BestVendor , which aims to create an online resource where business professionals can exchange recommendations for work-related software and services, has raised $3 million in Series A funding. The financing round was co-led by RRE Ventures and SoftBank, with previous backer Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective’s David Tisch and Old Willow Partners participating. Founded in January 2011 and based out of New York City, BestVendor says it aims to be for recommendations and reviews of work apps with Amazon is for books and Yelp for restaurants. The site was launched – in beta, of course – last month and has already attracted more than 4,800 members, who’ve shared 13 work-related applications on average. In June 2011, BestVendor secured $600,000 in seed funding from SV Angel, Peter Thiel, Lerer Ventures, and SoftBank Capital.

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BestVendor Raises $3M For Work App Recommendation Platform

As more and more consumers are flocking online to shop for gifts this holiday season, Amazon has announced that it is extending the order deadline for its free shipping through the last weekend before Christmas. Amazon has been offering “FREE Super Saver Shipping” on eligible orders $25 and over. So now, customers can place orders through Monday, Dec. 19 with delivery by Christmas, which is on Sunday, Dec. 5. Usually, Friday, December 16 is one of the last days when merchants offer free shipping with delivery by Christmas Eve. Amazon buyers can still order past the Dec. 19 deadline but will have to pay for expedited shipping to have the item delivered by Christmas. Free shipping is actually one of the contributing factors to the significant increase in online holiday spending this year, so this is a wise move for Amazon to capture more consumer dollars on last-minute holiday shopping. Amazon made a similar move last year as well. Of course, this is not good news for brick and mortar stores, who tend to reap the benefits of last-minute shoppers who can’t go online for free shipping offers the week prior Christmas. Last week, Amazon announced that users of Amazon’s Price Check app will be able to score up to $5 off a purchase of any product if they use the app in-store, another blow to physical retailers. We’ll probably see other big e-commerce players also extend free shipping deadlines in the coming week.

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Amazon Extends Free Shipping Cutoff Through The Weekend Before Christmas

Today, December 10th, Amazon is offering a very special deal you’re going to love and your local brick-and-mortar retailer is going to hate. Use its PriceCheck mobile app and get 5% off your purchase, up to $5 at a time, as many as 3 times. Why the discounts to use PriceCheck? The app is designed to get you to visit local shops, try out a product, submit valuable pricing data to Amazon, leave without buying anything, and make your purchase on Amazon instead. Actually scanning an in-store item isn’t technically required to get the discount, though Amazon doesn’t make this clear at first. The webpage for the deal states “Get a 5% discount just by checking a price”, but you can check a price by typing in a product’s name from home without submitting a local price. If you read the terms it says “In-store price submission and location confirmation are optional.” Amazon explains the local pricing data helps it offer competitive prices. That’s exactly right. Because it offers such a wide range of products and makes the real money from hooking users on its shopping experience, Amazon can afford to lower its prices to beat out brick-and-mortars. PriceCheck helps it identify which products it needs to put on sale, and the one-day discount will get shoppers used to looking on Amazon for these deals. Now, I’m no luddite. Efficient technology’s march over old models is natural and inevitable. But using shoppers to gather reconnaissance on its offline enemies is pretty aggressive. It also promotes  show-rooming  where users get the benefit of checking out a product in person, but then neglect the shops that pay overhead to offer that service. There’s little that brick-and-mortar stores can do to stop this. If they berate people for scanning their products with PriceCheck, they’ll just push them right into Amazon’s clutches. Shoppers will have to decide whether to take the discount, or support their local mom-and-pop or even their local Walmart which at least keeps jobs nearby. But in this economy, most people’s allegiance is to their wallet.

