deals are being found by other customers searching the site. The service is not being driven by a special sales relationship between Expedia and the suppliers.

That probably means the deals are not unique to Expedia and can be found on other travel aggregation sites, but at the same time, Expedia didn’t have to hire a sales team or build out a lot of infrastructure to support the feature.

“In a sense, the millions of people who come to Expedia are now serving as your own personal travel agent, helping you find the best and most popular deals from your home city,” said Joe Megibow, VP and GM of Expedia, in a statement.

The Web site is very simple to navigate and takes out a lot of the headaches of searching millions of listings. That also means that the selection is limited to around six results for each time period — in other words, not a ton of destinations or hotels to pick from. Cancun was offering six hotel rooms — some for as low as $40 a night — for this weekend. Orlando also listed six hotel rooms, all under $100 a night.

This is not Expedia’s first experiment in the deals space.

Last summer, it launched a partnership with Groupon that sells vouchers for vacations around the world. It said it successfully sold 15,000 travel deals in the first three days of launching that partnership, but wasn’t entirely satisfied with the model yet. It also launched a program called ASAP (A Sudden Amazing Price), which lists deals at 9 am PT and is bookable for 12 hours only.

In the past seven months, Fab has grown rapidly, registering 1.65 million users, who have purchased 750,000 products.

It now plans to grow even faster, with the help of this acquisition.

Both companies have a similar mission: To bring independent artists and craftsmen, who make aesthetically appealing and sometimes out-of-the ordinary items, to a large marketplace.

Fab.com does this mostly for home decor, and New York-based FashionStake does it mostly for fashion and apparel. The sites have the flavor of a Gilt Groupe, which sells high-end fashion at a discount, except they offer more undiscovered brands, at more reasonable prices.

In a blog post, Fab CEO Jason Goldberg said FashionStake co-founders Vivian Weng and Daniel Gulati will join the Fab company.

Goldberg did not disclose terms of the deal, but it’s possible that he tapped into a large cash reserve, which includes a $40 million round of capital raised last month from Andreessen Horowitz and others.

FashionStake, which launched in September 2010, has received investments from a number of players, including Battery Ventures, Forerunner Ventures and Gilt Groupe co-founder Alexis Maybank.

Last year, FashionStake acquired Moxsie, another retailer of independent fashion.

Ryan called AllThingsD this morning to clear the air after a report in BetaBeat painted a fairly grim picture of the situation.

BetaBeat reported this morning that as many as 170 employees would be laid off today; that Gilt Taste, the company’s high-end grocery site, was likely to be closed down; and that Jetsetter, its travel operations, was likely to be merged with Gilt City, its daily deal division.

On pretty much all accounts, Ryan declared not guilty.

“We are not closing down any businesses. We are not closing down Gilt Taste, and we aren’t merging Gilt City and Jetsetter,” he said.

Additionally, another new division, Park & Bond, which sells full-priced men’s clothing, is also doing well. “In its fifth month of business, Park & Bond did more revenue than any other business in its fifth month,” Ryan added.

The one grain of truth in all of it, he said, is that over the next couple of months, he expects to selectively trim staff by roughly 50 employees.

But for emphasis, he added, the company will still end up having more employees by the end of March than it does now.

“It’s pretty minimal in the scheme of having 900 employees,” he said. “Not only will we do that [have cutbacks], but we will continue to do that. What Gilt needs to be, and is doing, is to create a fantastic consumer experience while running an efficient company.”

He said the company achieved its goal of generating $500 million in June and now is setting its sights on transitioning the business from a money-losing organization to cash-flow break even this year.

He also said that Gilt Groupe, which raised $138 million in capital last May, is on track for an IPO, perhaps as early as the fourth quarter, but more likely in 2013.

“The timing feels about right, and we are on a steady progression,” said Ryan, who declined to give revenue estimates for this year because the company is in the sensitive lead-up to a public offering.

Ryan named two divisions that may see cuts over the next couple of months: Gilt Taste and Gilt City.

In October, Gilt City purchased BuyWithMe, and although it hired only 20-25 of the deal provider’s 190 employees, Ryan said they probably don’t need that many going forward now that the integration has been completed.

Additionally, he said there are some inefficiencies within Gilt Taste.

Ryan characterized the site as “doing great,” but said it will need fewer staffers now that it is up and running. At first, it needed to negotiate deals with dozens of vendors and shoot photos of the more than 1,000 products on the site.

