Showing posts with label Looking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Looking. Show all posts

Sunday, August 19, 2012

That Flickr Account Wasn’t Marissa Mayer, But She *Is* Currently Looking For A New Head Of Flickr

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... ? Learn More

Screen shot 2012-08-15 at 9.13.50 PM

Oh Process Journalism, how lucky we here at TechCrunch are that we get to practice you. Anyways, here’s what I got: That “Marissa Mayer” account that went up on Flickr earlier today isn’t actually Marissa. While Mayer does have a personal Flickr account, it’s currently set to Private: We should have known she would never use a corporate Google photo on a Yahoo account!

Note: Yahoo PR *still* hasn’t responded to Anthony Ha’s email request for clarification.

While we’ve also learned that the increase in Flickr hiring started well before Mayer arrived, there is one key development that can be attributed to the new CEO: The hunt is on for a new, executive Flickr Product Head, because the site is currently being held together by Product Director Markus Spiering. Spiering is presently the de facto Flickr lead within Yahoo despite answering to Flickr General Manager Douglas Alexander.

Mayer is hoping to fill the position via acquisition, and is currently sniffing around the startup ecosystem for likely candidates; as it will probably be difficult to find the talent the company is looking for through a simple hire. The strategy is to have an entrepreneur in charge. And there are rumors that much of the existing team is being completely reorg’d, which is big company speak for dismantled.

Flickr, founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake in 2004, has had tumultuous leadership and cultural change before being left in its current beleaguered state — going from the guidance of its original founders, to PM Matthew Rothenberg to Spiering. The changes left it slow and vulnerable to more nimble and mobile focused competitors like Instagram.

The product is the number one thing The Internet would like to see Mayer fix during her tenure at Yahoo, so it’s no surprise she’s made it a priority. Now if she’d only make her real account public.


Former game designers Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake created Flickr, an online photo sharing network, in 2004. Flickr, which began as a photo-sharing feature of their gaming project, has since then blossomed into one of the premiere photo-sharing sites on the web. Yahoo purchased Flickr for $35 million in March of 2005. Since then Flickr continues to compete with other photo-sharing giant Photobucket.

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Friday, August 17, 2012

Looking For Discounts On Grass-Fed Beef & Truffles? Delicious Karma Debuts Its Online Gourmet Food Shop

Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. ? Learn More

delicious-karma-logo

Playing in the same general space as 500 Startups-backed Love With Food, but going the traditional e-commerce route instead of the “box of the month” club, new San Francisco-based startup Delicious Karma is officially launching its own artisanal and gourmet food shopping site today. The site currently features over 500 different products from nearly 100 different artisanal food companies and has already signed up 2,000 customers during its private beta. The big idea? Offering artisanal food vendors a better, more efficient way to get their products in front of customers, so they can go back to making their fancy cheeses.

The service will be dabbling with a mix of different approaches to entice customers to the site. For starters, members are introduced to foods through special three-day sales where they’ll be able to buy at discounted prices before the items are moved into inventory. Customers who purchase through more traditional means will be incentivized to return to the site through marketing initiatives that will include both email and social efforts. (Shoppers today can already collect their favorites on Pinterest-like “Crave” boards.) And soon, the company will also offer “sample box” subscriptions containing a half dozen or so items, so shoppers can learn what foods they like and want to buy again.

Nope, you can’t entirely avoid the box-of-the-month model these days, it seems.

Delicious Karma isn’t working off an affiliate model for revenue generation, but is instead buying foods wholesale or discounted from wholesale. The team developed its own backend infrastructure that automates the ordering process. Vendors have their own unique portal where they can log in, run reports, print out shipping labels, and set up deliveries using Delicious Karma’s shipping carriers.

Founded by Jim Ritchie, whose background is in engineering, and wife Michelle, who most recently held an executive role at Jamba Juice, Delicious Karma isn’t only about selling its tasty treats, it also wants to give back to the artisanal community. Ritchie says that 1% of the company’s time, equity and profits will be returned to its partners through something called “Karma Kauses.” The “Kauses” are actually organizations that promote and support this community. Currently, the site lists San Francisco-based non-profit incubator kitchen La Cocina and non-profit Seedling Projects as its first “Karma Kauses.” Soon, customers will also be able to donate their own Karma Kredits (points awarded for participation) to the Kause of their choice too, in order to have Delicious Karma donate cash on customers’ behalf. Those Kredits can also be applied to on-site purchases (10 Kredits = $1.00).

The beta has only been open for a matter of weeks, so numbers regarding transactions or orders per day don’t make sense right now. Jim did say they were seeing multiple orders per day, however. Until now, the five-person startup has been self-funded, but Jim, a 20 year Silicon Valley resident, is now planning to use his connections in the industry to help raise a seed round of around $1.5 million to $2 million to grow the site further.


Delicious Karma is an online market that makes it fun and easy to discover, learn about, and buy exceptional artisanal and gourmet foods, at great prices, while supporting the community of artisanal food producers. People are becoming more interested in eating great-tasting, wholesome foods made with local, natural ingredients, yet these foods can be difficult and time consuming to find and expensive to purchase. Delicious Karma solves this problem by providing a trusted, online marketplace that makes it fun and easy...

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