It’s not clear if Netflix’s recent series of snafus are Amazon’s gain or not. But in a just-released report by ForeSee, one went up and one went down.

It’s an easy guess which was which.

In the well-known customer satisfaction survey of the Top 40 online retailers during the holiday season — which ForeSee has been conducting twice a year for the last seven years — Amazon rose to its highest spot ever, while Netflix’s score dropped significantly.

Amazon got an 88 out of 100, up two points, while Netflix dropped seven points to 79. The survey noted that “Netflix saw scores drop in every single element of the website that ForeSee measures, including site content, site functionality, merchandise, and prices.”

Ooops.

(Netflix fared better with customers in another poll last week, conducted by Citigroup. As Peter Kafka noted: “They’re less happy than they used to be. But they don’t seem to be going anywhere.”)

But in the ForeSee survey, Netflix moved from being a consumer darling to just another face in the crowd. It garnered the average score, which is also 79, a number that has risen from 74 since 2005.

But Netflix was not the only online retailer hit. Also down: Gap.com (down 6 percent to 73), and Overstock.com (down 5 percent to 72).

But on the up: TigerDirect.com (up 8 percent to 79) and J.C. Penney (up 6 percent to 83).

In general, ForeSee concluded that consumers are starting to get the hang of this e-commerce thing, and have become less price-sensitive, too.

And here’s a pretty chart explaining it all (click on the image to make it larger):

A new start-up, Openspace, is launching a physical store where consumers can visit and discover the latest mobile applications.

“If your iPhone has a problem, you take it to Apple. If your Android tablet has a problem, you take it to Verizon, AT&T or Best Buy,” said Openspace founder Robert Reich. “But if you have a question about which camera app would be great for taking pictures this weekend on the slopes, where can you turn?”

To help solve that problem, Openspace opened its first physical storefront last week in Boulder, Colo. Open six days a week, the store is staffed by “App Gurus” who make recommendations and try to eliminate “app-rehension.” (Their joke, not mine.)

Previously, Reich founded Boulder-based OneRiot, which uses social data to make mobile advertising more targeted. The company was acquired by Wal-Mart in September.

Openspace is just getting off the ground, so all the details haven’t been nailed down — like how the operation will make money. But in the next year it hopes to partner with developers to take a percentage of sales that result from applications promoted in the store.

Consumers can also do things the old-fashioned way and visit the company’s Web site to get recommendations. On the site, the company categorizes applications by interests — many of which won’t be found on iTunes — including such nontraditional subjects as Occupy Wall Street, zombies or “games a 10-year-old girl will enjoy.”

Developers often complain about how difficult it is for their applications to be discovered, and frequently pay for advertising or third-party promotion. So it’s possible that a physical app store could be one more way to get the word out.

Whether Openspace will be able to make enough money off referrals to offset the high costs of real estate and full-time staff will be the bigger question.

Among the hot and hyped Web 2.0 scene, not many would pick out 13-year-old digital promotions site, Coupons.com.

But, on the heels of a recent $200 million funding — which valued the quiet Mountain View, Calif., company at $1 billion — and a surging online discounting market, it has nabbed another $30 million from Greylock Partners.

Greylock has already invested half that amount, via a secondary market transaction, and is Coupons.com’s first venture investor. Its previous funders have been institutional investors.

“Coupons.com have been quietly building all the key infrastructure in this area,” said Greylock’s Reid Hoffman. “We think they are poised for the massive shift that is coming.”

The new funds, said its CEO and co-founder Steven Boal, will be used for a variety of things, including an aggressive mobile and social push for the longtime site.

“We are now focusing on hypergrowth,” said Boal, who noted that coupon clipping is perhaps the original social media. “Saving is kind of hip these days, even if we have been around for a long time with this exact focus.”

Coupons.com had already moved in the mobile/social direction with the 2009 acquisition of Grocery iQ, a mobile app that lets users manage shopping lists and discounts on phones.

There will be more to come, said Boal, who said the growth of the category is inevitable as consumers use these devices to manage their spending habits.

Coupons.com will also use the funds to expand its staff from 288 employees now to more than 450 by the end of the year, operating in about 13 countries. While Coupons.com has been profitable on a cash-flow basis, all the new initiatives will be costly.

And, while that kind of expansion could remind you of the explosive daily deals sector — and it is easy to put Coupons.com in the same highly competitive arena as Groupon — the company operates more as a platform and a white-label provider of discounting services to manufacturers and retailers, especially supermarkets and chain stores.

In fact, Coupons.com provides a lot of such services for them, garnering $100 million in revenue this year, up from $60 million last year and $40 million the year before. Much of that money is made when a customer uses its site or sites it powers and downloads a coupon for redemption.

