FYI, Karma's best mechanic is that you send a gift to a recipient without entering cc info; then when the recipient accepts, you become socially obligated to complete the payment process. It also asks the recipient for their address, so you only need to pick the item and enter their email (or FB select). It's generally a beautifully designed app.
Congratulations to the Karma team. I was the founding CTO of a competitor, Giftly, have thought about/worked on the space a great deal, and have been really impressed with what y'all have built. You deserve it.
Great acquisition for Facebook. People are wondering what kind of monetization strategies Facebook will use to make them worth their post-IPO valuation, and Karma is now one good example.<p>People spend a LOT of money on gifts.
Looks like FB is on acquisition spree. Instagram, Glancee and now Karma. Just in the space of one month. Are these (Glancee and Karma) people acquisitions?
I hope they're getting a mandate to build gifting / ecommerce transactions into a revenue stream for Facebook whatever way they can. Bring back Free Gifts / FB Gifts with a vengeance. One-click purchase of products advertised in the sidebar!<p>And congrats again Ben, Lee, and the whole Karma team. They're going to do great things with the resources of FB.
Ben & Lee are a great team, from parlaying the winnings of a business plan competition into a hit app (tap defense), to building a successful company around app marketing using their app to gain traction (tapjoy) and now karma. Can't wait to see what they do with Karma and what comes next!
How do you guys find out about new products and companies?<p>I had never heard of Glancee or Karma (among many others) before I read the news that they had both been acquired by Facebook.
Pretty interesting app and can see how Facebook could utilize the product. I wonder if we will see more of this consolidation in the market place as the big players buy up smaller ones.
So. Facebook is ostensibly a "public" company except it's still more than 50% controlled by one man and now it has 18 billion dollars of cash to buy up potential competitors before they get big. Zuck has to be feeling pretty damned pleased with himself right about now.
wow... this is how out of touch the wealthy are. No one at all in real life would ever use this idea. I don't want to say like 1%, but honestly this is a tool of a very very small portion of society. The scary part is that a very small portion of society decides if it gets the money to exist.