Zaarly Storefronts: A New Milestone In E-Commerce

If you haven’t seen the new Zaarly Storefronts, you should take a look. It legitimately might change ecommerce forever.

The team of geniuses at Zaarly has tackled a few big peeves we’ve all had with the legacy ecommerce establishment:

• Traditionally, online merchants focus on products and are horrible at selling services
• It’s hard to find local products/services which due to their proximity may be more relevant to what I’m looking for

E-commerce isn’t totally broken today, but it doesn’t really provide a good avenue to finding good local service providers (house cleaning, outsourced chores, lawn mowing, personal chefs, et cetera), and it is no good at helping you find Services (major ecommerce sites like Ebay/Amazon are much more focused on selling products). All the daily deal sites made ecommerce more local, but they only gave us deals on restaurants, spas, and some other things that we don’t really want or need. Zaarly Storefronts changes is. It is local (which makes its service offerings more relevant), it includes products (which is what most of us buy online, anyway), it makes buying services easy, it provides a clear visual introduction to the service provider or product, and does all of this in one place.

The gist of Zaarly Storefronts is that it is local products and services with with engaging descriptions and photos/visuals that give you a good idea of what you’ll get.

Here’s an example: you want someone to clean your apartment every two weeks because you don’t have time to do it yourself. Zaarly Storefronts says “Meet your new cleaning lady, Geannie Meckler!”:

See, read, click, buy. Now your house is clean. It’s intuitive and effortless. I think that Zaarly’s ecommerce innovations are going to drive its competitors to change the way they list products and services, so perhaps Zaarly Storefront will change the way commerce happens even on platforms outside Zaarly.

Here’s an example of some of the local products available on Zaarly Storefronts (which reminds me of a sort of virtual farmer’s market):

Kudos to the team over at Zaarly for building a hyper-relevant ecommerce platform!

Keep Jesus Off Pinterest

They have Church for that.

Thank you.

Le 21ème – New York’s Best Street Fashion Site

Do you read The Sartorialist or occasionally take peeks at lookbook? Meet the new Sheriff in town: a photoblog called Le 21ème Arrondissement.

It all started in Seattle in 2008, when photographer and fashionphile Adam Sinding began taking photos of the fashionable denizens of his adopted hometown and posted them on his now-famed photoblog. Years later, in 2011, Sinding moved to New York City, enabling him to capture and curate an elite fashion scene that was on an entirely different level than that of the very provincial Seattle.

Adam’s work has been featured by Elle Magazine, mega-influential blog Refinery 29, Mary Claire, ELLE Japan, and New York Magazine. Just last week, The W New York Times Square hotel and Elle Magazine hosted an event to kick-off fashion week called Scene On The Street, a photo exhibit curated by Elle Fashion Editor Sydney Wasserman which featured street fashion photos from Le 21ème Arrondissement.

Here is a taste of what you’ll find on Le 21ème, as well as some photos from the event:

The Scene On The Street photo exhibit is viewable at the W New York Times Square’s Living Room until February 29th.

Visit Le21ème

Follow Le21ème on Twitter

Subscribe to Le21ème via RSS

Cows are SO chic.

Sometimes, photo comments make my day:

Preppy Overload

I wonder if Facebook somehow knows I went sailing this weekend.

G-Chat Safety

Clarissa: why are you alone right now
and not with your duchess
Cameron: I’m GChatting her
right
now
Clarissa: G-Sex
use protection!
even on the interwebs

Yelp Is For Hookers And Blow

We Need a Yelp Italy – Yelp

The New Dork (Jay-Z Spoof)

Thanks, Jenny!

Privacy vs. Transparency

A little exchange I had regarding privacy (which I do not really value as highly as I value transparency). I learned that not everyone shares my values, and that, for many, eschewing Google products is the most appropriate choice:

Thanks for allowing me to learn something new, Steve!

