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.

And there are more significant deployments underway.

Lowe’s announced last week that it was rolling out 42,000 handheld devices at stores in the U.S. and Canada. That closely follows announcements by Home Depot, Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters.

While some of the retailers are a little shy about saying which devices are being deployed, for the most part they are using Apple products — an iPhone, an iPad or an iPod touch. And while the devices may eventually be used to accept payments, many of them are starting off as tools for salespeople to look up answers or to check on product availability.

It’s not just large retailers, either — small stores are also jumping on the mobile bandwagon.

I happened to see an iPad being used in a small winery in eastern Washington state. The device, which was mounted on a mechanical arm, was still in the process of being set up, as evidenced by the nearby iPhone, calculator, traditional credit card point-of-sale machine and cash register at the nearby counter. But a complete changeover was in the works.

And the list keeps growing, according to South Plainfield, New Jersey-based Global Bay, a company that develops mobile software for the retail environment.

It is announcing today that it is helping Pacific Sunwear, a retailer known for surfer-style apparel, to roll out iPads in 300 stores, with plans for 500 to 600 more by next year.

Global Bay CEO Sandeep Bhanote said he’s been in the business of mobile retail solutions for a long time, but it is “the Apple line of products that has reinvigorated the market and is bringing it [mobile] to the mass market … Everyone is looking at the Apple technology line. No one is looking at Android, or at the older generation of devices … It’s an Apple world in retail, although that could change next year.”

A variety of companies, including Google, Square and Verifone, are also racing to get a piece of the action.

Bhanote said Global Bay did its first iPad deployment last year, in November.

It was at a mall store called Things Remembered, and the iPad served as a self-service kiosk where customers could select the right engraving for a particular item, such as a jewelry box.

“Why not use the iPad to streamline the experience?” Bhanote asked.

Even in these early stages, there’s evidence that handheld devices may evolve, moving from tools that automate annoying or painful processes to becoming sales-generating machines.

“The next phase is introducing a commerce component,” he added.

Bhanote declined to say how many iPads it has helped to deploy in the past year, but said that retailers are already starting to see results. One retailer reported that it experienced a 12 percent increase in average order transaction when a customer was serviced with an Apple device in the store.

PacSun associates will carry iPads in the store to help customers place online orders when products are out of stock. Using an application built by Global Bay, store associates will be able to find a shirt or pair of shorts and then order it from the iPad, accept the customer’s payment and ensure it is shipped to the customer’s home.

Bhanote said for an apparel chain of that size, being able to close five more transactions a day per store means a lot of money.

However, there are still some logistics to be worked out. If a mobile device replaces the register, where do you store the cash? What happens if a salesperson drops and breaks that $500 device? Worse yet — what if a customer drops it?

Bhanote said PacSun is putting security tags on its iPads, so if someone walks out of the store with one, an alarm will sound. He said other customers have used rubberized cases for protection; in the case of the winery, there was that mechanical arm.

But the winery’s second iPad wasn’t as lucky. The device was being used by associates, who walked around the store with it, and it was accidentally knocked off the table by a customer. It was a very expensive lesson for a small company — especially when the customer only bought one bottle of wine.

Photo Credit: Beekman1802.com.

According to the marketing terms that we obtained from a source, we learned that Gilt is asking wineries and other suppliers to agree to a 12-month exclusive if they choose to feature their products on the site. Gilt Taste is expected to start selling wine in August.

In speaking with Gilt’s competitors, we’ve learned the terms are far from average.

Here’s the exact wording:

Seller agrees that for the Term of this Agreement, and for twelve (12) months following the Term, it will not enter into any similar agreement with a Direct Competitor or create its own flash sale site for the marketing of wine. “Direct Competitor” means a company similarly situated to Agent that is in the business of conducting online marketing via a flash sale model, including, but not limited to, Rue La La, One Kings Lane, HauteLook, Lot18, inVino and ideeli. In addition to the termination rights contained in Section 11, Agent shall have the right to terminate this Agreement immediately if Seller breaches this Section 8. Upon such termination, Agent shall have no obligation to feature a previously agreed upon Marketing Event on the Gilt Groupe Website.

Based on the wording, Gilt is not specifying that a certain bottle of wine is excluded from appearing on other sites, but rather that the winery or distributor is prohibited from doing any business at all with any other flash sales sites.