Now that they’ve hit a baseline of items, they’ll probably add only a couple hundred new products a year, reducing the need for so much staff.

“There’s much less work to do there,” Ryan said. “With flash sales, you have to do that process every week, but in the full-priced business, there’s greater start-up costs. That’s part of the business.”

In particular, BetaBeat said Park & Bond President John Auerbach was likely to leave the company.

Ryan said there’s always the chance one of the top 15 executives could leave, whether it was their decision or the company’s, but that Auerbach is still working there as of now.

“I have about 50 pairs of Nikes in my closet, and it seemed to me like I should be treated differently by Nike than a customer who has zero pairs,” he said.

The thought inspired Swinmurn to start RNKD, which is launching in beta today. Customers can create profiles and upload pictures of items of clothing they already own by snapping a picture and designating brands and where they bought each piece.

“The idea was to bridge the gap between consumers and brands by using what people already have in their closets,” Swinmurn said.

Users will be rewarded with badges and points for uploading photos, and will have the opportunity to win gift cards based on their participation. Swinmurn believes brands could use RNKD as a way to offer clothing at a discount to their most dedicated fans.

The emphasis is on the brand, rather than the store at which the apparel was purchased, which is how many other loyalty programs are designed.

Swinmurn, who left Zappos before it was sold to Amazon, also gained inspiration for RNKD after starting a small clothing line called Dethrone, which creates gear and clothing for practitioners of mixed martial arts. He said he sells 99 percent of the apparel to small shops. “We have no idea who walks into the shops and buys the product,” he said.

Swinmurn is hoping to tip the market on its head. Brands are already giving discounts on clothing at stores like Ross and T.J. Maxx, and on online flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe, ideeli and Rue La La. But those discounts aren’t being given to the biggest fans of the brands.

Instead, Swinmurn argues, discounts should go to consumers who deserve them.

RNKD is based in San Francisco, and is self-funded by Swinmurn, who has an engineering team of one.

In July, the Salt Lake City-based company, which is also known as Overstock, discontinued the year-old Eziba, a boutique site that mimicked flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe, Rue La La and One Kings Lane.

Meanwhile, on its homepage, the company has also been cutting back. After six years, it shut down its auctions category, which was similar to eBay; earlier this year, it shuttered real estate, which allowed people to browse homes for sale and receive discounts on real estate services.

And finally, one of its newest ventures is also on hold.

In March, O.co launched a vacations tab, which offered discounted hotel rooms. It is expected to relaunch later next month with a new partner.

In an interview, O.co President Jonathan Johnson explained the cutbacks.

He said that auctions and real estate in particular didn’t seem to fit its model. The two categories weren’t things you could easily add to the shopping cart and buy right away. The real estate tab was a referral service, and auctions required haggling.

Meanwhile, Johnson said, Eziba cannibalized sales from its main site.

Eziba was a modern boutique that featured large photos of the products, in contrast to Overstock’s more straightforward, traditional e-commerce layout, which stressed searching for items displayed in small thumbnail pictures. Eziba offered a dozen or so products at a time by email, as compared to the hundreds of thousands of items found daily on Overstock.

“We watch and see what competitors are doing,” Johnson said. “We thought private sales sites would be good to experiment with … What we learned was that it wasn’t bringing us any new customers.”

Johnson concluded that they could offer the same deals on Overstock.

He also said manufacturers were concerned that by offering discounts on items for Eziba, it was hurting future sales over the next week or month.

“We did not see the lift in Eziba that we were hoping,” he added.

The 12-year-old company is stuck with a model that surfaced when shopping first became prevalent on the Internet. With 2010 revenues of $1.1 billion, it all of a sudden appears out of style compared to smaller start-ups that are able to raise millions of dollars in venture capital.

And even while those more trendy companies get all of the attention, a majority of sales still are occurring on traditional megasites, like eBay, Amazon and the Overstocks of the world.

One business Johnson said the company investigated but never launched was daily deals.

“We did some development on the Groupon model,” he said. “But we aren’t bullish on the model. The merchants we talked to said it brings in a nonloyal, coupon-using customer that doesn’t come back. I wish them (Groupon) the best, but there’s 600 other Groupon-like competitors. It wasn’t the right time to say ‘me, too.’”

