You spoke and we listened. You may have noticed that we launched a revamped version of the website a few days ago. We’d like to thank all our members for their feedback as it allowed us to cater the entire site to your needs and interests, while making your shopping experience more fun and pleasurable.

So, what’s changed? Definitely not our mission, which remains to help you discover products you’ll love and share your fab finds with friends and like-minded people.

The most visible change is the new visual interface, with bigger images that make product browsing and discovery more fun and interactive for you. We’ve also introduced a column on the right where you can drag and drop things you love and add them straight to your Wishlist or “trash” those items you don’t like.

In addition to that we restructured our categories, adding new topics and simplifying the process of picking your interests. In an effort to inspire you to discover the best products the new categories feature less content but more original and stylish options.

With this new version you can add cool products to Veedow from any website with the simple click of a button! Check out the new Uploads section and add the Veedow buttons to your bookmarks bar.

Last but not least, please meet Sabrina, an early user from Seattle who turned into a full-time Veedow employee! She’s our community manager, so do not hesitate to add her to your friends and she’ll guide you through all the goodness of Veedow!

It is our sincere hope that you enjoy your new shopping experience with Veedow and we can’t wait to hear what you think about it! Feedback

Oh, don’t forget to become our fan on Facebook! Veedow Fan Page

-The Veedow Team

go to veedow.com…

Veedow had the pleasure of joining major European start-ups and the tech industry experts at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference held at London’s ExCel in the heart of London’s Royal Docks. FOWA is recognized as the best place to learn directly from the developers, designers and entrepreneurs behind the web’s brightest stars in a relaxed and fun environment.

Two days before FOWA, Stewart Townsend of Sun Microsystems called our team and offered us a booth at the conference. We were thrilled for the opportunity to give demonstrations of our website. Special thanks to Stewart and Sun Startup Essentials!

Of course, second to this reaction was how the heck do we pull together a booth in less than two days. If you attended the event, you might have recognized our booth as the simplest booth in history. I like to call it “the little black booth”. At most conferences, it’s the candy, cookies, contests or catchy signs that draw you in, the Veedow booth took a new approach: simplicity. A classy black booth, with bright white lighting that shone directly on our Veedow poster that glistened “Shopping Without Searching”, a demonstration table and our snazzy black tees that read “we help you discover products you’ll love” (Ok, I guess our shirts were not quite as snazzy as the bright red “I love my church” ones that greeted us all bright and EARLY in the A.M.)! Although, at first glance, our booth may have looked a little sad, we found that our tag line, “shopping without searching”, our bright personalities and cool t shirts (Thanks to Neil at Ninjazoo) were enough to draw in the crowd. We shared great conversations about Veedow.com with respected attendees such as Jaan Orvet of Sharpenr , Sam Downie of Bristol Sounds and our booth neighbour One Four Forty. Also, check out our interview podcast with Bristol Sounds here.

The little and minimal black booth was a success!

Meanwhile, outside of the little black booth, highlights of the conference included special guest speakers Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Kathy Sierra, Blaine Cook of Twitter, Kevin Rose of Digg, David Recordon of Six Apart and Tim Bray amongst several others, in depth workshops such as “how to grow and nurture your community” and “how to survive outside of Silicon Valley”. When conference attendees weren’t getting down to tech business, they were getting down to partying business! Attendees enjoyed the FOWA wrap up party with Diggnation and Facebook and drinks sponsored by Google.

Some of the highlights of the Expo can be found here on video. In sum, the conference was a big hit and as Andy McLoughlin of Huddle.net so aptly stated, relationships + partnerships + networking = winning! Special thanks to Carsonifield, Sun Microsystems, Diggnation and many others.

Veedow’s New PR and Marketing Specialist

My name is Sabrina Coady, I’m the new Marketing and PR Specialist for Veedow.com. I come to Veedow from Seattle, WA, USA, where I received my Bachelors Degree in Public Relations and Business Marketing. I have a background in the technology, non-profit and media sectors.

In Seattle, I was an avid user of Veedow and as I stumbled upon many cool products, I stumbled upon a job posting. The first time I came across the job posting, I immediately went to check out the Veedow team. As I witnessed a team of four men; two Italians, one Polish and one British, I made a direct connection to the movie “What Women Want”. Now, since these guys don’t have the ability to have a gender-specific telepathy, I was convinced that the best way to reach their community was for me to try on a new pair of shoes! (ie: jump on a plane to London and discover “What Online Shoppers Want.”)

A registered user as of June 2008, I’ve learned how fun online shopping is without the hassle of searching. Shopping online can be an overwhelming or daunting task, especially if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. For example, if use a search engine to type in general key words such as “wine glasses”, the wonderful world wide web will produce millions of results. Sifting through page after page to find what I’m looking for is not my idea of fun or convenience (that is what we use the internet for, right?). Also, the criteria used by Google, John Lewis or the likes, displays products to me that do not necessarily reflect what’s best for ME specifically. Veedow, on the other hand, displays products that are specifically related to my interest and its’ knowledge of my taste gets better over time without asking me to do anything more than just enjoy the service.

