Zach Coelius writes:

We are excited to announce two new features today. Analytics and the click server are now up and running.

Analytics:

The performance of every Triggit link is now measured! Open your Triggit tool and all your Triggit links will have a new halo. Mouse over link to see how many clicks it got for the day! Soon you will also be able to go to Triggit.com, and view My Reports for more data.

Click Server:

To provide such great performance data and reports, we had to create a new link structure. Triggit now routes your links, and your users clicks, through our servers before they go to your destination. Your Amazon links will still go to Amazon, Shopping.com to Shopping.com and CJ to CJ, but by sending them through Triggit we are able to track their performance and thus provide analytics.
These analytics will also let us build an optimization platform for you, so you can test sending your traffic to multiple sources. Most of you won’t even notice, but it is a big infrastructure change that will let us do lots of good stuff to make your life easier and hopefully your pocketbook a little fatter.

Tags: Triggit

Robert Pazornik, Founder of LicketyShip, writes on The LicketyShip Blog:

If Amazon — without any local stores — can find a way to get a product delivered to you the same day you buy it, the big question is, why haven’t major retailers — with hundreds of local stores in North America alone — found a way to do the same?

In theory, with a quiver full of local stores at their disposal, retailers could potentially get products to their customers much, much faster than Amazon. With storefronts in the neighborhood of virtually every household in a major U.S. market, it’s practical to imagine that retail customers could get products delivered to them in just a few hours, as opposed to the 12 or so that Amazon requires.

The explanation for why this hasn’t happened yet is complex. But we can isolate 2 main reasons why this service is taking so long to come to market:

a) lack of inventory control
b) lack of a local delivery mechanism

The first problem — lack of inventory control — naturally makes local shopping difficult. If you don’t know what products you have on the shelf, how can you sell them to customers? This has been a problem for as long as retail has existed. You should be able to recall with ease the last time you searched a store high and low for a certain item, only to have a clerk look up the product on a store computer and exclaim “the system SAYS we have 5 in stock!?”

But over the past 5 years or so, the accuracy of store inventory accounting has improved dramatically. The sweeping popularity of “In-Store Pickup” (the shipping method for online purchases where you can choose to pick items up at your local store for free) has forced retailers to step up their ability to predict which items are in stock so they can offer this service. This option has grown in popularity to the point where some retailers report that 50% of their items purchased online are “shipped” using this method.

But just knowing what you have on the shelves doesn’t solve problem #2: how to get those items delivered from the store to the customer.

Local delivery isn’t as easy as it sounds. FedEx, UPS, and DHL aren’t designed to do on-demand deliveries from stores. The items customers purchase online are shipped almost exclusively from far-away distribution centers, from which products are funneled by the major carriers through a sophisticated network of central and regional shipping hubs — a process honed over decades of operation — before reaching the customer.

With the fastest, most expensive shipping online option available (”Express” or “Next-Day”), that process usually takes 2 days at a minimum — 1 to locate and pack the item, and 1 to ship — or 4 days at a maximum if the order is placed over a weekend, when traditional carriers do not operate.

That’s where LicketyShip steps in. LicketyShip has designed a turnkey software and logistics solution that integrates smoothly with retailers’ legacy online platforms and store protocols to provide an efficient method for delivering products direct from local stores at affordable rates.

In other words — when retailers use LicketyShip, they have an easy way to get products delivered from their brick-and-mortar stores to their customers the same day they buy.

Getting your products closer to buyers means faster delivery; faster delivery means happier buyers.

And that’s how you get closer to your customers.

Tags: LicketyShip

SocialTimes wrote about Buddy Media (the company that owns and operates the Facebook currency AceBucks) buying the Versus Franchise from ChipIn’s CEO Carnet Williams:

Over a month ago I received rumors that Carnet Williams was entertaining offers worth millions of dollars. As a result, I would guess that this acquisition was a combination of both cash and ownership in a more stable company. This acquisition illustrates the importance of partnerships and acquisitions in the highly volatile market of Facebook applications. This is a great move by Buddy Media and it will be interesting to see how they maintain their dominance in such high risk environment. If you’d like to read more about the acquisition go check out the Buddy Media blog post.