One area of promising growth, said Boal, is managing discounts on Facebook’s social networking site, which is increasingly being used by consumer goods companies to test promotions and increase loyalty.

“It’s a really interesting area as product companies can be really nimble in managing their promotions,” he said. “And the ability to really drill down on the response of a certain sector of consumer is very powerful.”

It goes without saying that newspapers that previously dominated this industry have been on the wane.

The massive funding also sets up Coupons.com for a possible 2012 IPO, especially given its dominance — it serves nine out of 10 big grocery chains, four out of four pharmacy giants and such — in the digital couponing sector.

Presumably, there would be no discounts for that stock.

Here’s the official press release:

COUPONS.COM ANNOUNCES GREYLOCK PARTNERS INVESTMENT

Company’s Rapid Growth Including Mobile and Social Couponing Solutions to Benefit from Greylock’s Expertise

Mountain View, Calif. — October 3, 2011 — Coupons.com Incorporated, the recognized leader in digital coupons, including online printable, social, mobile and loyalty card promotions, today announced an investment by Greylock Partners. Coupons.com, which recently raised $200 million from institutional investors, is transforming the multi-billion dollar coupon industry and accelerating the shift from the newspaper to digital. The investment, a secondary market transaction, will enable the company to tap into Greylock’s expertise as it continues to produce market-transforming couponing solutions, including its mobile- and social-based products and services.

“We are very excited to work with Reid Hoffman and James Slavet and the entire Greylock team,” said Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons.com. “Greylock’s expertise and relationships will prove invaluable as we continue connecting brands with consumers via money-saving offers at every touch-point across the digital landscape — including web, social and mobile — and along the consumer’s entire path to purchase.”

“We’re very pleased with our investment in Coupons.com and are excited about working with the team as they continue to build a substantial, market-defining company,” said Reid Hoffman, Partner at Greylock Partners. “Coupons.com is almost single handedly transforming the multi-billion dollar coupon industry by ushering the newspaper-dominated business to digital. The market opportunity the company faces is immense, and we look forward to contributing in any way to their continued success, particularly in the context of social and mobile solutions.”

Coupons.com powers the vast majority of coupons printed online via a network of tens of thousands of sites in addition to their flagship site, Coupons.com, which is the 39th most trafficked site in the country. Coupons.com Incorporated is also the go-to resource for manufacturers wanting to coupon-enable their digital marketing initiatives, and virtually every major consumer packaged goods manufacturer resides on the company’s client roster. The company is aggressively building its team, expanding its full time staff from 288 employees in June to more than 450 expected by the end of the year, a growth of over 50 percent during the six-month period.

In addition to capturing a growing share of the multi-billion dollar newspaper-dominated coupon industry, Coupons.com is also expanding the couponing market by lowering the barriers to entry for companies to offer coupons, enabling smaller manufacturers — which could not place offers in the newspaper insert because of budget requirements or category exclusivity restrictions — to utilize coupons to engage with consumers. In addition, Coupons.com attracts a new demographic of coupon users, who engage with new couponing methods like digital, social and mobile coupons, but typically would not engage with traditional paper coupons.

With the mobile payments space rapidly heating up, we thought it would be a perfect time to add the person most responsible for that current disruption–Square CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey–to the speaker roster at the ninth D: All Things Digital.

By the way, Dorsey is the same man who also invented a little thing called Twitter, the groundbreaking microblogging service–where he also now serves as Executive Chairman and now its product guru once again.

In other words, Dorsey is just the kind of person Walt Mossberg and I are thrilled to have onstage at D9–a perfect entrepreneur to talk about the innovative product vision that has made tech in Silicon Valley so powerful.

Dorsey started Square in 2009, after serving as CEO of Twitter until 2008. A software engineer by training, he previously worked as a programmer at a bike courier dispatch service.

Just this week, Square made news by launching a new cash register for merchants and a new mobile wallet for consumers to make paying for retail goods extremely easy.

This is a quick development from the start-up’s original Square dongle and app, which allows consumers to use their smartphone or Apple iPad to accept credit card payments.

Square has distributed 500,000 of these dongles, which click into the headphone jack, and has recently said it is processing $2 billion in gross payment volume per month.

The new innovations should increase that if they catch on and Square can best a plethora of competitors, including a new digital wallet entry by Google (whose Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will also be at D9 onstage demoing it too).

As Tricia Duryee wrote about Square’s latest effort:

It starts with the user’s card case, which must be set up in advance with a user’s credit card information. From the card case, the user will be able to see the menu of the restaurant, cafe or spa they are visiting. Users can click to order. When they go up to the register to pay, the consumer doesn’t hand over anything but their name.