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Today Amazon Will Give You $15 To Use PriceCheck and Screw Local Retailers

For a company that generally sticks to fancy-pants Bluetooth headsets and speakers, Jawbone has done a surprisingly good job of making their UP fitness-wristband-thing into a rather trendy item. Alas, there’s another trend going around that’s not nearly as beneficial: complaining that the UP is broken. Looking to fix things before the UP’s reputation goes down for the count, Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman has just announced that the company is implementing a full No-Questions-Asked refund policy for anyone with a wonky wristband. They don’t even want it back. In a letter to UP owners , Rahman says “We recognize that this product has not yet lived up to everyone’s expectations – including our own – so we’re taking action.” Users looking to take part in the program are offered two options: cash, or Jawbone.com credit. If you take the former, they’ll give you $109.43 (if you’re in the US — it varies a bit based on currency/location); if you go for the credit, they’ll bump it up to $150. Perhaps most (pleasantly) surprising, Jawbone isn’t making anyone actually send their wristbands back — as long as you promise that you haven’t returned your UP already and that you won’t sell it on eBay or otherwise profit from the device, they’ll cough up the dough. The program kicks off tomorrow, with a placeholder page already up here. Furthermore, the FAQ page reveals that Jawbone has cancelled all pending UP orders (it seems to be pulled from Amazon already , as well) and pledges to not begin taking orders again until they “have sorted out the issues with [the] UP bands.”

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Jawbone Cancels All Pending Up Orders, Refunds Unhappy Owners (Even If They Keep It)

There’s a lot of skepticism about the success potential of UltraViolet, a new cloud based digital distribution format designed to make digital rights management work across devices. That’s because people hate DRM, but also because the standard currently lacks support from Amazon and iTunes, the two biggest digital video sellers and renters. I wanted the real story on where UltraViolet is going, so I sat down with the Tim Dodd, VP and GM of Neustar Media, developers of the technology that powers UltraViolet. Watch here on TCTV as he defends UltraViolet, explains how it works on iOS devices without support from iTunes, and claims that there’s still a future in physical media. Last year, UltraViolet emerged as the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem coalitions choice to power DRM. Hollywood hoped that users would be more likely to continue buying DVDs and Blu-Rays if they could also stream the same content across console, web, and mobile devices. Last month, the first UltraViolet films went on sale from Warner Bros, and they were supposed to play on iOS devices via the Flixster app the studio recently acquired . But the UltraViolet launch was a disaster . Customers complained that they had bought DVDs that came with a “digital copy” only to find they didn’t actually get to download a copy. Instead they had use buggy UltraViolet through the crash-prone Flixster app, and couldn’t play the films in iTunes. Things got so bad that Warner Bros started distributing free iTunes download codes to customers. Still, Dodd is optimistic. He thinks it’s only a matter of time before more content producers and retailers adopt UltraViolet. I agree that retailers are in need of a way to keep digital from cannibalizing their sales, and that cross-device content rights are what users want. However, I think users are only going to buy an UltraViolet DVD instead of buying it on iTunes if they can easily play it on all the most popular devices. Right now, they can’t. Apple has little incentive to cooperate. It has its own DRM system FairPlay, and accounts for such a big percentage of digital sales and rentals that Hollywood can’t afford to pull their content from iTunes to pressure Apple into adopting UltraViolet. Apple makes its money on hardware, so it’s in its interest to prevent the content it sells through iTunes from being played on other devices. Apple could even flex its muscle and ban a dedicated UltraViolet player app for mimicking native functionality. The only way I can foresee UltraViolet succeeding in any capacity is for it to be expressly anti-Apple. Neustar would need to get Amazon to adopt UltraViolet, concentrate on offering a great Android experience, and publicly hammer Apple and its FairPlay DRM for not permitting interoperability. As nice as a future sounds where you buy content and can play it on any device, a fractured ecosystem seems more plausible right now.