A personalised shopping page with product recommendations that relate to my unique tastes is my idea of fun and convenience! Hence, my love for Veedow. It’s not just any ordinary shopping experience. Rather, it’s a way to window shop from my computer, get inspired and stumble upon original products that I describe as having the “wow! factor”. In most cases, the products are not something I would have specifically searched for and therefore, never would have discovered, or perhaps I would have after arriving on page 1,908 of results. Don’t get me wrong, if searching for something specific, Google or other related search engines are my best friends, however, if I’m looking to get inspired and discover something new, I use Veedow.

There you have it, the foundation I’m walking on in my new shoes, Veedow’s PR and Marketing Director. I look forward to shopping with you all on Veedow.com! You can find my profile here, so send me a friend request and tell me “what do online shoppers want?”.

This morning I was sifting through some unread RSS feeds and I stumbled upon this nice post from Paul Fisher.

It’s basically a constructive argument about the inadequacy of CPA and lead-generation models under various point of views. The full article is here.

I tend to agree with the general argument but I’d raise 2 points around a short paragraph, where Paul says:

The last click before a purchase is not the reason why that purchase was made. Intuitively this makes sense: I am personally more likely to click on an ad for Dixons than I am for ABC Online electrics ltd. This is a result of 20 years of brand-building from Dixons.
The question then becomes: why should I pay a lead-gen fee or CPA to an affiliate if they have not done the work?

First off you don’t necessarily have to be the “last click” to get paid. Or, better, you could easily be among the last redirections to Dixons (I’ll use Dixons as a synonym of any merchant) and still get a revenue share. Every affiliate program offers a cookie of 30/60 days on average, therefore you can drive a user to Dixons and get paid for a future purchase (under certain circumstances of course). It’s basically what Paul refers to when he quote DoubleClick’s “view-throughs”.
Let’s use Veedow as an example. Even if our user goes to Dixons thorough Veedow and he doesn’t make any purchase today, chances are that he will go back straight to Dixons (or also through a natural result on Google) and if it does within the cookie’s time frame will generate money for your site. Even better, that person might have seen a vacuum on your site and end up buying a washing machine and a flat screen TV… you “risk” to get a commission for all that stuff.

This leads me to the second point. Paul wonders why should I (say, Veedow) get paid if I haven’t done the work (Dixons brand-building in the example). Well, the way I see it is that Dixons and all the other merchants are paying for traffic, eyeballs and potential customers. So they’ve done only half of the job building their brand. Also, after 18 months spent working with Affiliate Networks what is quite clear is that revenue share levels reflect not only the merchant’s business (technology has very low margins and pays 1.5 to 3% on average, while furniture could easily go up to 15-20% and fashion is in the range of 8-15%) but also its brand weight. So the Net-a-porter of all industries pays a lot less than the less know brands, therefore paying back the investments done to raise their brand awareness.

One last point about this topic and Veedow. As Paul says referring to Moveme.com:

[...] a great web app will act as a “noise reduction agent” to cut through the advertising clutter.

I completely agree with him on this and the necessity to better connect users to products, services and brands. One of the main goals here at Veedow is to bridge the gap between products and people, allowing our users to discover great new stuff they would have hardly found otherwise. And the reason of that is simple, probably these people didn’t even know that they fancied something and without the right tip, the right recommendation, they wouldn’t have enough motivation to search for that thing. Veedow inspires you and - as evil as it may sound - it sparks new ideas and needs for great products to buy or desire.

I’d be happy to hear other points of view on this topic, so comments are very welcome.

-Fabio

Matteo used to assemble the best images of food and food-related products he found on Veedow for a while. You know, being Italians we like to cook and treat us well in the kitchen :) So, after a couple of nights of editing the result is this very nice video:

[if you have problems watching the video click here]

The best thing is that Matteo didn’t put that much effort into finding these cool products because they were all delivered to his personal Veedow page in the past few weeks! He found great stuff - whether delicious, funny, smart, stylish, etc. - without searching for it.
In fact one of Veedow’s core principles and beliefs is that discovery can be far more effective than search under certain circumstances and depending on your own objectives. Wow, sounds like a statement taken from a schoolbook! So, let’s dig a bit deeper into this concept…
For example, if you want to buy a book, a dress, a pair of shoes, a dvd, etc. and YOU ALREADY KNOW WHAT YOU WANT, than a traditional search tool of some kind is what you need. Whether that search is performed on Google, Amazon, Kelkoo, HMV or any other website it’s just a matter of who do you trust more and what kind of product or service are you looking for. On the contrary, sifting through the sheer amount of information inside these websites could be pointless - or at least not optimal - when you only have a vague idea of what you’d like or not even a clue about it.
I hear you say, if I don’t have a specific need or don’t know what I’d like, why should I bother looking for something?. This objection is true to a certain extent, because it’s also true that people like to do some window-shopping, they like to dream about things they fancy, they like to check out new products, share their taste and so on…
Everyone has some interests and Veedow offers personalised recommendations and inspiration about those interests, so even if you don’t have a specific need you can get valuable advice from the service, whether you’ll end up buying something or just indulge in some window-shopping.