Consumers and retailers will have to believe that using Apple products can be as safe and secure as big enterprise-grade systems that everyone is accustomed to seeing.

Square will also have to go up against a ton of other providers coming down the pike, including solutions from [eBay's] PayPal and payment giants such as Visa, MasterCard and American Express.

The San Francisco-based start-up recently received an investment from Visa.

Given that the future of the massive, badillion-dollar industry is at stake, it should make for a great interview session at D9.

The first round of funding was led by Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group, known for its early investment in Amazon.com.

The small Vancouver, B.C.-based company was started in 2007 when two college students, Kyle Vucko and Heikal Gani, went hunting for a good suit. After being struck by the difficulties of sorting through the options, ranging from Hugo Boss to Men’s Wearhouse, the two college students determined that there must be a better way.

That’s when the idea for Indochino was formed.

He and his partner bought one-way tickets to Shanghai and identified home tailors who could sew a suit in 48 hours and ship it to the U.S. in two to three weeks–all for $300 to $500.

Three years later, Vucko spends a lot of time in a suit.

“It’s an occupational hazard. I’m from the West Coast, which is not a huge suit-wearing culture. I grew up wearing Birkenstocks,” said Vucko, 25, who dropped out of University of Victoria during his final year to start the company.

But now, there’s no turning back.

The company has 35 employees, has developed a significant supply chain (rather than the mom and pop tailors) and has offices in B.C. and Shanghai. It has 17,000-plus clients in 60 countries, and revenues have cracked seven figures with 200 to 300 percent annual growth.

The idea is fairly simple. Teach men how to take their own measurements via step-by-step videos. Let them order online from a number of selections. Ship the suit within three weeks. As incentive, it is sending out free tape measures for a limited time to people who follow them on Twitter and send a Tweet about Indochino.

If it doesn’t fit, there are three options: take it to a local tailor and they’ll refund you the cost to fix it, they’ll remake it, or you can return the suit and get your money back.

“We generally keep every customer that we get. The second suit is click, buy and repeat. From a business perspective, that’s where you make all of your money and margin. From a guy’s perspective, it saves them time and money. You don’t have to go back to the store. Buying online is faster than what it takes to go to a mall,” Vucko said.

Bonobos, which raised $18.5 million recently, is in a somewhat similar niche, although it doesn’t offer tailored clothing, just better fitting clothes. It’s also in the same vein as Milk & Honey, which ships custom high heels to women, or Gemvara, which claims to make user-generated jewelry and recently raised $15 million.

The company–whose roots are in e-commerce and not mobile–aspires to merchandise and sell apps better than Google does on its own platform.

And, potentially as well as Apple, which up until now has been the shining star in mobile.

Beginning tonight, the Appstore will be accessible online at amazon.com/appstore. Android owners will also be able to download a version of the store to their handset. The store will support hundreds of mobile operators and hardware manufacturers.

Amazon has been recruiting developers since at least January to convince them to get on board with the venture. Initially, users will have access to a catalog of 3,800 applications.

While selling apps is not a particular stretch for the company since it already dabbles in a lot of digital content, like music and e-books, working with mobile developers is not exactly a home run since their time and attention is fragmented among so many competing stores and platforms.

However, the company’s efforts seem to be paying off.

At launch, apps will be available from dozens of developers, spanning big names like Gameloft, Handmark and Glu Mobile. (It’s also worth noting that its efforts have also not gone unnoticed by Apple, which is suing Amazon, claiming trademark infringement and unfair competition over the name.

To start, the store will be nowhere near the long tail of applications found on Android Market or Apple iTunes, which respectively have catalogs of roughly 150,000 and 350,000 applications. But Amazon is trying to make a big splash in terms of quality. The store launches today with an Angry Birds exclusive to its new hit game based on the movie Rio.

“The developer response has been really strong,” said Aaron Rubenson, category leader for Amazon Mobile Services. “We’ll be launching with a broad range of paid and free and the customers will find lots of best selling titles from Doodle Jump to Call of Duty to Zagat and Tweetcaster. The list goes on and it’s just day one. We are adding more every single day.”

One problem that Amazon is trying to solve is discoverability.

While there’s a huge number of apps in the market, customers have a hard time finding the ones they want to buy. Conversely, developers have a hard time monetizing.

Amazon will be doing four things to help with that:

• Amazon will offer one free app a day to help with promotion.
• Amazon will offer a feature called Test Drive, which will allow a customer to try an app out before they buy. The technology is using Amazon’s cloud services. Users will be able open and use the app from within their computer browser. The simulation will last for about 30 minutes at which point they’ll have to buy it.
• Lastly, Amazon will drive recommendations based on a user’s purchase history. If they are someone who purchases cook books and high-end utensils, Amazon may recommend a recipe app.
• Amazon is also enabling one-click purchasing for anyone with a credit card on file.