The vacations tab is expected to relaunch in December with a new provider, and will offer a larger array of products, including hotels, rental cars and airfare. It will rejoin three other categories — shopping, cars and insurance. In a note to users, it says: “We promise we aren’t lying by the pool or sitting under a beach cabana, but are hard at work exploring even better vacation destinations, packages and exclusive deals.”

The company also continues to expand internationally. Today, it ships to 91 countries, and in the next two to four weeks, expects to add another 23 countries. The shift from using O.co instead of Overstock was to support visitors in more languages.

In the three months ended Sept. 30, the company’s revenues fell 2 percent to $239.7 million, from $245.4 million in the year-ago period. Its losses also widened to nearly $8 million from $3 million.

The company attributed the decrease in revenues to several reasons, including lower conversion rates, 8 percent fewer new customers compared to last year, and its rebranding efforts.

The most recent round was led by Accel Partners. Existing investors New Enterprise Associates and FirstMark Capital also participated.

“That’s pretty huge for us,” Lot18’s founder Philip James said in an interview. “We are a year old. We launched on Nov. 10, and it’s a little bit of a surprise that we raised an A, B and C in such a short period of time.”

James said the funding was justified because Lot18 is growing so quickly.

In the past year, it has expanded to 90 employees, added 600,000 members and sold 500,000 bottles of wine. In addition, the company has added two new product categories, “Gourmet” and “Experience,” which sell food and travel, respectively.

James said it is Lot18’s goal to be the leader in the epicurean space — and to be all about eating and drinking.

On a standalone basis, that makes it similar to Gilt Taste, which is a full-priced online gourmet store owned by e-commerce company Gilt Groupe, which dabbles in everything from discount to full-price fashion and daily deals.

Also in the space is Wine.com, which has been selling wine online since 1998 and has a selection of hundreds of thousands of bottles. It also operates WineShopper, a members-only daily wine deals site.

James said he doesn’t anticipate getting into other categories, such as fashion or home accessories, as many other sites in the category have. He also says international expansion is not on the immediate roadmap, since shipping alcohol faces so many regulations.

Lot18 is a marketplace, so it does not own any inventory or warehouses; its cost structure is a little different from some of the others. Instead, the company’s headcount is a considerable expense, as are its marketing costs to get new members — just like Groupon. In addition, it subsidizes shipping, since wine is so heavy and fragile.

As the company grows, those costs continue, but there’s also a chance they may fall, as volume discounts on postage start to apply.

The company offers between 10 and 20 new products a day, from wines to travel and food. Users sign up to receive a daily email; James said that if people don’t make purchases, or even read the emails, the frequency drops. Its top-tier users have an open rate of more than 50 percent.

“We are blurring the line between content and commerce,” he said. “It’s for people who care about what they eat and drink. Even if they don’t buy it, they like learning about it.”

And unlike other companies, it’s not all about the discounts.

“The value proposition is curation, access and value,” James said. “When I think of flash sales, I think of discounts on products I already know. When something is artisanal, and it comes from a small, family-owned business, it’s about introducing people to brands they don’t already know.”

The $30 million round follows a $10 million second round in May, and a first round of $3 million. Quidsi founders Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara, who sold their company to Amazon, are also investors.

The former DoubleClick executive, who sold his company to Google for $3.2 billion, had his pick of high-profile jobs, but instead has landed at a company most people probably have never heard of.

You can be sure that between Rosenblatt’s appointment and an injection of capital from Benchmark, that’s about to change.

Both Rosenblatt and Benchmark’s General Partner Matt Cohler will join the company’s board. Neither 1stdibs nor Cohler would disclose details of the investment.

In an interview, Rosenblatt told me that, unlike DoubleClick, this is not an advertising play.

“What was exciting to me about DoubleClick was that it was an opportunity to usher an industry into the digital age,” he said. “I think we have a comparable opportunity here at 1stdibs in the luxury marketplace. That’s what gets me excited about it. It’s not an ads business.”

The company’s obscurity in tech circles did not dissuade Rosenblatt from the opportunity.

“I have never come across a company that is as unknown among the Internet crowd, but is known as well as it is in its vertical,” he said.

Rosenblatt quoted from a Bain & Company study to highlight the size of the opportunity. It found that only three percent of luxury spending was spent online as of 2009, even though the market size totaled $257 billion in 2010.

Already, Rosenblatt said, 1stdibs’ gross merchandise volume of goods (the value of goods sold by dealers on the site) was set to exceed $500 million in 2011. He said the average price of each item sold is $5,000, which sets it apart from other luxury players, like One Kings Lane and Gilt Groupe, both of which are focused on offering daily discounts for items.