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How Neustar Plans To Make UltraViolet DRM Work, With or Without Apple (TCTV)

Amazon this morning pounded itself on the chest once more for selling Kinde devices as if they were hotcakes, particularly during last (Black) Friday. According to the company, it was the “best Black Friday ever” for the Kindle family, with Kindle sales “increasing 4x over last year”. As usual, don’t expect Amazon to share hard sales numbers, because they never do. We’ll have to do with analyst estimates, which I’m sure will be rolling in during the course of this week (today is Cyber Monday and will likely result in another sales spike for Kindle devices). The number does run in the millions, of course, and Dave Limp, Kindle VP, is quoted as follows: “Even before the busy holiday shopping weekend, we’d already sold millions of the new Kindle family.” Amazon also reiterated, again , that its tablet computer, the Kindle Fire , is its bestselling product on Amazon.com. In fact, they say this has been the case for the past 8 weeks now, since the device was introduced on September 28 . Related: Black Friday E-Commerce Spending Up 26 Percent To A Record $816M; Amazon Most Visited Retailer

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Amazon: Kindles Are Flying Off The Shelves (But We’re Still Not Sharing Numbers)

When the Kindle Fire first shipped a couple weeks ago, the reviews were mixed. Uncle Walt calls it good, but not great . David Pogue at the NYT thinks it is “sluggish,” lacking “polish or speed.” But the Kindle Fire is still selling like hotcakes . Some reviewers are disappointed that it is not an iPad, but that is the wrong way to look at it. The Fire is a standout media tablet that does a few things very well and I am going to tell you what they are. I’ve been using a Kindle Fire for the past two weeks (that is, when my kids or wife haven’t absconded to another room with it). The device passes my first test: my family fights over it. The Fire is kid-tested, and mother-approved. Fruit Ninja is the new obsession with my young children. Even my two-year-old, who loves the iPad , is increasingly eyeing the Kindle Fire and scheming ways to get her Mom out of the room so she can play with it. My wife will have none of that, she’s reading Joan Didion’s latest book on the Fire. I sneak it away from the bedside table when everyone is asleep at night to watch old episodes of Arrested Development . The Kindle Fire is purpose-built to find and consume digital media: books, movies and TV shows, music, magazines, apps, and the web. It is more limited in its capabilities than an iPad, but in these areas it holds its own. Let me address each of these areas individually: Reading A better comparison than the iPad is to other Kindles. I’ve been playing with a Kindle Touch as well, and the responsiveness of the screen is so temperamental that it is frustrating for me to use. The flicker of the E Ink screen also gives me a headache. No, if you are going to buy a Kindle buy the Kindle Fire. It is much better, even for reading digital books and magazines. The New Yorker magazine looks great on it. Yes, I know backlit screens are not as good for your eyes as E Ink, but who are we kidding? Many of us are staring at screens for 8 to 12 hours a day. I, for one, am used to it and find backlit screens more readable than E Ink. It also is much easier to highlight passages or look something up on the web straight from the text. The Kindle Fire also blows away the iPad as a digital book reader (as you would hope it would, coming from Amazon). Mostly, that is because of its smaller form factor. It is about the size of a large paperback. You can hold it in one hand and flick through the pages with your thumb. It is a much more pleasurable reading experience than the larger iPad, which is a little unwieldy by comparison for extended reading periods. Although, the Kindle app on the iPad is otherwise perfectly fine. Watching Despite its smaller screen size, the Fire is an excellent video viewing device. It ties in directly to Amazon’s Instant Video store, where you can either buy or rent video downloads. The selection is pretty decent, with a mix of old and more recent movies and TV shows. You can either stream the movies directly or download them for later viewing. I’ve had no issues with streaming. The pictures are sharp and I’ve watched entire episodes without any hiccups over a strong WiFi connection. You can also watch movies through Netflix or Hulu Plus, which both have apps available on the Fire. But if you are an Amazon Prime member (all-you-can-eat shipping for $79 a year), you get Instant Video thrown