The retailer is also doing a few uncharacteristic things, including being the one to set the price of the app.

For instance, if the developer recommends the app be sold at $1, and Amazon agrees, they’ll make 70 percent, or 70 cents on each download. If Amazon decides to make it free for a day, the developer will make 20 percent off their original recommendation of $1, or 20 cents. The developer will always make whichever is greater.

Rubenson said the response has been positive. “As we’ve gotten closer to launch and have talked more tactically about our merchandising capabilities and programs, they [developers] are getting very excited about the potential.”

Amazon is clearly banking on Android’s success since it is unlikely to ever sell iPhone applications on Apple’s closed system. With more than 300,000 phones based on the operating system being activated everyday, and many more tablets coming, the company sees it as a very large opportunity.

Rubenson said Amazon works closely with Google in a number of ways, especially as a major reseller of its devices. It also maintains a site called Android 101, which teaches customers about the OS. “In that regard we are engaged on multiple fronts,” he said. “But one of the strengths of the OS is the openness. We’ve taken that and focused on making the best possible store for customers.”

So far, Amazon will mostly rely on driving traffic to their store through their own referrals. However, increasingly they expect to partner with carriers or handset makers. Rubenson said its first third-party partnership will be with Cellular South, which will make the Appstore available to its customers through preloads and other methods.

He declined to discuss revenue splits or the financial relationship with partners.

The online retailer on Thursday took action in Illinois, as it had threatened to do, to counter a new law aimed at forcing online retailers to collect sales taxes in the state. Hawaii, North Carolina and Rhode Island have enacted similar laws, and California is weighing action. Amazon is also in a court battle with New York over such legislation.

The Illinois law, signed by Gov. Pat Quinn Thursday, requires online retailers that work with affiliates in the state to collect sales taxes on purchases made by Illinois residents and businesses. Amazon responded to the measure by cutting ties to its Illinois-based affiliates, which are blogs and other websites that refer traffic to Amazon’s website and get paid commissions if customers make purchases there.

Amazon, which is based in Seattle, has fiercely opposed all efforts to force it to collect sales taxes. “We had opposed this new tax law because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive,” Amazon said in its letter to Illinois affiliates. “We deeply regret that its enactment forces this action.”

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To do so, New York-based Bluefly partnered with Menlo Park-based Badgeville, which is focused on bringing game mechanics to retail, entertainment, media and other categories.

This falls under the heading of “gamification,” which operates on the premise that humans are often motivated by rewards (even if they aren’t worth much).

For retailers or others, the motivation is to make an experience that can be fun and provide reasons to stick around.

The techniques can be traced back to other companies, such as Zynga, the maker of social games on Facebook, or Foursquare.

Foursquare awards badges to people who check into restaurants and other businesses. If you check-in more than anyone else, you can become a fictitious mayor — which may earn you a free beer, but often not much else. Likewise, Zynga rewards users who harvest crops on time, or interact with other players, by advancing them to the next level.

In an interview earlier this year, Kris Duggan, Badgeville’s CEO and co-founder, said they’ve identified three mechanics that Zynga has become very successful in using:

• Personal motivators: This is an achievement. Someone has done something that deserves rewarding.
• Friend and social graph motivators: This is essentially peer pressure. A friend has done something, why don’t you?
• Group motivators: This is competition. If you come back two more times a week, you’ll do it more than anyone else.

The Bluefly game works like this:

The more badges shoppers earn, the more they will be rewarded with early access to products, special deals and discounts. While those are tangible benefits, sometimes it’s only for bragging rights or recognition.

Badgeville, which is about a year old, has also worked with Moxsie.com, a boutique online retailer. Its other customers include Philly.com, which uses it to engage with its readers. Badgeville charges an annual fee to use its service.

Many of the company’s investors have ties to e-commerce, including former senior executives at eBay, PayPal, Chegg.com, Shopping.com and Drugstore.com.

It’s connected to Amazon’s existing cloud services, so sending mail from applications already hosted on services like EC2 should be easy. Messages will cost 10 cents per thousand, and customers can send up to 2,000 per day for free when the messages originate from within an application already running on EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon’s new service for Java developers.

Amazon named two customers already using the service: Eyejot, a video-messaging service, is using it for sending transactional messages. Another is Neustar, a managed service provider that handles domain-name queries, which is using it to ensure smooth delivery of mail related to signup for services.

The service, AmazonTote, is currently available only around Seattle, where the company is based. The program offers customers a free weekly delivery on a specified day and doesn’t require a minimum-order size.