Despite repeated attempts to get a statement from the Gilt Groupe, it failed to provide one.

UPDATE: A company spokesperson said the contract obtained by AllThingsD is an early draft, and that they are still in the process of rewriting it to include exclusivity clauses for specific products sold on Gilt Taste. No word on whether the length of the exclusivity would change.

Philip James, the founder of Lot18, a membership-based wine sales site that was listed as one of Gilt’s competitors in the contract, said its policy is to ask wineries not to sell the exact same bottle (or one specific SKU) with one of its competitors for 30 days to avoid customer confusion.

He argues that “365 days for all SKUs is an order of magnitude more stringent,” and that “from the winery point of view, these are small, family-run businesses, and making wine and selling it is a tough proposition.”

Another executive in the space called the exclusivity clause “very unusual.” He went on to say that Gilt does not need to require an exclusive because if the vendors are happy working with you, they’ll naturally keep coming back.

Gilt Taste is a high-end grocery service selling food and other ingredients that may ordinarily only be available to chefs, or to people living in Los Angeles or New York City. A sample of its offerings include marbled wagyu steak, dried morels, fiddlehead ferns and jumbo white asparagus.

Indeed, wine is a natural pairing for the site, and clearly, this marketing agreement proves that Gilt wants to maintain the same level of exclusivity enjoyed by the produce section or seafood case.

Lot18’s James said he recently became aware of Gilt’s terms after a winery sent him a copy of the contract.

Mostly, he said the winery shared it with him because Lot18 was named as a competitor. “It’s flattering to think that they think highly enough of us to mention us specifically. I know we aren’t the only one, but it’s flattering.”

Lot18 has raised a total of $13.5 million in venture capital, and is banking on mail-order wine being a big business. So far, selling wine online has had a high barrier to entry because the alcohol sale laws vary state by state, making out-of-state sales complicated. Still, he’s hopeful it will become a big business, especially as state rules relax.

Gilt Groupe, which recently raised $138 million, started off as a flash apparel company, but has increasingly entered into new verticals, like groceries, daily deals and full-priced men’s apparel.

[Image credit: Raymond Yee]

The wine sales pilot, which the e-commerce giant launched last year, was intended to sell wine from California’s Napa Valley and other U.S. regions.

An Amazon spokesman declined to give details about why the company ended the program.

The end of the program may have been related to financial troubles at partner New Vine Logistics, which had been tapped to handle shipments for Amazon. Over the summer, that company suspended operations amid financial problems, but then later got new investment from Inertia Beverage Group.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Oh, Scooby-Don’t…

You could not be more wrong in your post last week–titled, “Why Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are wrong about naming Web 3.0 ‘Web 3.0′”–about Walt and I being wrong about naming Web 3.0 “Web 3.0″ in an essay we posted at the start of our D: All Things Digital conference, which took place last week.

I know writing “Kara Swisher,” “Walt Mossberg” and “Wrong” is well-nigh irresistible, but your solution of calling the digital era we are in the “2010 Web” is equally confusing and incorrect.

So, since you know I love to do translations, let me try to take apart your entire piece paragraph by paragraph:

What Scooby-Don’t wrote: Can we just head this trend off at the pass? It seems that Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, at their “All Things D” conference announced the beginning of the Web 3.0 era.

And I’m not the only one to think so.

BoomTown response: Walt and I simply wrote an essay in which we said we thought mobile and smart phones were super important as the next platform and represented what we thought Web 3.0 innovations, such as social networking (which we also think is important, by the way) would pivot around.

We didn’t “announce” anything, although that does sound awfully grand.

But so what if we did, because it happens quite a lot?

Dan Gillmor, for goodness sake, declared it Web 3.0 in 2005. His take was different:

“The emerging web is one in which the machines talk as much to each other as humans talk to machines or other humans. As the net is the rough equivalent of a computer operating system, we’re learning how to program the web itself.”

And in 2007, Tim O’Reilly weighed in on it, responding to Web 3.0 theses by Jason Calacanis and Nova Spivack, and also noting Stowe Boyd’s thoughts on the subject.

You get my point, Bobby? Lots of folks have opinions about what is Web 3.0, much as they will when we start arguing over what Web 4.0 is.

At Web 5.0, of course, a self-aware Google (GOOG) will have begun its inevitable war with the human race, sending back a cyborg to terminate you before you wrote that post, thereby making this rebuttal moot.