1stdibs plans to expand into more categories and geographies for growth. It has already gone beyond furnishings to real estate, fashion, fine art and jewelry. The company is a marketplace, so it makes money by charging dealers a listing fee to post items on the site. Currently, it has 1,200 dealers, who sell 6,000 items a month. Because dealers and sellers connect directly, similarly to eBay, 1stdibs does not stock inventory or have to manage warehouses.

Rosenblatt said he discovered the company through Benchmark’s Cohler.

Cohler said he learned of the site through his brother, a well-respected interior designer who was helping him decorate his house.

Cohler said that countless items in his house were found on 1stdibs. “I was astonished to see how incredibly powerful it was,” he said.

Ironically, Cohler was able to close the investment with 1stdibs and recruit Rosenblatt faster than it took to redecorate his house, which “is never really done,” he joked.

Cohler said that Rosenblatt’s appointment will lend the company the operational expertise it needs to scale a large Internet company. “I don’t think there’s anyone better in the world to take the company forward,” he added.

The 1stdibs marketplace was founded in 2001 by Michael Bruno, who had the goal of bringing the Paris flea market — famous for its one-of-a-kind items — to the Internet.

Bruno, who Rosenblatt calls a charismatic entrepreneur, will continue to play an active role at the company by working on strategy and consulting directly with customers.

Rosenblatt will continue to sit on the boards of Group Commerce, Twitter and IAC.

Gilt will be purchasing BuyWithMe’s assets, including its member and vendor lists, as well as some of its technology. Other companies also exploring offers included San Francisco-based Bloomspot and the No. 2 player, LivingSocial.

Both companies are based in New York and partially backed by Matrix Partners, so the handoff should be fairly simple. We hear the deal is expected to officially close next week and remaining employees at BuyWithMe will be able to apply for jobs at Gilt.

UPDATE: Gilt will pay about $5 million in cash and stock for the assets, according to multiple sources. At this price, it was pretty much a fire sale. BuyWithMe had raised about $20 million in venture capital and had also secured additional debt.

The acquisition was first reported by Ben Popper at BetaBeat, who has been following the situation closely.

A spokesperson from Gilt City declined to comment, and BuyWithMe could not be reached for comment.

BuyWithMe, which was once considered a top contender in the space, had struggled and then expanded rapidly in the past few months by making six acquisitions to enter new markets across the country.

To support its spending spree, it was seeking to raise $100 million in new financing at a $500 million valuation, our source said.  But without making any progress over the past couple of months, it was forced to lay off a sizable chunk of its staff last week and seek alternatives.

The funding market for deals sites is tough right now, with Groupon and LivingSocial dominating the market and having secured billions of dollars combined — before Groupon’s pending IPO.

Some of the smaller players, such as Bloomspot, have been able to raise funding based on pitching a slightly different business model.

Especially of value is BuyWithMe’s subscriber list; the lists are incredibly expensive to build and are the primary way that daily deals sites have been able to grow revenues.

So far, Gilt City has expanded into 10 cities. BuyWithMe is active in about 13 markets, many in which Gilt is already operating.

With the launch of the travel vertical, the members-only flash sales site treads more heavily into the territory of others who have been working on travel packages and other experiences for much longer.

Several other daily deals and flash sales sites have already gotten into the business of offering travel packages, including Groupon’s partnership with Expedia and Gilt Groupe’s high-end, exclusive vacations on its own Jetsetter.com.

The company’s new Lot18 Experiences will offer a twist, focusing exclusively on wine and gourmet food-themed excursions, from vineyard tours to dinners at well-known restaurants.

New York-based Lot18, which has raised roughly $13 million from investors, including the founders of Amazon-owned Diapers.com, has 550,000 members and has sold more than 500,000 bottles of wine.

The capital was expected to be used for launching new verticals; the launch of Lot18 Experiences coincides with the company’s one-year anniversary.

When it goes live today, travel packages will include a seven-week trip to several of the world’s major wine regions (Bordeaux, Napa, Mendoza, South Africa, Italy, Spain, Germany and Portugal). On a smaller scale, there will be one-night-only offers, such as food and wine pairing dinners at Auberge du Soleil in Napa and Le Bernardin in New York.

It will also launch soon in Chicago, Los Angeles and other major cities, through a network of partner sites to be announced later.