The AmazonTote website said the program “will be expanding soon.” However, that notice was removed later Monday. An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment.

Such an expansion could be risky. One pioneer of online grocery shopping, Webvan Group Inc., went bankrupt in 2001 and is considered one of Silicon Valley’s biggest busts.

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Despite new reports of the funding today, the line of credit from TriplePoint Capital is months-old, and we’ve learned it was used primarily for building out a new warehouse in Louisville, Ky.

According to our sources, who declined to be named, only $5 million of the $15 million has been drawn down from the facility, and it’s one of three lines of credit the company has. The company spokeswoman declined to comment.

The Gilt Groupe is a members-only online retailer focused on luxury brands. It has seen huge success in offering deep discounts on items for short periods of time. More recently, it has set its sights on the local deals business, similar to the businesses being built by Groupon and LivingSocial. It has also expanded into offering luxury travel deals.

Gilt’s local deals site, called “Gilt City,” offers bargains on items ranging from massages to frozen yogurt. So far, it’s launched in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco. It’s going up against two feisty and well-funded competitors: LivingSocial, which just raised $175 million in capital from Amazon, and Groupon, which turned down Google’s $6 billion acquisition bid.

A round of funding raised this summer supported those product rollouts. In total, the company has raised upward of $50 million from investors, including General Atlantic and Matrix Partners.

The line of credit shows that the emerging company still needs additional financing for one-off capital projects as resources are pulled in other directions. A big focus is likely on hiring a local salesforce, which is considered a specialty of Groupon. Still, Gilt Groupe is considered one of the more likely IPO candidates, and has said in the past that it expects to achieve gross revenues of $400 million to $500 million by the end of this calendar year.

Following the release, the company’s stock began a free fall, dropping 15.25 percent to $35.34 a share over concerns that the retailer is losing market share to Amazon, Target, Wal-Mart and others.

What’s worse is that the retailer appears to be one of a few that is not seeing this year’s goodwill. ComScore is reporting big online sales gains this year compared to last year, and the Commerce Department said today that retail sales rose for a fifth straight month in November due to increasing consumer confidence.

Meanwhile, Best Buy reported a 4.4 percent drop in quarterly profits, and was forced to lower its per-share profit forecast for the year to the range of $3.20 to $3.40, which is down from its previous guidance of $3.55 to $3.70 a share.

In the three months ended Nov. 27, Best Buy reported $11.9 billion in revenues, falling from $12.02 billion in the same period a year ago. Net income fell to $217 million from $227 million in the same period last year.

In the quarter, Best Buy said sales of TVs declined in the U.S., but the loss was partially offset by an increase in smartphones and tablet computers. Best Buy faces stiff competition from retailers such as Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target and GameStop, which were more aggressive on pricing. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company surrendered 110 basis points of market share in the most recent quarter.

Not for much longer, it seems. The company is also closing its online music store at the end of the year. And I’m told that it has essentially abandoned efforts to launch a new, legal music service that it had spent much of the past year building.

A sign on the Web retailer’s homepage tells customers that it’s no longer accepting new payments, and the company has told vendors via email that the store will shutter on Dec. 31. (You can see a copy of the note at the bottom of this post.)

LimeWire hasn’t responded to my request for comment. And it’s not clear why the company is closing up the shop, because in this case, LimeWire shouldn’t be dealing with any legal issues. LimeWire operated the store the same way that Apple’s iTunes does–it took product that music labels (not the big ones, but small independents) wanted to sell and delivered it to customers.

Meanwhile, people familiar with the company tell me that it has also stopped pursuing plans to launch a new, legal music service that had been building throughout 2010.

As recently as October, the company had been talking up the prospects of the new service, and had invited me to see a preview of it even after the court ruling that shuttered its illegal file-sharing service. But LimeWire later rescinded the invitation, and said that its lawyers had advised it not to discuss the new service.

My hunch is that LimeWire is stripping down all of its remaining assets in advance of January court proceedings. Those are going to determine how much the company owes the major music labels that successfully sued it for copyright violations.

LimeWire had already laid off at least 30 percent of its workforce following the October court ruling.

According to sources close to the situation, Google has offered $5.3 billion for Groupon, in what would be its largest acquisition yet, if completed.

Sources said the deal for the Chicago-based social buying site seems likely to be struck, even as early as tomorrow, although it certainly could fall apart right up to the end.

But, if done, it will move the search giant instantly to the top spot in local commerce online and give it huge troves of data about consumer buying habits and merchant information across the globe.

Combined with its pending $700 million acquisition of ITA Software, the travel data firm, that should freak out regulators worldwide and could be considered Google’s own version of a jobs plan for antitrust lawyers.