– Nick O’Neill @ Social Times

Tags: AceBucks

Mike Lazerow, CEO of AceBucks (company name is actually Buddy Media) explains why they purchased the Versus franchise from ChipIn:

I am extremely excited to announce that Buddy Media has acquired 5 applications from ChipIn, Inc. Combined, the applications have been installed by 5.6 million Facebook users and generate more than 5 million page views a day.

The acquired applications are a series of popular Facebook applications based on a “Versus” franchise. In the applications, users join one side (Vampires vs. Werewolves, Pirates vs. Ninjas, Skiers vs. Snowboarders, Santa vs. The Grinch, Cops vs. Robbers) and create armies and battle each other to win virtual gold coins.

Why did Buddy Media buy these applications?

~ Huge Traffic: We are currently working with many large media and marketing companies to drive their overall Facebook and social media strategy. This includes application development, application marketing and more. This deal gives us 150M+ page views a month (and growing) to use to fulfill our current and future ad deals.

~ Loyal Audience: Buddy Media is all about loyalty. With 11,000 applications already live on Facebook, we believe strongly that the social networks need a loyalty system to keep users coming back. The “Versus” apps have a VERY loyal audience. According to third-party analytics services, the apps average 33 page views per visit. And more than half of all the applications’ unique visitors came back 9 times or more in the past week. That’s more than once a day! They will be even stickier as soon as we complete the AceBucks integration.

~ AceBucks, AceBucks, AceBucks: We will use these applications to promote AceBucks to 5M+ additional Facebook users. This helps solidify AceBucks’ position as the leading loyalty program on Facebook, with short-term plans to expland on other social nets. The games fit AceBucks really well. We will be allowing users to take their earned gold coins and transfer them into AceBucks, where they can buy any of the 4800+ items for sale in the AceBucks Stores. We will also be adding new life to the games by promoting the games to our growing audience.

~ Revenue Potential: The apps are currently generating significant cash flow through several third-party networks. We will be able to generate premium CPMs from the applications by selling the advertising and sponsorship inventory directly. We can drive much better results for our partners (and CPMs for Buddy Media) by operating our own apps in addition to working with others. ChipIn has already shown success with the apps. Lionsgate Entertainment used the application to promote the werewolf movie Skinwalkers, spending $15,000 a month to embed a promotional video inside the apps.

~ Additional Apps: We plan to use the flexible “Versus” application technology to launch other apps. The model has appeal. Proof is in the numbers.

Why would ChipIn sell the applications given their popularity and intense loyalty? Simple … Focus. Carnet Williams, the company’s CEO, is trying to create a monster widget business. I have no doubt Carnet will be successful. I enjoyed getting to know him during our negotiation and he’s as bright as they come. And he is smart enough to know that with $1 million in angel funding for ChipIn, he can’t do everything. The Facebook apps, which were launched as a marketing campaign for Carnet’s real business, started to “take its toll on ChipIn,” this month’s Inc. Magazine reports, detailing Carnet’s growth and decision. “Its software developers were finding themselves devoting more and more of their time to coding for Facebook applications.”

This deal is one of many great deals we already have in store for 2008. Stay tuned! This is just the beginning.

UPDATE: Here is Carnet’s blog post about the deal. AllFacebook.com, Social Times and Mashable have some initial coverage as well.

Tags: AceBucks

Betsy Schiffman of WIRED.com writes:

Web publishing tool Triggit launches Thursday, and its staff is smiling. Left to right: Susan Coelius Keplinger, COO; Ryan Tecco, CTO; Zach Coelius, CEO; Jackson, office dog; and Robert Dunn, VP of Sales.
Photo: Courtesy of Triggit

Zach Coelius came to San Francisco at age 25, as a Minnesota native and Silicon Valley outsider. Within a month he crashed the high-profile Demo conference and charmed his way into a top-secret poker game among venture capitalists, where he won a thousand dollars in seed funding for a then-nonexistent company.

A little more than two years later, Coelius is CEO of Triggit, a new web service that helps bloggers easily add pictures, video and ads. And Coelius, 28, has hustled his way into the upper ranks of the Silicon Valley web scene — thanks partly to his poker habit. When he first arrived, he played several nights a week, occasionally paying his rent with his winnings. He admits he’s a “pretty good” poker player.

