A Latin American Unicorn From Argentina

Adapted from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0.

So far, we have only looked at American companies [Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks, Kayak and SuccessFactors] in the Unicorn series.

There is a market of 500 million people – nearly 8.6% of the world’s population – that the business media all too often neglects, serving up story after story on China and India. Forgotten is all of Latin America.

Between 2000 and 2007, the number of Internet users in Latin America grew from 18.1 million to 122.4 million, a compounded annual growth rate of 32% compared with only 12% in North America during the same period. Average penetration across Latin America was approximately 21.5%, compared to 71.4% for the US. Even with such low penetration, Latin America’s Internet population represented close to 10% of the world’s Internet users.

Fast forward to 2014, numbers have exploded, touching 300 million. Analysts forecast 393 million users in 2017.
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E-Commerce Home Goods Store Wayfair Files for IPO

According to Euromonitor International, the US home goods market is expected to grow 2.5% annually over the period 2013 to 2023 to be worth $297 billion in 2023. Researchers also estimate that the current US home market has very limited online penetration with a mere 7% of the sales being made through this channel. Boston-based Wayfair is trying to make a difference in this online market.

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New Book – From eCommerce to Web 3.0

Excerpt from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0: How To Leverage The Evolution Of The Internet.

Back in 2007, even before the iPhone was launched, giving us a powerful computer in our pockets or handbags, I started outlining a vision for Web 3.0.

There are numerous definitions of Web 3.0 floating around. Tim Berners-Lee, a father of the World Wide Web, talks about the “Semantic Web,” a way that computers employ the meaning of words – not just pattern matching – along with logical rules to connect independent nuggets of data and so create more context for information. The formula that makes the most sense to me is this: Web 3.0 results from combining content, commerce, community and context, with personalization and vertical search. Or, to put it in a handy phrase: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

Here’s what it means.
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Groupon Still Struggling

Recently, online travel player Priceline purchased online restaurant reservation service provider OpenTable for $2.6 billion. The acquisition has sparked merger interest in several other local focused online players such as Yelp. Recently, analysts have also been speculating the possibility that daily deals site Groupon (Nasdaq: GRPN) could be a possible take-over target and that someone like Google may be interested in buying it to beef up their Google Offers service.

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Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 4)

Tony DiCostanzo: When I started engaging customers on the website in the broader segment of enterprise sales rather than just healthcare, I initially put up the books and made single copies available. It was difficult to say, “We’re great at these bulk sales but we also can do one copy.” That’s what everybody else was doing. Within two months, I realized that we needed to get rid of all the small sales to position us as experts. That was an important distinction for us because it enabled us to convince publishers that don’t normally ship on behalf of book distributors to become drop-shippers for us. We have some unique leverage in the market that we’re really the only company that some of these major publishing houses will drop-ship for.

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Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: After you sold the healthcare business?

Tony DiCostanzo: Yes. I didn’t think of the book company as having a big potential because at that time, it was limited to probably about 20 different books that we sold consistently. Some of those books were from different publishers, but I didn’t really represent all the other books that those publishers carry. We didn’t develop our own content.

Sramana Mitra: Were you focusing the business on business books and those kinds of books? >>>

Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 2)

Tony DiCostanzo: We engaged a professor out of Stanford who had developed some studies documenting a return on investment for companies that implemented this wellness program. We were able to take that and develop a new company without all of the baggage that the other firm had. That was the first personal foray into entrepreneurship using the company experience and applying it into a new company. It felt more comfortable, if you will, to get my feet wet in something that I knew.

About eight months later, I pulled in a business partner who was involved with the previous firm. Together, we grew the company over a two and a half year period. We had the good fortune of a private equity >>>

eBay Looks Flat

According to a comScore report, online retail spending grew 14% last year compared with a single digit growth in overall retail spending. The report reveals that while mobile transactions are a fast growing segment, the online sales are still dominated by PC-based sales.     >>>