Opinion: Why I’m dropping Google: Google Buzz, blog deletions show the search giant doesn’t respect users’ privacy – Computer World

Mature, Adult Relationships

How The Internet Is Saving Haiti

By connecting humans to one another, the internet has revolutionized communication, and by extension it has also revolutionized aspects of every other discipline. This can be seen quite clearly in the lightning-fast response to the post-earthquake humanitarian crisis in Haiti.

Within an hour of the quake, news reports were disseminated across the globe instantly. Those reports made mention of the quake, its location, and its severity. That put aid agencies on alert, and sparked hundreds of thousands of subsequent phone calls between consular officials, humanitarian/aid organizations, foreign militaries, airlines, medical staff, concerned families, et cetera. The fight to save Haiti became viral, and the virus’ method of delivery was undoubtedly the internet.

The internet has allowed for much more than quick dissemination and virality of news results. On Wednesday, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal posted image galleries online which effectively communicate the scale of the destruction to outsiders. The image galleries act as a crucial emotional appeal to humans’ nurturing instincts, and are most probably responsible for a surge in the size and quantity of charitable donations being made.

Already, Haitian-American recording artist Wyclef Jean has managed to raise more than $750,000 for his Haiti-focused charity, Yele, by soliciting donations via Twitter. His charity accepts donations via the internet, and through SMS shortcode (Anyone on an American wireless carrier who texts ‘YELE’ to the phone number 501 501 makes a donation of $5 to Yele which is charged to their mobile phone bill). Without the viral platform that Twitter offers, Wyclef Jean’s charity surely would have raised much less money.

The immediacy, virality, and rich media offered by our modern internet has surely helped save the lives of Haitians who would’ve perished without it.

If you’d like to make a donation to the relief effort, consider the following organizations:

Direct Relief International
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières
Yele

Facebook Profile Photos in Latin America Are Unintentional Hilarity

I’ve just come across perhaps the funniest yet-undiscovered thing on the internet. It seems that young people in Latin America are stylizing their Facebook profile photos, and with predictably hilarious results:

Those sunglasses are boss, but the fierce nickname, ‘El Calen’, really adds to the coolness factor.

Classy. Bonus points for the stars in the background.

How could she still be single with that money profile pic?

Killin’ it with those shades! Don’t mess with this muchacho.

DANGER! Skinny dancers! Yay-yo!

Adding insult to injury, many of the accused joined the ‘Panama City, FL’ regional network–instead of their native Panama–by mistake.

I’ll let y’all find the rest.

Twitter Avatars Can Rap

Joell Ortiz – Food For Thought

Twitter Disguised As Excel

I’ve seen games in Excel before, but this is something else:

Spreadtweet is a Twitter client that makes a person’s incoming Twitter stream look like a typical Excel spreadsheet, giving the impression that an employee is working when they really are not.

Via The Type-A Way (Thanks, Marina!)

Gist Previewed

I sat down with Gist CEO T.A. McCann last Friday and got a personalized introduction to their messaging application. I’m finally importing all my messaging, contacts, and social networking data into Gist so I can use it as my centralized messaging center day-to-day.

It’s fascinating what kinds of things Gist can tell you about your contacts:

Imagine I had a meeting scheduled with Marcelo Calbucci next week. I could look at his Gist profile and see which media organizations had mentioned him in the last week, and what they wrote about him. That way, I can be caught up on what’s going on in Marcelo’s world before even sitting down with him.

Gist functions in a very similar fashion to my BlackBerry’s Messages application, and by that I mean that it’s a centralized destination that gives a timeline of my communication with all my contacts no matter the platform (email, Facebook messaging, Twitter, et cetera). That kind of continuity and context is important in our modern, connected, busy world. And to top it off, you can reply using any and all platforms right from Gist. No need to open up Facebook or Gmail in a separate tab.

This thing is just going to blow Google Wave out of the water because it harnesses the power of context. It combines communication and contextual relationships into one, bringing a human element into messaging–something that Google could only wish they’d thought of building into Wave.

It seems like this product was purpose-built for me. If they made me pay monthly for it, I would–in a second.

I’m going to write about any new Gist features that strike my fancy each week, as I get to know the software better, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, try it out yourself: https://beta.gist.com/dashboard