That said, it is a killer move for Google–despite the high price–given it has long tried to enter the local advertising space, with decidedly mixed results.

With its more than $33 billion in cash and strong stock, it had previously tried to buy local reviews site Yelp, in a deal that fell apart for reasons that are still unclear.

In contrast, Groupon, founded in 2008, has taken off like a Roman candle and dominates the huge market for social shopping and discounting.

While the $6 billion Google is considering paying seems high, Groupon’s fast-growing revenue and profitability make its multiples less daunting, said those familiar with the matter.

It will certainly be a big payoff for Groupon’s investors, including Silicon Valley’s Accel Partners, as well as Battery Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Russia’s DST Global.

Groupon has gleaned about $170 million in venture funding from them, most of which it has not needed.

That’s because it has reportedly attracted upward of $50 million in monthly revenue.

It has done this by offering “daily deals”–getting a massive discount from local retailers in return for delivering customers via marketing via email and on social networks, especially Facebook and Twitter.

Typically, local merchants rely on less effective newspaper circulars or paper couponing.

In what will certainly be one of the deal’s ironies, Google could own a start-up that is largely powered by rival Facebook’s massive skein of social networking connections.

Facebook, of course, recently introduced its own Facebook Deals offering.

BoomTown first wrote about the deal discussions between Groupon and Google two weeks ago, noting the price would be well above the $2 billion to $3 billion offered by Yahoo.

That interest from Yahoo, which was first to sniff around the fast-growing social buying site, was first reported here too–mostly because I apparently like to stalk Groupon CEO and Justin Bieber lookalike Andrew Mason.

(And I will personally be fascinated to see how he’ll mesh with Marissa Mayer, the former search experience head who is now leading local for Google.)

The New York Times–which does not ever seem able to give credit, as All Things Digital and other blogs always do happily and without fuss–is also reporting a $6 billion price tag for Groupon.

While we all await the outcome of this potential blockbuster of a deal, here is a video interview I did with Mason this summer in Vancouver, where I asked him specifically about Google’s interest (actually, I suggested he mug Google co-founder Larry Page for dough).

Note the Bieber haircut:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101129/googles-groupon-offer-5-3-billion-with-700-million-earnout/feed/ 30 http://allthingsd.com/20101117/best-buy-joins-free-shipping-fray/ http://allthingsd.com/20101117/best-buy-joins-free-shipping-fray/#comments Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:33:00 +0000 Matt Jarzemsky http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32685 Best Buy Co. said it plans to offer free online shipping on certain items through Dec. 21, following a similar move by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. earlier this month.
The electronics retailer said Wednesday its offer is valid on “hundreds of thousands” of items, including all CDs, Blu-Ray and DVD movies and gaming software and accessories. Some items, such as Apple Inc.’s iPads, laptop computers and major appliances are not included.
Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, plans to provide free shipping on more than 60,000 online items during the holidays without the need for a minimum purchase or subscription plan.
The strategy was seen as an attempt to counter a similar but broader deal from rival Target Inc. and grab sales from e-commerce leader Amazon.com Inc. From Nov. 21 to Dec. 11, Target plans to offer free shipping on more than 800,000 items, on orders of at least $50. Amazon already includes free shipping on many orders over $25.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101117/best-buy-joins-free-shipping-fray/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101117/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-deal/ http://allthingsd.com/20101117/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-deal/#comments Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:00:08 +0000 Ethan Smith http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32682 After years of litigation and ill will, it took two men just a couple of hours to hammer out the basic terms that would finally bring the Beatles’ music to the iTunes Store.

Beatles songs are finally available in Apple’s iTunes store. But ATD’s Peter Kafka says that iTunes is all about apps these days, while digital music sales have flattened out–and even the Fab Four may have a hard time changing that.

The deal was outlined by Jeff Jones, chief executive of the Beatles’ corporate entity, Apple Corps Ltd., and Roger Faxon, CEO of EMI Group Ltd., which owns and distributes the band’s recordings. The meeting took place at EMI’s London headquarters this past July 14, less than a month after Mr. Faxon took the reins at EMI.

Under the terms, Apple Inc.’s digital media store is the Beatles’ exclusive online retailer at least until January, Mr. Faxon said in an interview Tuesday, after the much-awaited deal was announced. It marks the first time that Beatles songs have been available for digital-download sales.