in. That’s a good deal, considering that the Netflix streaming-only plan costs $96 a year, and you don’t get free shipping of any Christmas gifts with that. The one drawback of watching video on the Fire is that it is a solitary experience. The small screen size does not detract from the viewing experience when you are holding it in your lap and watching alone, but it’s not great for watching a show or movie with someone else. It is the video equivalent of reading over someone’s shoulder. And there is no easy way that I can tell of projecting the video on a bigger screen like you can with Airplay on the iPad. Listening Quite frankly, I barely notice the music store on the Kindle Fire. There is nothing wrong with the selection, and I applaud the way it distributes MP3 tunes that are compatible with any player. But when it comes to digital music that I purchase, I am just too locked into iTunes (or streaming music services) to want to bother with the Amazon Music Store. It is too much of a hassle to figure out how to get the music into iTunes, where I can listen to it on my iPhone or through my stereo. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t want to walk around listening to an album on the Fire with my headphones plugged in. It’s not like you can go on a run with it. And listening through the Fire’s external speakers, while perfectly fine for a movie, is not the ideal listening experience. The one use-case where music does make sense is if you want to listen to something while you are reading or browsing the web on the Fire. Browsing The Fire’s Silk browser is supposed to accelerate browsing on the device by pre-caching pages in the cloud and delivering them more intelligently. The browser is fast and functional, but from what I can tell it is no faster than the browser on an iPad. I tested about half a dozen web pages. If there is a difference in page-loading speeds, it is not noticeable. In the Web browsing department, the iPad bigger screen size gives it the advantage. You are not squinting as much as you do on a mobile phone’s browser, but you squint nonetheless. I find myself pinching and zooming a lot to read webpages. The tabbed browsing on the Fire, however, is a plus. Playing Finally, there are the apps. The Fire only ships with a few thousand apps available for download, compared to more than 200,000 for the iPad. But Amazon has done an excellent job to make sure that many of these first apps are excellent. Games like Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds, while not unique to the Fire, are addictive and show off its graphics capabilities. Media apps like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Pandora expand its entertainment capabilities. Some “apps” like Facebook and Twitter merely redirect to their HTML5 mobile websites through the browser, but I suspect they will get full-fledged apps in time. More importantly, the store, is much better organized and easier to browse than the official Android Market . If the Kindle Fire becomes the most popular Android tablet, as I suspect it will, then it could also become the biggest distributor of Android apps . Amazon’s app store finally brings a shopping and discovery experience to Android in much the same way that iTunes did for iOS apps. The best apps are still on the iPad and will continue to appear there first, but you are not giving up apps by going with a Kindle Fire. And they are just going to keep getting better the more people flock to the Fire, a device where buying media, including apps, is encouraged. People are not going to buy the Kindle Fire because of any of its specs. They are going to buy it because it eases them into the still-strange realm of digital books, movies, magazines, and apps. These are all media. The Fire makes it easy to find them and, more importantly, easy to pay for them. You hardly think twice about it. The ability to pack all your media into one little 7-inch device is still an incredible thing. But it is not just your media that makes it compelling. It is the access to Amazon’s vast and growing digital library of millions of books, movies, apps, and songs, all at your fingertips and one click away from your consuming eyes. If you do end up buying a Kindle Fire, I guarantee that you will end up spending a lot more than the subsidized $200 price of the device on media. And once you start buying digital media for the Fire, you won’t be going anywhere. Amazon will have you as a customer for life, if it doesn’t already. Watch the Fly or Die I did with John Biggs below for a look at the Kindle Fire in action.

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The Kindle Fire, What Is It Good For?