“When I first moved (to San Francisco), I played all the time. If you wanted to, you could go to a poker game every night of the week. I didn’t really know anybody, and it was a good way to meet people,” Coelius says. “Now I just play my own game once a week.”

In a cutthroat business environment such as Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs use whatever tools they’ve got to get ahead. For Coelius an appetite for risk and fine-tuned poker skills helped him secure funding and get his startup off the ground.

Triggit, which officially launches to the public Thursday, has already attracted a couple of “big” companies interested in acquiring the startup, Coelius says. That’s even though the company has been in stealth mode until today, with a tiny user base and an unproven business model. (Coelius thinks the company will eventually negotiate deals directly with ad networks.)

Even with a hazy profit outlook, the company scored $500,000 in seed funding from Bay Partners. Salil Deshpande, a partner at Bay, played poker on the VC circuit with Coelius for about a year before he made the investment in Triggit.

“Zach is a high-IQ individual,” says Deshpande. “When we invested, it wasn’t clear what he was going to build. And it’s still not clear whether they’ve built the right thing. But it’s a process, and I felt like even if he hadn’t figured it all out yet, there’s a good chance that he would.”

Triggit, which was literally conceived in Techcrunch co-editor Michael Arrington’s backyard, lets bloggers link to products or photos on the fly. The idea is this: The easier it is for bloggers to link to advertisers, the greater the potential for generating revenue from affiliate sites such as Amazon.com or Shopping.com.

It looks like a win-win situation for advertisers and bloggers. Affiliate marketing is a cheap way for advertisers to expand their reach. For bloggers, Triggit is a nifty way to link to products or to pull photos from Flickr, ideally increasing their blogs’ visual appeal as well as enhancing their revenue. The tool lets bloggers drag and drop ads, YouTube videos or Flickr pictures directly into their sites.

“Triggit’s made a little difference in terms of sales, but overall sales are down this year for a number of reasons,” says Anne Levy, a Chicago full-time mom, blogger and Triggit user. “But really I use it because it’s so much easier for me to load links.”

Coelius and his sister Susan Coelius Keplinger (Triggit’s COO) are longtime entrepreneurs, having started three other businesses together. They’ve led a pretty charmed existence in Silicon Valley: Shortly after they arrived, a friend of a friend hooked them up with angel funding and raw office space in San Francisco.

They furnished the entire office with free stuff (including free artwork courtesy of Flickr). In fact, the founders have collected so much free stuff that they’ve since sold some of it, turning a $1,000 profit.

Although it’s been a seemingly effortless ride, the economy is positioned to take a nasty turn, by the looks of it. Internet advertising could be particularly vulnerable to weakness in consumer spending, a concern that Coelius dismisses.

“We’re uniquely positioned for a downturn,” Coelius says. “Our users are small publishers — like stay-at-home moms. Those are people who will need Triggit.”

Tags: Triggit

Jerry Guo blogs:

I posted last week about a bad experience with Kayak. Their chief architect was nice enough to give a helpful response. Anyway, a reader, Sam, then pointed me to Yapta, what he calls “a sexier Kayak.”

We’ve posted about Yapta back in April when they first opened. Unlike Orbitz or Travelocity or Kayak for that matter, it’s not meant to help you find cheap tickets. What it’s good at, aside from centralizing airfare options into one convenient location, is helping you land a refund after you’ve booked your flight if it goes down in price. Apparently most airlines have this secret policy, but they don’t advertise it, and of course, almost no one bothers to look up ticket prices again for a flight they’ve already booked. Until now!

Now it seems after the news of Kayak buying up Sidestep, other travel sites are eyeing Yapta, which is still a fledgling startup. The site’s been fairly successful in the half year it’s been open; a couple weeks ago, they announced a Firefox add-on that makes tracking your purchases that much easier. What you do is input your flight itinerary into Yapta, and they’ll send you an email when it goes down in price. If you don’t think this is a big deal (or big business), just out these stats from a beta trial Yapta did earlier this year. “Yapta found that 34% of purchased tickets became eligible for a refund. The average refund was 16% of the ticket price, or $85. During the beta period that worked out to a total of $28,900 in aggregate potential refunds, or about $100 per beta user,” said the good people at Techcrunch.

The only thing is I’m not sure just how easy or costly it is to get the refund. Newsweek claims that you’ll be charged $100 on most airlines for the flight change.

Tags: Yapta