“Jeff and I sat down shortly after I arrived” as CEO of EMI, Mr. Faxon recalled. “We agreed this really was the moment to do this. After that it was very easy to cut a deal.” They code-named the initiative “Bastille,” as it coincided with Bastille Day.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101117/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-deal/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101116/shopkick-checks-in-with-target-ceo-cyriac-roeding-talks-about-social-shopping/ http://allthingsd.com/20101116/shopkick-checks-in-with-target-ceo-cyriac-roeding-talks-about-social-shopping/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:28:13 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37354

The idea of being rewarded for being a consumer is getting a lot of heat of late, as retailers seek to take advantage of the fast-moving social phenom among consumers, especially young ones.

Thus, a wide range of efforts to combine location-based mobile apps with purchasing, both online and offline.

Earlier this week, BoomTown posted on a funding for one such start-up, Topguest, which links check-ins with airline and hotel loyalty programs.

Today, another company in the space, shopkick, announced it had added another store–Minneapolis-based Target–to its list of retailers deploying its platform and mobile app.

As with customers of Macy’s, Best Buy and others, users of the shopkick app will receive points and other rewards, as well as instant mobile coupons, just for walking in the store.

The point being: Retailers need to reward foot traffic and not just purchases.

The Target partnership is limited now to 242 stores in the Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City and the San Francisco area.

Target will also offer scannable mobile coupons to customers for redemption at checkout.

It will be interesting to see how effective apps such as shopkick are as they roll out, as consumers test them.

Unlike others that offer quick deals–from Foursquare to Facebook to, now, Yahoo–shopkick uses its “kickbucks” as an enticement simply for being present in a store or scanning certain barcodes.

It’s certainly easy enough–my son, Louie, did it with ease and definite enjoyment–although a user does need to remember to fire up the app when entering a participating store.

There is also a small device retailers need to install need to make the shopkick ecosystem work.

CEO Cyriac Roeding, a former EVP for CBS’ mobile unit, created the concept for the Menlo Park, Calif.-based start-up while an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins.

The company has raised $20 million in venture funding from Kleiner’s iFund, longtime Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman, as well as Hoffman’s home at Greylock Partners.

Here is a video interview I did with Roeding about where shopkick is going next:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101116/shopkick-checks-in-with-target-ceo-cyriac-roeding-talks-about-social-shopping/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101115/apple-itunes-at-long-last-gets-rights-to-beatles/ http://allthingsd.com/20101115/apple-itunes-at-long-last-gets-rights-to-beatles/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:53:52 +0000 Ethan Smith http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32566 Steve Jobs is nearing the end of his long and winding pursuit of the Beatles catalog. Apple Inc. is preparing to announce that its iTunes Store will soon start carrying music by the Beatles, according to people familiar with the situation, a move that would fill in a glaring gap in the collection of the world’s largest music retailer.

The deal resulted from talks that were taking place as recently as last week among executives of Apple, representatives of the Beatles and their record label, EMI Group Ltd., according to these people, who also warned that there is still a chance that Apple could change plans at the last minute.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101115/apple-itunes-at-long-last-gets-rights-to-beatles/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101115/topguest-checks-in-with-2-million-series-a-round-and-peter-thiel-as-advisor/ http://allthingsd.com/20101115/topguest-checks-in-with-2-million-series-a-round-and-peter-thiel-as-advisor/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:33:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37263

Topguest, a check-in loyalty service that was founded just five months ago, has gotten $2 million in Series A funding, as well as nabbing well-known Facebook investor Peter Thiel as an adviser.

Investors in the round include: Thiel’s Founders Fund, as well as angels such as Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Jeff Clavier and Naval Ravikant.

Topguest is exiting its beta phase today with partners that include Virgin America, Hilton, Wyndham Worldwide, Kimpton and others.

Using Topguest, those companies can offer deals, making large travel and hospitality loyalty programs social by plugging them into smartphones and geolocation.

Users check in with their existing services–such as Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook Places and Gowalla–in order to get benefits such as air miles for your Virgin Elevate account and hotel points for Hilton HHonors.

Topguest is competing in a crowded market, where a lot of such services are offering many kinds of deals.

The San Francisco start-up is most like another service aimed at retailers called Shopkick, where you get points when you check in to its mobile app.

Topguest said the differentiator is that it links into geolocation services already in use, instead of requiring another different check-in and offers points in already existing loyalty programs.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101115/topguest-checks-in-with-2-million-series-a-round-and-peter-thiel-as-advisor/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101012/ipad-hits-wal-mart-friday/ http://allthingsd.com/20101012/ipad-hits-wal-mart-friday/#comments Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:00:37 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=50593 With the holiday shopping season nearly upon us, Wal-Mart (WMT) is gearing up to sell the iPad. The big box retailer says Apple’s tablet will go on sale at hundreds of its stores on Friday, October 15, reaching all 2,300 by November. That’s some serious retail visibility–not that the iPad needs it. With the device already being sold at Best Buy and Target (TGT), as well as in Apple’s own retail stores, this holiday season is likely to be a very, very good one for the iPad.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101012/ipad-hits-wal-mart-friday/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101008/amazons-android-app-store-may-open-before-months-end/ http://allthingsd.com/20101008/amazons-android-app-store-may-open-before-months-end/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 17:30:17 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=50431 Not that there was ever much doubt about this after the leak of its App Store Distribution Agreement, but Amazon’s rumored app store is evidently the real deal.