Fire sales turned into a firestorm for Walmart this morning as the company’s web servers buckled under Black Friday traffic. Shoppers from around the country waited until the middle of the night for sales only to experience broken checkout pages, emptied shopping carts, and login errors. This caused their desired items to go out of stock before they could buy them, leading to mass frustration and ill will towards the discount store chain. Meanwhile at its physical stores , 20 people were pepper sprayed by a fellow customer, and 2 people were shot outside separate locations. Walmart will need to sort out its servers in preparation for the upcoming Cybermonday blitz or it risks losing customers to Amazon. We’ll let traditional news outlets cover the offline violence and focus here on Walmart’s web fiasco. Disgruntled online shoppers flocked to the GottaDeal.com forums to voice complaints about Walmart’s website problems. It’s unclear exactly how widespread the issues were, but the forums had complaints coming in every minute at one point last night from customers in Florida, Mississippi,  New York and many other places. Many expected deals to go live at Midnight local time only to have to wait up until 3am EST. Visitors then feverishly filled shopping carts but suddenly found them empty when they went to checkout. Others were confronted with the error message “We’re having temporary difficulties arriving at the destination you requested”. Login problems also arose, with users being asked to enter their credentials when already signed in. One customer reported that they complained about the checkout disruption on Walmart’s Facebook Page but later found their post deleted. The entire Walmart site does not appear to have crashed. By keeping the site up despite the issues, Walmart may have sought to conceal the errors and avoid press coverage of the discontent. Loyal customers said they hadn’t had such problems since 2006 when Walmart experienced a similar breakdown of its site. The company pulled in $418 billion in revenue during the 2011 fiscal year, so today’s disruption could have cost it a lot of money. While it might be too late to save Black Friday, Walmart better be scrambling to fix its website for Cybermonday, the biggest online shopping day of the year, just 36 hours away. The corporation acquired two startups Kosmix and OneRiot  this year and formed its Silicon Valley-based @WalmartLabs in an effort to improve its ecommerce offering. However, it’s competing with powerhouse Amazon, whose cloud hosting division may protect it from the outages that plagued Walmart today. If the errors persist on Cybermonday, shoppers may seek out a more reliable ecommerce solution. When customers post “I’m so frustrated I’m going to cry” and “an hour and a half of nonsense. shame on you Walmart!”, something has to change. Update 3:3o pm PST : We’ve learned that Amazon online ordering also experienced an outage this morning as well. Both Amazon and Walmart should expect record traffic this weekend through Cybermonday.

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Walmart’s Black Friday Disaster: Website Crippled, Violence In Stores

“It gives you social energy. It gives you taste of friendship.” It’s Facedrink ! And you better go buy some because it will be sued out of existence any minute now. Following in the footsteps of the unofficial Mark Zuckerberg action figure, some dude named Barry Moustapha (ROFLCOPTER) has created a lawyer-magnet energy drink. It’s themed with Facebook colors and proudly displays an “Add as Friend” button on the label. I’d be suspicious this was a hoax, but there’s a photo of a real bottle and reviewers confirm it leave a worse taste in your mouth than getting Poked by your dad. The gloriously named Barry Moustapha trumpets “Facedrink achieves the goal that I set out for by providing you with the extra energy needed to be social or to deal with your boss.”  Reviewers on Amazon seem to disagree, though: “All my friends drank it up, and it starting to feel odd being the only person in line (besides my friend Tom) who was buying MyDrink anymore…Over time, I think I got too comfortable with it. I started drinking it with my parents, my boss, people I hadn’t seen since high school. Being too casual with FaceDrink eventually lead me to make some comments regarding my cousin possibly being gay, and my boss being a dick and since then I’ve cut back on who I drink it with. I should just quit it all together, but I might have a mild addiction at this point.” Facedrink will make a great holiday gift, and an even better collectors item as there’s no way Moustapha’s getting away with this. Facebook successfully trademarked the word “face” specifically to prevent this kind of exploitation of its name. But I think there might be an amicable way to settle this. Facebook, acquire Facedrink, and promptly move their operations into the cafeteria of your swanky new Menlo Park headquarters. After all, “ Whether it is work, school, sports or just getting through the daily routine, Facedrink p rovides you with a boost of energy to manage it all.”

