MerchantCircle had it's quiet launch party last night in downtown Los Altos. It was a great event with family and friends.
A bunch of people who had been at Spoke were there, including a couple of my favorite investors from Spoke; Rob Thies and Philippe Cases along with some of our current investors like Sharon and her family from B of A and Mark Menell from Rustic Canyon.
We also had a couple of our local merchants attend, Cambric, Delegate to Me, and Intero Real Estate Services joined the festivities. A group of people from Topix were there as well. Skrenta always has something to say interesting that make me stop and think. Chris Kelly, who is now with the Facebook but former GC and CPO from Spoke was there as well. Prasad who also worked with me at Spoke attended. It was great to see him at Cydelity where I am fortunate to be on the board and had just had a major win in online fraud protection. There were also a bunch of other people there as well including Mike, Joe and Arin who worked with me at Spoke and are now at Topix. On another note, Topix just launched some really interesting things in the classified space and we are looking forward to getting our merchants the ability to advertise there as part of our bundles.
The evening was particularly exciting because some very interesting things had just went live with one of the map services from a big search engine right before the event. I am not going to talk a lot about it because I don't want to mess it up, but we're excited they had taken our idea on what to do with our RSS feeds and implemented it. Now, they did not tell us and we found it by chance, but it was still great. Let's just say if you are a merchant getting other merchant reviews, having coupons and having consumer reviews; it is a very good thing.
As the night was coming to a close and as we were washing the dishes- or should I say as David was washing them, we had some great discussions about how to better help merchants leverage all of the picture content they are putting on the site. I expect some amazing things out of the team in this area during June. I am sure you all have great ideas on what we should do as well. Send them in...we all know that you guys are the ones who know what we should be doing.
p.s. check out the pictures from the launch here.
Best,
Ben
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