Sources familiar with the retailer’s plans tell me, and The Wall Street Journal as well, that it’s putting the finishing touches on an Android app store that will compete with Google’s (GOOG) own Android Market. No word yet on the storefront’s name, but I’m told Amazon (AMZN) hopes to open it relatively soon–perhaps even before the end of the month.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101008/amazons-android-app-store-may-open-before-months-end/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101004/amazon-to-acquire-online-retailer-buyvip/ http://allthingsd.com/20101004/amazon-to-acquire-online-retailer-buyvip/#comments Mon, 04 Oct 2010 21:50:16 +0000 Eyk Henning http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30636 Amazon.com Inc. has reached an agreement to buy the Spanish internet retailer BuyVip for around €70 million ($96.5 million), a person close to the matter said Monday, as the company seeks to break into premium online retail.

The deal will be announced this week, the person added. BuyVip offers overstock items from brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton or Levi’s for steep discounts. The company doesn’t buy the stock itself but acts as a broker between fashion brands and consumers using its marketing and online-distribution channels. “BuyVip has huge growth potential. After sales of €60 million in 2009 the company now expects sales of over €130 million,” the person close to the sale process said.

BuyVip is owned mainly by a consortium of private-equity companies including Cipio Partners, Kennet Partners, Spanish fund Debaeque and the venture-capital arm of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG. Amazon ( (AMZN)) wasn’t immediately available for comment.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101004/amazon-to-acquire-online-retailer-buyvip/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100824/update-zappos-tony-hsieh-on-magical-happiness-bus-tour-and-hugging-it-out-with-boomtown/ http://allthingsd.com/20100824/update-zappos-tony-hsieh-on-magical-happiness-bus-tour-and-hugging-it-out-with-boomtown/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:30:28 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=32845

Also, while in Vancouver, BoomTown tried to avoid the happiness-fueled stalking by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of online retailer Zappos.

To no avail.

I interviewed Hsieh (as well as Groupon’s Andrew Mason) onstage at the Grow2010 conference. Hsieh’s topic was his new book, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.”

It came out in June and is all over the bestseller lists, and Hsieh is now headed on a nationwide bus tour to promote it.

You can see my video interview with him below, in which he discusses his fervent intent to hug me. Also other stuff.

Amazon (AMZN) certainly gave a bear hug to the company, buying Zappos last summer in a deal valued at about $850 million.

It was a good idea, since Zappos is well known for its culture of intense happiness, both in its high level of customer service and the enthusiasm of employees of the company, which started as a Web shoe retailer but has been expanding its offerings.

I actually went to Zappos’s Las Vegas HQ and terrorized its very friendly “Mayor” Jerry Tidmore, and also talked to Hsieh then. Both videos are also below.

Here is the update with Hsieh:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100824/update-zappos-tony-hsieh-on-magical-happiness-bus-tour-and-hugging-it-out-with-boomtown/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100820/questions-for-tony-of-zappos-and-andrew-of-groupon-step-right-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20100820/questions-for-tony-of-zappos-and-andrew-of-groupon-step-right-up/#comments Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:15:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=32545

Later today, BoomTown will be onstage at Dealmaker Media’s Grow2010 conference in Vancouver, Canada, to interview Tony Hsieh, CEO and co-founder of Zappos, and Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of Groupon.

Hsieh has just written a book, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose,” which is topping the best-seller lists.

It essentially chronicles how he built the customer-service-focused online retailer, which was sold for $850 million to Amazon (AMZN) last year.

Mason is also a bit of a phenom, having turned the social local buying service into a start-up juggernaut, garnering massive funding and a valuation of above $1 billion.

Yesterday, Groupon had a big day, offering its first national social discount at the Gap (GPS), which blew off the doors at the service.

I will ask both the usual questions, but feel free to suggest any for me to use.

Note to Tony: No trying to hug me or getting me to do a group cheer.

Note to Andrew: No, I do not want a 50-percent-off spa treatment today.

Of course, I will post video updates with both innovative–and unusually likable–entrepreneurs later, but here are the interviews I did with each earlier this year to enjoy until then:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100820/questions-for-tony-of-zappos-and-andrew-of-groupon-step-right-up/feed/ 2