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Tired Of Facebook? Try Facedrink Energy Shot Before Zuck Sues

I’m an author , but thankfully I’m not a member of the Authors Guild, that “not-for-profit American organization of and for authors”, who a few days ago issued a statement that first lauded publishers for not signing on to Amazon’s new Kindle book-lending program for Amazon Prime members, and then condemned those few publishers who did agree, citing a bizarre and convoluted argument that authors aren’t protected by such an agreement. That argument concludes: “[Publishers should] not decide for themselves how to step into this brave new world of subscription models without solving all this before they receive their first dollar. My guess is that most publishers, when faced with the complexity of the problem and the unlikelihood of finding a solution that makes everyone happy, will decide it’s just not worth the trouble. And that, perhaps, would be the best outcome of all.” Oh my. The stupid, it burns. Memo to the publishing industry: recent history strongly indicates that subscription models are what your customers–you know, the people who read the books you publish –want. They want Hulu for television, Netflix for movies, Spotify for music. Do you really think they don’t want a similar model for books? (When in fact, history shows it’s what they’ve always wanted?) Follow @shawnyeager @shawnyeager Shawn Yeager Neal Stephenson's new novel, Reamde: A Novel, just automagically appeared on my Kindle. There goes my next few nights. September 20, 2011 11:46 am via Twitter for Mac Reply Retweet Favorite If there was ever a surefire e-book success, REAMDE was it . So of course HarperCollins went out of their way to make it the best, classiest, most beguiling e-book edition of all time, right? Follow @kirkbiglione @kirkbiglione Kirk Biglione Reamde has vanished from the Kindle store. I assume that means @ harpercollins has realized it's an eBook disaster of epic proportions. September 26, 2011 1:10 pm via Twitter for iPad Reply Retweet Favorite Speaking as someone who’s had two novels published by HarperCollins: how incredibly embarrassing . Well, that was just a freak one-off, right? Weird mistakes happen. It’s not like they make a habit of butchering beloved books… oh, wait . Follow @ardaniel @ardaniel Ard Collier (Janice) @ pablod Dude, look it up in the iBooks store. Even the DESCRIPTION is riddled with weird spacing errors. October 14, 2011 1:47 pm via Echofon Reply Retweet Favorite It’s just depressing. How can we expect the publishing industry to adapt, evolve, and thrive in the digital world when, four years after the Kindle was introduced, they still haven’t even figured out how to format e-books correctly? It gets even worse at the bookseller level. After Amazon negotiated a deal with DC Comics for the exclusive digital rights to some graphic novels, Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million stopped selling those books in their stores . (Full disclosure: I’m also the author of a graphic novel for DC’s Vertigo imprint , though I don’t think it’s part of this deal.) Ah, the old “angrily depriving our customers of the ability to buy stuff they might want” business model. Strange how that never seems to work. Readers are unhappy. They complain about inflated ebook prices , which publishers set; indeed, a class-action lawsuit alleging ebook price-fixing by publishers was filed a few months ago. No wonder Amazon is increasingly becoming a publisher in its own right, as is its competitor Kobo . They seem to have decided that if they can’t find any smart, competent publishers to deal with, then they’ll have to become one themselves. The existing publishers have responded by, um, offering online sales data to their authors, for the first time. Wow, that sure changes everything, eh? What would a smart and reasonable publisher have done? They would have realized that sticking their fingers in their ears and hoping the future doesn’t come is not an intelligent strategy. They would have noted that, as the Authors Guild said, Amazon is especially eager to make their lending library aka subscription service a success right now, in the face of increasing competition from Kobo, the Nook, and iBooks. And they would have used this leverage to negotiate a short-term, test-the-waters subscription licensing deal with both Amazon and their authors. (Hopefully one that treats the latter group better than Spotify treats musicians .) Time is not on their side. As authors — including Neal Stephenson — jump ship to Amazon and Kobo, and as subscription services increasingly become treated as inevitable rather than revolutionary, the negotiating leverage held by traditional publishers (and the Authors Guild) will steadily decline. Now was the time to take a bold leap into the future. Instead they sat down, closed their eyes, and hoped it wasn’t coming. Good luck with that.

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Dog Bites Man; Pope Condemns Violence; Publishing Still Doesn’t Get It