In our opinion StumbleUpon is the best example of online discovery so far. They make you discover websites, pictures and videos while Veedow makes you discover products, but the core proposition is very similar. Inspire people through the discovery of great things they would have hardly found otherwise. If you apply this to music you have Last.fm and Pandora for example. If you apply it to books you have Shelfari and aNobii and so on.

What’s your opinion about discovery vs. search?

-Veedow Team

Veedow has some great news for you today.

After 6 months of private testing we’re opening the site to more people as a first step towards a fully open version of Veedow. Therefore we’d like to encourage you to invite all your friends to join! Having friends on Veedow not only makes it more fun, but actually it contributes to make our recommendation engine work better for you!

To make this whole process smooth and easy we’ve added the possibility to invite more people in one go and, at the same time, to check out whom of your friends is already a Veedow member.

We added a People page where you can see new and featured members and where you can find people who love a specific topic. Also, you can send multiple invites to your friends and if some of them are already members their profile will show up and no other invitations will be sent (i.e. no spam!). And if you feel a bit more “techie” you can automatically import your contacts from any address book (Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, Plaxo, etc.) by clicking on the icon “Add from my address book” and then invite as many friends as you wish.

Friends are one of the best things in life, aren’t they? What about neighbours though? It really depends on how lucky you are, really… but on Veedow the good luck is on your side because your Neighbours are members with similar taste which you might want to engage with, see what they fancy, what they rate high (or low too!), what they put in their wishlist or what products they upload to Veedow. It’s a great way to discover like-minded people and share your Veedow experience with them too. Where can I find these neighbours you say? In your Profile page of course!

Last but not least… following many feedbacks and suggestions we also added the average rating of every product displayed and we slightly changed the icons underneath the products description to make them clearer. We hope these little things will improve your experience and please keep suggesting us how you’d like Veedow to be.

Cheers,

-Veedow Team

http://www.veedow.com

Ladies and Gentlemen,

we’ve rolled out a few new things here at Veedow and now it’s time to share them with everyone.

First of all we’ve introduced a messaging system which allows Veedow’s members to communicate with each other. You’ll find a new area in your Profile tab with your last five inbox messages and by clicking on ‘view all’ you’ll find your full inbox, outbox and compose new message.

We’ve also added a feature which lets you easily recommend a product to any Veedow’s member, either friends or not. In order to make a recommendation simply click on the envelope icon underneath the product description and then type in the usernames of the people you want to send that product to. It’s that simple.

Another change you’ll notice is the categories available within the service. We decided to focus on a narrower range of topics in order to provide better content and boost the community effect. Therefore you may find some categories you’ve picked for your own Veedow page missing but we’re sure that there are still plenty of other interesting categories to add!

Please let us know your thoughts about these changes and provide us with your feedback on the service. It’s vital for us and we’re keen to improve Veedow based on what you think!

Cheers,

-Veedow Team

Veedow Homepage

Another month of hard work has gone. Time for a wrap-up then!

A few weeks ago we took part of StartupCamp in London and we participated to the Best Startup Contest aka SpeedGeeking where we met Fritz Nelson from TechWeb.com who wrote a nice post about us and shot a video interview. Fritz is a very nice guy, so we’ll forgive him for misquoting Fabio’s surname… :)

March brought some ‘behind the scenes’ upgrades to the site and new servers which will give us the right gears to run our magic formulas and bring our beta testers a faster and enhanced service.

Last but not least, Veedow has a Facebook page. Become our fan if you haven’t done already!

Thanks for the support and the feedback you poured out in these months and please keep doing it!

Cheers,

-Veedow Team

Hello fellows,

we’ve been busy for a while now fixing issues that were causing the service to be pretty slow and detrimental to the Veedow experience.

Definitely not as compelling as we’ve envisaged it from the outset.

Now that these bugs have been squashed we would like to encourage you to visit your Veedow page, check out some products, play with the website and let us know what you think. Your feedback is vital for us to improve the service and to know what we got right and what is just wrong.

Get active! Just by using Veedow, viewing products, leaving ratings and comments you tell us what’s hot and what’s not. This improves our ability to deliver the best content to everyone in the Veedow community.

Don’t be shy! Contact us if you have any questions and spread the word among your circle of friends … the more we are the better the service become!

All the best,
-Veedow Team

A quick update from the Veedow Team before Christmas strikes…

Since we launched our private beta we’ve been busy fixing lots of bugs and responding to the great feedback you have given us. Sadly, not much time has been left for rolling out new features, but expect to see more changes to the site early next year and make sure you come back regularly to check out what’s new.

Internet Explorer users may like to know that the problems encountered earlier are now sorted out and everything seems to work fine. If not, please let us know.

Also, as a result of the growing activity on the site we are experiencing some speed issues that could cause the site to freeze. Please bear with us while we work on this issue.

Last but not least, be sure to pick those categories that really meet your interests to have a better experience on the site. Especially in these early days the content displayed in very “high” categories such as Fashion & Clothing > Women, or Technology > Computers might be a bit fuzzy. Go deeper in the category selection to get the best out of your Veedow, that’s our advice for the year’s end.

With our best Christmas wishes.

-Veedow Team