A First For Home Shopping Network: Selling An Online Storage Product. Guess Which One!

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

Exclusive - Starting today, Home Shopping Network will begin selling – for the first time – an online storage product on air. With a reach of about 89 million households per week in the United States, this could be quite a big deal for the online storage provider in question.

So who is it? Dropbox? Box.net? Mozy? Carbonite?

No Sir Ree Bob, it’s MiMedia (earlier coverage)!

Sure, HSN has sold electronics before, but this is actually the first time they’re selling an online file storage service on the air, so consider this a sign that this type of product is going mainstream.

MiMedia tells me Home Shopping Network had a number of parameters they needed to adhere to, namely: a ‘lifetime’ service that costs no more than $50.

Also, the product needed to be tangible and shippable. Wait, what?

Yes, it’s kind of ridiculous to sell a 100% digital service as a physical product, but HSN knows its audience very well, so MiMedia complied with everything they asked.

What they came up with is an offering that comprises 25 GB of storage, ‘for life’, which will be sold for $49.95. To achieve a shippable product, MiMedia will be sending buyers a USB drive with a software loader pre-installed. Yes, still kind of ridiculous, but who knows, it might just work for them.

MiMedia brings you a totally new approach to online storage – a way to protect, access, enjoy and share your digital life all in one place. MiMedia will back up and protect your files in a secure online storage account. Beyond online backup, MiMedia also provides instant on demand access to your files from anywhere. With MiMedia, you can listen to your music, watch your latest videos, view any of your photo galleries, and access your other files all in...

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Pushpins Launches SimpleUPC: Product Information-As-A-Service

Pushpins, Inc., the makers of a mobile app for saving on groceries, have launched a new service called SimpleUPC targeted towards mobile app developers. SimpleUPC, which is available as an API (application programming interface), provides product information as a service for the use in mobile apps like barcode scanners, shopping lists and nutrition trackers.

The API contains data on over 120,000 food, beverage, personal care and household goods from over 15,000 brands and nearly 5,000 manufacturers.

Explains Jason Gurwin, Pushpins CEO, when the company was building its mobile couponing app Pushpins, it received hundreds of requests per month asking for a simple web service like this. So the Pushpins team decided to fill that need.

“There are other things out there – like Google Product Search, but they return crappy information,” scoffed Gurwin. “I didn’t know that they put guns in Gerber Baby Food,” he said referring to this glaring mistake found in the data his competitors’ provided, where instead of a baby food photo, a case for handguns was pictured.

Gurwin speaks from personal experience when it comes to the difficulties in building accurate product information databases, thanks to his work with Pushpins. Now, other developers don’t have to go through the same thing he did – they can just plug into the RESTful SimpleUPC API instead.

The new API includes traditional product information (UPC, manufacturer, brand, size, container), as well as nutrition facts (the entire product label) and manufacturer-approved images. To license this data from other sources, the cost is often very high (Gurwin says one company wanted $100,000 for its UPC database, for example). Generally, the data would not include nutritional info or images, either.

SimpleUPC, however, now offers more affordable options for small businesses, starting at $99/month for 50,000 searches and product info. For $249/month, you get 300K searches plus nutritional info and for $499/month, you get 500K searches, plus nutritional info and images.

To showcase the API’s capabilities, the company built an iOS app called Food Fight! which is waiting App Store approval. You can also check out the SimpleUPC demo here.

To sign up for SimpleUPC, visit this page on the company’s website.

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