In addition to wine and experiences, the site offers gourmet food products, such as olive oil, chocolate, caviar, coffee and more.

Experian CheetahMail client data indicates that as part of the retail push, marketers will be sending coupons and offering deep discounts, such as 10 percent off or free shipping, as the shopping frenzy ramps up.

Email has proven to be a very effective channel, especially for new local commerce providers, such as Groupon and LivingSocial, and flash sales sites, such as Gilt Groupe, Rue La La or ideeli. But already some critics are using the words “deal fatigue” to signal that consumers are growing tired of seeing offers in their inbox.

While the study didn’t mention those sectors specifically, it found that one of the big contributors that has ramped up e-marketing since last year was the travel sector, growing by 126 percent, followed by media and entertainment at 77 percent.

In addition to pushing offers, Experian said, it was also trendy for the emails to link to social media, including Twitter and Facebook, and carry mobile-specific features, such as QR codes.

[Image via eyeidea/Shutterstock]

Where before, Facebook users had to use their computers for most of their Facebook gaming and app needs, now they should be able to play and participate from almost any device with a Web browser. And they may get a better experience if it happens to be an Apple iOS device.

In fact, though this launch had been described as an affront to Apple, it’s really not — whenever possible, the new Facebook mobile versions will defer to Apple’s native platform and even its payments system.

A big reason why Facebook apps, especially games, didn’t work on phones was because iOS devices don’t support Flash. Facebook has helped a select set of developers — Audiovroom, Branchout, EA, Flixster, Gilt Groupe, Huffington Post, Moblyng, Storm8, Wooga and Zynga — create HTML5 versions of a selection of their apps and game titles that will work in mobile Web browsers.

But HTML5 still doesn’t offer the performance that many complex apps require, so if the developers have created native versions of their apps, they can also connect Facebook users directly to that native app.

So now, when a friend sends you an invitation to play Words With Friends and you view it on the Facebook app on your iPhone, you can click to play and be taken to the Words With Friends app. If you don’t have the app, you’ll be directed to Apple’s App Store. If you’re on an Android phone, you’ll be taken to an HTML5 version in your mobile Web browser.

The combined native and Web app experience is only available on iOS for now. On Android and other phones with Web browsers, users will default to the Web experience. Facebook CTO Bret Taylor told AllThingsD today that Facebook is also working on an update to its native Android application.

While many people will appreciate having a more consistent Facebook app experience, the byproduct of this launch is that it could be much easier for users to find new mobile apps through their friends. Mobile app discovery has been a huge challenge for developers, and social could help unlock that problem by showing people what apps their friends are using.

“We really hope that we can fill a gap in app discovery here,” Taylor said.

On the downside, there’s one place Facebook wasn’t able to negotiate a consistent experience for users: payments. This was a major sticking point in ongoing discussions with Apple, as I’d written last week.

Facebook Credits can’t be used to pay for virtual goods within native iOS apps or mobile Web apps running within a Facebook app on iOS. Instead, users will have to buy separate in-app currency through Apple’s own in-app payment system.

And this after Facebook just required all of its game developers to switch to exclusive use of Credits earlier this year.

“We realize there’s some inconsistency,” Taylor admitted. He wouldn’t say if Facebook gets a share of revenue for in-app purchases it refers to Apple.

As for the Facebook iPad app, it has been close to being released for over a year, according to people who have seen it and worked on it — though the app has changed in scope throughout. Today at 1 pm PT it will finally be available as part of a universal iOS update.

Along with the ability to use Facebook platform apps, the iPad version will feature “an immersive and full-screen photos experience,” plus new and speedy chat and messages interfaces, Taylor said.

All this is being released three weeks after Facebook held its major developer conference, a week after Apple unveiled its new iOS, and just a few days after iconic Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died.

So why now for the mobile platform? “Honestly — because it’s done now,” Taylor said.

“The reason these [launches] are connected is about ease of use, which is particularly acute on something like a tablet,” he added. “We wanted our native apps to be as feature-complete as possible.”

Okay, but the new mobile versions — despite their focus on app discovery — don’t include Facebook’s new live Ticker, which is one of the main ways users can see their friends are engaging with various apps.

That’s true, but probably won’t be for long, Taylor said, attributing the lag time between Web and mobile features to the challenge of designing user interfaces on small screens.

