The race between Europe’s Groupon clones reached a high point yesterday as it was announced that the Samwer brother’s CityDeal was being taken over by the American group-discount giant. First coverage by German media groups (Netzökonom-Blog and Deutsche Startups) announced the deal at 22:00 CET yesterday. Holger Schimdt wrote: “The tempo has paid off for | View post »

As shown by the “shop” approach from Lockerz, playful elements and new reward systems are gaining increasing importance in e-commerce. Therefore, in addition to their presentation “Putting the Fun Into Functional” here is another interesting presentation from Amy Jo Kim which shows how gaming elements will increasingly penetrate into our lives (“Metagame Design: Reward Systems | View post »

The French e-commerce pioneer Vente-Privée sweeped the Media Momentum Awards this year and took home four awards. The Media Momentum Awards are bestowed annually by British investment house GP Bullhound to the strongest growing European internet businesses. Besides the Judges Award, Vente-Privée earned the top awards in the categories of Best Management, Best Execution, and | View post »

The first $35 million for Groupon gave impetus to the German Citydeal, now the further $135 million is goading on another wave of investors, including in Europe. New in the race is the Spanish Groupalia, who earlier this week announced their first big financing round of 2.5 million euro: “Groupalia, an online site which features | View post »

A very lively debate erupted from this question on Exciting Commerce’s German language blog last week. A secret project is in the works at the Intershop Tower in the former East German city of Jena. A project so secret that practically everyone is talking about it. With high priority, Intershop is developing a new e-commerce | View post »

There were times when e-commerce was all about picking the “right” shop system. In the meantime, the debate on infrastructure in technology and development departments has evolved. Now the question is: what is the right software framework for a future-ready e-commerce solution? This question will be keenly debated in Germany from May 6 – 7 | View post »

Unfortunately there are still too few scientific studies on networking effects in e-commerce. Understandable though, due to limited opportunities to make direct comparisons. All the more exciting that a new study has been released (PDF) from France and the US with the title “Deriving Value from Social Commerce Networks”, whose results have been recently published | View post »

The most exciting startup of the Next Web conference in Amsterdam was Shutl (“Online Delivery Revolution”) from Great Britain, because they are trying to get a delivery service off the ground which meets the demands of the 21st century. Shutl has the support of some first investors and a start capital of 500,000 British pounds. | View post »

Jochen Krisch reported from the 2010 Next Web Conference in Amsterdam this week. One of the highlights of the Next Web Conference was the presentation from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who has taken a look 4-5 years forward at the future of web applications (“The Future of Web Building Blocks”): “When we talk about building | View post »