Social commerce... While the term was coined by VC David Beisel, it is Steve Rubel who brought a comprehensive definition to the new trend:

“Social commerce can take several forms, but in sum it means creating places where people can collaborate online, get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services and then purchase them. It shrinks the research and purchasing cycle by creating a single destination powered by the power of many.”

The VC and the Blogger sketched the main lines of social commerce back in those days. It's important to notice that while we witness an evolution of social commerce today, we don't particularly see that "single destination powered by the power of many". Or don't we?

Balaji Sundararajan is the Founder and CEO of Bravisa, a social commerce site. Bravisa's role in the social commerce landfill is to provide products for individual retailers at wholesale price. The process is dead simple: sign-up - product selection (from over 80 suppliers) - price tagging - store creation - product promotion through widgets, partner sites, written reviews - a 10-minute process max.

Retailers don't need to spend a dime to sell products through Bravisa. Online sellers choose the profit margin they wish to make on the product they sell. Bravisa handles payment processes, shipping, and customer service.

Bravisa's main competition is Zlio. The main difference between the two is that Zlio's products are from the Amazon store feed. since Zlio is the middlemen between a retailer and a re-seller, profit margins are smaller. Bravisa gets its stuff directly from wholesalers, which is a huge difference for small individual retailers.

So far, the product selection for individual sellers on Bravisa is not extraordinary. I would even say I was disappointed to see the wholesale store filled with pillows, candles and digital picture frames. Not very exciting products.

But Bravisa is young and has a great vision in mind: Becoming the back-end engine of all social commerce transactions. Balaji Sundararajan's strategy is to grow through partnerships to acquire new retailers (example), and therefore negotiate more deals with more whole sellers. And quite frankly, after talking with Balaji, I have total confidence in Bravisa's achievement of their goal.

Bravisa

More info about Bravisa:
Bravisa E-store: The Good, The Bad, And The Very Good - Online Business Review
Boosting Bravisa - Selling Products Without Owning - Startup Booster
Bravisa - Another Online Shop - Problogger
Bravisa - Make money with your own online store - howtomarketyourstuff.com

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A "bar-like environment". Those are the words that Suneet Wadhwa, Founder and CEO of Engage, uses to describe traditional dating sites. The 1998 romantic movie "You got mail" has seriously changed Americans' attitude regarding online dating. Sites like Match.com soon became the next best thing for singles to make romantic encounters in a whole new fashion.

Back to 2008. The rise of online dating has brought yet another dilemma in the mix: Most online daters lie on their profiles to decrease their chances of being rejected. This is why Suneet Wadhwa describes traditional dating sites as "bar-like environment", i.e. places where the end justifies the means when it comes to attracting others.

Engage has been created in response to this dilemma. Engage is an online social dating site. The idea is to invite your friends to help you find the perfect match through recommendations. Most people love to play wingman for their friends. For that purpose, the Engage team has developed a set of social features, like the Matchmaker - you crawl a list of people to recommend some to your friend(s) - or the Cast Your Vote - out of three given profiles, you pick the one you think fits the most to a fourth given person.

Thanks to the presence of your friends:
a. You can approach other people with more ease by asking your friends to help you out, just like we often do in the real life;
b. You tend to be more honest since you are held socially accountable. Basically, your real life follows you online.

The service is really fun. As Derek Gordon, VP of marketing, adds at the end of the video, the service is not just designed for singles looking for a hot date. Married people can join the fun (if you're married, you can't put yourself in the date-me marketplace on Engage) and recommend their buddies to other singles to help them meet the right person.

There is much more to be said about Engage, so read those great articles below:
Engage Introduces Next-Generation Social Dating Community Platform - bnet
San Mateo-Based Engage Publicly Launches Social Dating Community - Silicon Valley Wire
Engage.com's CEO & VP of Love - CupidCast podcast
Engage: Where Dating gets Social! - Victor Caballero blog

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Apture is a new tool for bloggers that allows “content creators the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items directly into their pages” by adding links and small navigator windows to pages and posts automatically (CC Weblog).

This description of Apture couldn't be more exact. I am a video producer, and until today, I had not found a way to let readers access and watch all of my videos without leaving that same page you are on right now (converting readers into viewers is tricky). If you look in the center sidebar (HyveUp video directory), just hover a link and the video pops right up in an HTML window (it's not another browser window popping up).

With Apture, setting up one of those links is a breeze. Simply select directly on your homepage the word(s) you want to link to, and Apture automatically fetches for you related Youtube, Flickr, Wikipedia and WashPost content. Out of this automated pre-selection, you the publisher select what it is that you really want to link to.

Apture opens up the door to a new form of navigation system, where content is universal thanks to CC-license and Wikipedia's GFDL license. As of today, small site publisher can try Apture for free, and the startup offers a revenue-sharing model for larger media sites.

As far as I am concerned, Apture is one of the most innovative publishing solutions I have heard of and adopted so far. A lot of startups think that 3D is the way to tackle the flat Web symptom. Apture actually is a form of 3D, as it adds layers of content to your site. However, 3D is a little sci-fi and heavy on your bandwidth. Apture is down-to-earth and nice with your connection speed. Is this the Web 3.0 everyone is fussing about?

There is much more to be said about Apture, so read those great articles below:
With Apture, Hyperlinks Get Rich Media - Giga Om
Apture: Enrich Your Site’s Content - Brown Thoughts
Apture drags online news experience into the 21st century - Venture Beat
Fantastically cool code to watch - Lawrence Lessig's blog

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