As for Facebook’s relationship with Apple? “We have a good relationship with Apple and we’ve worked with them on all our iOS releases,” Taylor said.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

As with Jetsetter’s other travel offers, the inventory will target the high end, offering properties ranging from a five-bedroom house in Crete for $310 per night to a palatial 14-bedroom mansion on a private Caribbean island for $53,000 per night.

To date, the New York-based company has focused on selling discounted hotel rooms and other accommodations in exotic places around the world for a short period, or until inventory runs out. It shares the flash sales model with Gilt, its parent company, which is focused mostly on apparel and related items.

With this latest endeavor, Jetsetter will focus on renting out vacation homes owned by individuals, who might otherwise find vacationers through sites such as HomeAway.

HomeAway is one of the dominant players in the space, owning several Internet domains, and is now valued at close to $3.3 billion after going public this summer. But others also dabble in all sorts of niches in the space, including Craigslist and Airbnb, which lets owners rent out rooms in their homes to travelers and just launched longer-term rentals.

Jetsetter will add its own twist by picking five to 10 homes to feature each week and mark down by 20 to 50 percent off.

To start, it will have an inventory of more than 200 homes, which will be available in locations such as the Caribbean, Mexico, California, France and Italy.

Jetsetter will also act as the intermediary, keeping track of when the homes are available, taking photos and getting travel writers to craft unbiased descriptions of the properties, so that renters know exactly what they will be getting into. Jetsetter will also accept the payment.

This is in contrast to other rental sites, which simply connect travelers to property owners, who may or may not respond to inquiries or keep their calendars up to date. Payment is usually sent in the form of a check.

With this approach, there’s no room for haggling, or any awkward chitchats among strangers or surprises when you show up and get the keys — in other words, it’s oh so civilized.

In a release, Drew Patterson, Jetsetter founder and CEO, explained: “As anyone who has researched and booked a vacation home knows, the process is archaic and time consuming compared to hotels, flights and rental cars.”

A couple of other examples to drool over:

• La Maison Blanche in the Loire Valley starts at $1,430 per night for five bedrooms.
• Villa Encantada in Costa Rica starts at $700 per night for four bedrooms.
• Villa Mariposa in Mexico has two bedrooms for $280 per night, while Casa Theodore in Mexico is $1,800 per night for nine bedrooms.

For a limited time, Jetsetter will offer all of the homes for 10 percent off.

The major e-commerce spending days typically fall around the holidays at the end of the year, with the day after Thanksgiving or the first day back to work after Thanksgiving typically being some of the biggest retail highlights of the year. But traditionally, retailers have also marked down items heavily on Labor Day to draw in crowds over the three-day weekend before school starts.

However, in an unofficial survey of how online retailers handled the holiday yesterday, it seems traditional retailers such as Best Buy, Toys R Us, Fry’s Electronics and Old Navy offered the most specials, while many of the new e-commerce companies — like daily deal or flash sales sites — failed to mention the holiday at all.

There were two major exceptions: One Kings Lane, which sells home decor, offered a Labor Day Blowout Sale, discounting pillows and bedding, lanterns and polka-dotted tea sets. But oddly, there was no direct tie to the holiday since the sale ends Thursday. Zulily, a flash sales site focused on children’s apparel, also offered a specific Labor Day sale, which in addition to having hundreds of items for sale for kids and moms also was promoting a Labor Day shipping special, offering free shipping on all additional orders placed between Friday and Monday at midnight.

But after those two examples, mentions of Labor Day were fairly weak, and many missed the opportunity to call out the holiday in the subject line of the emails they normally send every day. It appears that sites that normally offer discounts have a hard time knowing how a sale tied to a marketing opportunity, like a holiday, can stand out on its own.

For instance, HauteLook, which is a flash-sales site owned by Nordstrom, offered a sale on some jewelry, including necklaces, rings and earrings. (Ironically, from what I could see, Nordstrom made no mention of Labor Day at all on its site.) The Clymb, which is a flash sales site focused on outdoor apparel, offered special Labor Day discounts on an assortment of hoodies, dog jackets and portable picnic tables. But in either case, nothing made the items particularly appropriate or timely — and the discounts seemed regular.

The Gilt Groupe perhaps tried a little harder by creating a section called Labor Day gifts, which discounted a handful of random items, such as wine glasses, picture frames, vases and photo albums.

Meanwhile, Groupon and LivingSocial, two of the biggest mass emailers, let the day pass without calling attention to it.