But, I digress!

Scooby-Don’t wrote: Short aside: It’s interesting that neither Kara nor Walt show up very often on friendfeed, which is the best example of the 2010 Web right now. Kara Swisher has made a total of five comments there. Walt is even worse, doesn’t bring any items in there, and only has six comments. How can you know what the 2010 Web is, if you don’t use it and don’t participate in it?

BoomTown response: The fact of the matter is that neither Walt nor I like to use FriendFeed as much as you do. I daresay that no one likes to use FriendFeed as much as you do.

Thus, hinging a larger point to this, just because we don’t play in a particular sandbox you like to play in, feels a little too much in the digital weeds to me.

Just because you have chosen to be the unofficial spokesmodel for the very laudable service–about which I have done a very lovely reported post on complete with video–I am not clear why you need to accuse Walt Mossberg and I of not being social because we don’t use it as much.

We both just happen to prefer Twitter and blogging as our social outlets.

I have done 3,255 updates on Twitter since I started last year, for example, which is certainly not as much as your 21,224. But–and I think we can all agree–as blabby as I am, I am simply not as blabby as you.

So, let’s try to make this as clear as possible.

We. Don’t. Use. FriendFeed. Regularly.

As I said, we use Twitter, we use Facebook, we use SMS, we use blogging and we use a whole lot more. In fact, between us, we try out pretty much everything.

While I appreciate that FriendFeed seems to be your home planet of the moment, it is not the only place to realize your term, 2010 Web, and it feels very Web 1.0 to say so.

Scooby-Don’t wrote: The Web does NOT have version numbers. Naming what was going on in the last eight years “Web 2.0″ did us all a large disservice (Tim O’Reilly did that, mostly to get people to see that there was something different about the Web that was being built in 2000-2003 than what had come before).

But by naming it a number, I believe it caused a lot of people and businesses to avoid what was going on and “poo poo” it as the rantings of the new MySpace generation (which was just getting hot back then).

BoomTown response: Let me see if I can get this straight. You can call it 2010 Web, but we cannot use version numbers, such as Web 3.0?

Hey, we’ll call it Britney Spears if we want!

Actually, I like naming the next era of the Web after the always volatile entertainer. She’s mobile, ever-changing, ubiquitous and always entertaining! Also, there are several eras of Britney: Sweet, Timberlake Lady, Federline Lady, Young Mom, Nuts, Nuttier, Nuttiest, Hospitalized, Medicated.

My main point remains: Who died and made you Boss of Pointless Internet Catchphrases?

Scooby-Don’t wrote: See, the Web changes EVERY DAY and a version number just doesn’t do it justice. Think about today, we saw Microsoft (MSFT) announce a major new update to its search engine, named “Bing,” that turns on next week and is already getting TONS of kudos. Seriously, in the rental car shuttle today a guy I met said the demo he saw at Kara and Walt’s conference was “awesome.”

Also today was Google’s Wave, which caught everyone by surprise and which sucked the oxygen out of Microsoft’s search announcements. Check out all the reports that I liked from around the world this morning.

BoomTown response: The Web changes EVERY DAY? You’re kidding! We had no idea! Thanks for that critical morsel of info!

Earth to Robert: Walt has spent a large part of his life writing about the panoply of new devices that have come out in an unceasing flow and I have written at least 10,000 news stories and two books about the Web since the early 1990s.

Pretty much all we write about is how the Web changes every day. Actually, every second.

Scooby-Don’t wrote: But, back to the theme of this post. There IS something going on here. I covered it a few weeks ago.

7. Hybrid infrastructure. At the Twitter Conference this week lots of people were talking about how they were using both traditional servers along with cloud-based approaches from Amazon (AMZN) and Rackspace (RAX) to store, study, and process the sizeable datasets that are coming through Twitter, Facebook, and friendfeed.

BoomTown Response: We had folks on stage at our D7 conference discussing all this last week. In fact, we covered a whole lot more than that, which you can read about if you click on through.

While I think all yours are also interesting ideas, I am still not clear why you need to get your knickers in a knot, since we happened to think mobile platforms and smart phones are more important trends at this juncture.

Also, could please explain how Google “caught that wave big time Wednesday when it handed Android phones to everyone at its IO conference.” Google is innovative because they give free swag to folks?

