Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.
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Bloglovin, a Sweden-born but now New York-based blog and lifestyle portal, is growing rapidly according to this article by All Things D. The concept of a combined blog/RSS reader with social networking features seems to have found many fans, especially among female users. Of the site’s audience of 10 million monthly unique visitors, 93 percent are women.
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Disqus is a quite popular comment system for blogs that adds social network-like features to the comments section. Now the free service has launched an update that allows commenters to post video, audio and images within a comment. So prepare yourself for more interactive content when sifting through blog comments.
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With Wallet, Google offers a digital wallet which they can use to transfer money to friends or to buy stuff in stores with their NFC-enabled smartphone. But since many phones and retailers still lack NFC support, the internet giant has come up with a handy workaround: Users in the U.S. can now get a free debit card to make purchases or ATM withdrawals using their Google Wallet balance.
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If you happen to walk by the Westfield Mall in San Francisco these days, you have the chance to order directly from a touch-enabled connected digital storefront, powered by eBay. If you found something to purchase, you get the order pushed to your mobile phone during checkout. It’s probably not really the future of retail, but a nice experiment nevertheless.
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If you instead decide to check out one out of two Macy’s stores in New York and San Francisco while carrying an iOS 7 device, you might get a notification about special deals, made possible with Apples new iBeacon feature. For now Macy’s will only ping your iPhone while entering the store. In the future, the retailer might also send you department-specific notifications.
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Zulily, a fast-growing flash-sales platform that hardly is being talked about in the media, has pulled of a successful IPO. The site operates daily flash sales with 4.500 products from children’s and women’s apparel to kitchen accessories.