Regardless of how relevant the offer is, the biggest mistake of all may be not mentioning the holiday. After all, it is something that consumers were searching for.

Yahoo said that searches for “Labor Day weekend 2011″ were up 1,889 percent his month, and that “Labor Day sales” was one of the major search terms, along with “Does FedEx deliver on Labor Day?”

(Answer: No, it does not.)

Gilt Groupe, an e-commerce and flash sales site, is experimenting with selling items from a range of categories — on Facebook.

The New York-based company said Facebook users will be able to go to a special page on Facebook, where they can log in using their regular account information to browse items and check out.

The site will officially launch on Monday, featuring items from women’s, men’s, children’s and home.

Other retailers have dabbled in F-Commerce, which is short for Facebook Commerce. But with most experiments today, it’s not much different from shopping on the Web. Unlike how users pay for items in games or buy movies on the social network, retailers don’t have to use Facebook Credits, which would require giving Facebook a 30 percent chunk of the transaction.

A spokesperson confirmed it was not using Facebook Credits and said that the platform was built in-house.

In a release, Gilt explained that it will offer products on the Facebook page that will not be available on its regular site. For example, Gilt Man will launch its first sale with a themed event called Man About Town featuring clothing, shoes, and accessories, and Gilt Home will offer a Vera Wang Home sale that will be available first on Facebook and then later on Gilt. Gilt Children will also have exclusives from Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants, including a 1.5-foot tall Lego model.

Flash sales sites — which specialize in liquidating unsold inventory at greatly reduced prices — are on the rise.

In July, traffic to the sites increased 368 percent, and by 109 percent when compared to the same month two years ago and last year, respectively.

But increasing interest in discounted merchandise in a down economy is not what’s surprising — nearly everyone enjoys the thrill of catching a really great deal, right?

What’s more revealing, in a report published by Experian Hitwise, is who the market leaders are, in terms of number of visits to their sites.

Most flash sales sites entice shoppers by sending them emails with colorful images of clothing, toys, furniture, wine or high-end apparel. From there, buyers click through to the site to see prices and make purchases before the inventory runs out.

According to the report, the top five sites are Zulily, Ideeli, LivingSocial Escapes, Woot! and HauteLook. (See the top 15 in the chart below.)

What’s worth noting about the list is that Zulily, the Seattle-based flash sales site that specializes in kids’ clothing, announced last week that it raised $43 million in venture capital. New York-based Ideeli raised $41 million in April. And another heavy hitter, Gilt Groupe, which recently raised $138 million, ranked No. 7.

Also worth noting is that Amazon is associated with three of the companies in the top 15. The e-commerce giant is a major investor in LivingSocial, which ranked third. The company, which is known for competing against Groupon, also operates Escapes, which offers discounts on travel. Amazon also owns the fourth-largest site, Woot, which it acquired more than a year ago, and it owns MyHabit — in 11th place — a flash sales site it launched in May. Despite being only two months old, MyHabit’s traffic jumped 128 percent since launching, according to Experian Hitwise.

Other findings: 

• The market is still extremely fragmented. The leader, Zulily, had only 16.3 percent market share, followed by Ideeli with 9.3 percent and LivingSocial Escapes with 8.6 percent.
• HauteLook, which was acquired by Nordstrom, ranked as the fifth largest.
• In the past six months, visits to Ideeli increased 42 percent; Gilt.com was up 14 percent and HauteLook went up eight percent.
• Flash sales shoppers were over index against the online population for household incomes over $100,000 and creditworthiness.

The Seattle-based company was co-founded by two Blue Nile execs, Darrell Cavens, former SVP of marketing and technology, and Mark Vadon, the chairman and founder of the online destination for engagement rings.

Vadon started Blue Nile in 1999 after getting engaged; he and Cavens came up with the idea for Zulily after becoming dads.

“The amount of packaging that was arriving at our house led me to believe that there was an opportunity in kids’ retail that didn’t already exist,” said Cavens, Zulily’s CEO and father of a five-year-old girl and a three-and-a-half-year-old boy.

Zulily emails its subscribers daily offers on clothing and accessories, with discounts from 50 to 90 percent. The sale lasts for roughly 72 hours or until the inventory runs out.

A ton of money has been pouring into the flash sales concept over the past year.

Gilt Groupe and Ideeli, both of which focus on women’s and men’s fashions, recently raised $138 million and $40 million, respectively. One Kings Lane, which is focused on home decor, closed a round totaling $23 million.