We gave free swag to folks this week at D7, so I guess that makes Walt and I 2010-Web-worthy!

Scooby-Don’t wrote: So, why doesn’t a version number work for these changes? Because they don’t come at us all at once. A lot of these things have been cooking for years. The Internet makes iteration possible. Tomorrow will be better on the Internet than today. In the old world of software you’d have to wait for the compilers, then you’d need to distribute tons of CDs or disks. That no longer needs to be done.

Same with the Web. Calling it the “2010 Web” puts an urgency into what’s happening. If your business isn’t considering the latest stuff it risks looking lame or, worse, leaving money on the table. Just like driving a 1994 car risks looking lame or, worse, breaking down a lot more often than a newer car.

BoomTown response: Actually, I would have to say that your year numbering system is deeply confusing and I am not sure we can treat Internet development like some auto or, even, say, fine wine.

Ah, that 1995 Web was saucy with a smooth Netscape IPO finish, while 2001 had a disappointing popped-bubble tone, due to the excessive tannins of Pets.com. Now, the 2009 is still very young, but it has a frothy Twittery taste, which goes surprisingly well with brie.

Scooby-Don’t wrote: Is the year metaphor perfect? No, I’m sure there are a few things wrong with it. For one, if you want to host a conference based on the “trend” you’ll have to change your conference name every year. That costs money, which is why conference companies like to have more stable trends that they can exploit for a few years, at least.

BoomTown response: D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, D7. So far, changing the number has worked out well for us that we’re going to go for D8!

Scooby-Don’t wrote: Also, there are some clear “eras” in the Web, so I could see wanting to suggest that we’re in the third era of the Web, but I’ve been studying this for the past eight years and calling the second era “Web 2′ actually held us back because mainstream users didn’t think anything was happening in the past few years and Web 2.0 became a useless phrase anyway.

BoomTown response: You must know that mainstream users don’t pay one bit of attention to any and all of the dumb terms Silicon Valley comes up with.

And, with all the obviously massive change that has happened in the past few years in tech and the Internet (iPhone, Kindle, Facebook, Twitter to name a few), it seems odd to say that anything has been held back.

Frankly, it would be nice if tech innovation took a breather once in a while.

Scooby Don’t wrote: Anyway, can we use year numbers to describe the Web now? It’ll make it easier to evangelize the modern world to businesses. We’re entering the 2010 Web, that’s what I’m exploring. Calling the Web a version number is for people who don’t really understand, or participate in, what’s going on here. Kara and Walt, you gotta do better here.

BoomTown wrote: What’s in a name?

Well, it’s dang easy to attack, of course, instead of actually discussing the actual premise that we were outlining in our essay, titled “Welcome to Web 3.0.”

As we wrote:

“So what’s the seminal development that’s ushering in the era of Web 3.0? It’s the real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean, simple software, against cloud-based data and services. The poster children for this new era have been the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and iPod Touch, which have sold 37 million units in less than two years and attracted 35,000 apps and one billion app downloads in just nine months.”

So, if you want to just focus on the name, then you gotta do better here.

Until then, you say 2010 Web, we say Web 3.0 and let’s call the whole thing off.

Unfazed by a market littered with the shattered remains of previous online wine retailers, Amazon (AMZN) is expected to begin selling by early October. Which is great news for direct-to-consumer wine sellers, who are certain to benefit from Amazon’s support. “Amazon isn’t the first company to sell wine over the Internet, but they have a lot of pull in the online market as the world’s largest online retailer,” Terry Hall of The Napa Valley Vintners Association told the E-Commerce Times. “That’s the exciting part. Consumers will get access to all those wines. It gives consumers a greater choice in what they can purchase, and gives wineries another venue to get their products out to consumers.”

Unfazed by a market littered with the shattered remains of previous online wine retailers, Amazon (AMZN) is expected to begin selling by early October. Which is great news for direct-to-consumer wine sellers, who are certain to benefit from Amazon’s support. “Amazon isn’t the first company to sell wine over the Internet, but they have a lot of pull in the online market as the world’s largest online retailer,” Terry Hall of The Napa Valley Vintners Association told the E-Commerce Times. “That’s the exciting part. Consumers will get access to all those wines. It gives consumers a greater choice in what they can purchase, and gives wineries another venue to get their products out to consumers.”