Since launching the site in January 2010, the company has grown from four employees to 240 employees. It has moved office space four times and has four million members.

The large round of capital will give Zulily the resources it needs to move even faster.

Cavens, who was tight-lipped when it came to sharing too many of the company’s financials, has the lofty goal of building the next big brand in children’s retail, a $60 billion business driven by the birth of four-and-a-half million babies in the U.S. every year.

What Cavens wasn’t willing to say about the company’s growth plans, however, was hinted at during a tour of the company’s new headquarters in the industrial district south of downtown Seattle.

Zulily is renting 90,000 square feet on three floors of the four-story building, but occupies only about half of that space today. The office staff includes buyers, editorial writers and photographers. As you can see from a video tour, boxes and racks of kids’ clothing are everywhere, in what Cavens calls “structured chaos” — which comes with publishing a brand-new site every day. (See the full tour in the video below.)

The expansive space is filled with employees steaming wrinkles out of miniature tuxes and prepping tutus for child models that will arrive later in the afternoon. But it does not include the company’s actual merchandise, which is stored at a distribution center in Kentucky. At that facility, Zulily employs hundreds more people.

Cavens compares running the site to putting out a newspaper every day. Like clockwork, the team publishes its email at 6 am, seven days a week, offering an average of 600 styles or pieces of clothing — representing 2,200 SKUs, or stock-keeping units — in different sizes and color combinations.

“For some retailers, that’s a whole season of clothing,” he said.

The $43 million round of funding was raised by Meritech Capital Partners, which is one of the largest institutional investors in Facebook and has registered 20 exits in the past 20 months, including four IPOs.

Zulily’s latest round brings the total funds raised to date to $53.6 million. Other investors include Howard Schultz’s Maveron and August Capital.

“The core value proposition is really strong,” said Craig Sherman, managing director of Meritech Capital Partners. “It’s great fashion for kids at reasonable prices. I don’t  think that’s been done before. … For a next-gen e-commerce company, this is the ultimate dream team. We’ve followed the company since inception 18 to 20 months ago, and they have continually and consistently accomplished more and grew faster than they predicted.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110810/former-blue-nile-execs-raise-43-million-to-nurture-their-new-baby-zulily/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110810/is-turkey-the-next-big-market-opportunity-kleiner-perkins-is-betting-on-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20110810/is-turkey-the-next-big-market-opportunity-kleiner-perkins-is-betting-on-it/#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 08:00:11 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=107951 Nope, it’s not China or India. It’s Turkey.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, best known for investing in Google, Amazon, Twitter and Zynga, has made a bet on Turkey as the next big market with its first major investment there.

The receiving company — Trendyol.com, an e-commerce site based in Istanbul — is announcing today that it has raised $26 million from Kleiner Perkins and Tiger Global.

Trendyol is similar to other flash sales sites in the U.S., such as Gilt Groupe, Rue La La, and Ideeli. The site sends out daily emails offering a heavily discounted selection of clothes. Consumers have a limited amount of time to purchase the items before the sale expires or quantities run out.

The company was founded by Demet Mutlu, a 29-year-old dropout from Harvard Business School — she is now running the company with about 350 employees.

Kleiner partner Aileen Lee said a combination of a hardworking executive team, the company’s phenomenal growth, and Turkey’s increasingly attractive market opportunity led to the investment. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to introduce e-commerce to a market that doesn’t have a strong brick-and-mortar environment.

Check out some of these facts:

• Turkey has 35 million Internet users, representing the third largest Web market in Europe.
• Turkey is a socially engaged country, ranking fifth-highest for Facebook usage globally; eighth for Twitter and first for FriendFeed.
• Turkey has a high credit card penetration rate of about 60 percent with 46 million credit cards.
• In the past 16 months, Trendyol has signed up four million members, translating into one out of every nine Turkish Internet users.

“When you go there and walk around the company, it looks like any other hypergrowth Silicon Valley start-up,” Lee said. “Trendyol has an incredible dedication to customer service and is driven by metrics and analytics. It has a good sense for what to outsource and what to keep in-house, and is building the brand.”

She said Trendyol has also been good at leveraging social media, including a store inside Facebook that allows users to make purchases without leaving the site.

The funding will be used for new initiatives, such as building out the company’s customer service team, increasing its membership, and potentially moving into new geographies. Trendyol.com has secured more than $50 million in total financing since the site launched in March 2010.

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