Overstock’s Bitcoin Purchases Account For Less Than 1% Of Revenue, But It’s Growing

Since Overstock.com started to accept Bitcoin as a purchase currency, the company has received a good press for its efforts to support the nascent cryptocurrency. Working with Coinbase to process Bitcoin, Overstock.com announced that it crossed the million-dollar sale mark in the currency earlier this month.

A report out this morning better details how Overstock.com is faring with Bitcoin now that the novelty of its acceptance of the digital payment method has cooled. After the day one sales number, according to Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, Bitcoin has settled in the “$20k to $30k” range, and is “gradually increasing from there.”

Let’s use the $30,000 sum, given that the company is seeing a ramp in the numbers, and if we are going to predict revenue we might as well give ourselves some room to wiggle. Let’s find out if Bitcoin is moving the needle for the company.

For calendar 2013, Overstock.com had revenue of $1.304 billion. Given that the company’s revenue is quite seasonal, we don’t want to use a fourth-quarter number to compare current Bitcoin sales run rates. So let’s take the quarterly average for the company as a starting point. That gives us a 90-day figure of $326 million, or $3.6 million per day.

$30,000 next to $3.6 million is a very small drop in the bucket. In fact, it works out to 0.83 percent. After the Sturm und Drang of the Bitcoin integration, the dollar amount is somewhat minor.

Now, its early days for both Bitcoin itself and even Overstock.com’s integration thereof, so don’t take the above as indicative of failure. More that the network for Bitcoin purchases remains modest, despite Bitcoin itself having a very high market cap.

I’ve been looking at Bitcoin volume for some time. Food for thought: Total Bitcoin in circulation is worth $7.9 billion. In the past 24 hours, Bitcoin had volume of only $18.5 million. That’s about 0.23 percent daily turnover. Picking a random stock, say, Groupon, we see that its volume as a percentage of its similar market cap is 3.7 percent daily. That’s about 16 times as much as Bitcoin sees. I think this is the impact of having around half of all Bitcoin owned by fewer than 1,000 people.

That wealth concentration means that the number of people who have enough Bitcoin to purchase items at Overstock.com is smaller than you might expect. That said, the larger Bitcoin network — so far as I can tell — is growing daily. So, expect to see Overstock.com move six figures a day in Bitcoin sales by the holiday season.

IMAGE BY FLICKR USER MARCEL GRIEDER UNDER CC BY 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN CROPPED) 

View the Original article

Influx Raises $250,000 To Help Growing Startups Handle Customer Support Requests

For startups just beginning to gain traction, the joy (and relief) of watching user numbers grow can vanish as soon as support requests start coming in. If customers don’t get their queries answered quickly, it can negatively impact a fledgling company’s reputation. But responding to questions in a timely fashion is difficult when a startup is still run chiefly by its founders.

Australian company Influx recently received $250,000 in seed funding from Mark Harbottle and Leni Mayo, the founders of SitePoint.com and 99designs respectively, to help startups help their users.

Founder Mikey De Wildt wants the company to enable tech startups and other online businesses to provide quality customer support while they are scaling up. Influx’s services are currently available in Australia and it will use its seed funding to expand globally.

Many customer service support providers won’t work with startups because their customer enquiry volumes don’t yet meet their minimum requirement. Influx doesn’t require a minimum volume and offers its services for a flat fee starting from $199 a month, even when a startup gets more customer enquiries during a peak period. All of Influx’s customer service providers, who are currently based in Australia, speak English as a first language and have tech backgrounds. The company also provides weekly reports so startups can see what bugs customers are complaining about or which features they want added.

Founder Mikey De Wildt says that startups have several alternatives to customer service support providers, such as hiring a freelancer. But drawbacks include not being able to attract good candidates because you can only offer a few hours of work. While services like oDesk and Freelancer make it easy to find contract workers, many are only looking for short-term work and have to be trained in order to handle tech-specific customer questions.

“To address these issues faced by many developers and new project founders, Influx aims to disrupt the traditional structure of outsourcing customer support to bring all the benefits of outsourcing your customer support, whilst eliminating the disadvantages,” De Wildt told me in an email.

As Influx grows, it will start to hire more customer support staffers in key locations around the world. De Wildt says Monterrey, Mexico is one possibility because it has a strong startup scene and plenty of tech talent.

Influx’s core offering is an email-based customer support service that can scale with startups as they grow and it is already generating good revenue, says De Wildt. Influx will also start to offer additional features. Potential additions include authoring documentation so startups can ask the company to write a knowledge-base article for a one-time fee and live chat.

Image by picjumbo

View the Original article

PlayStation Vita TV review: Sony's first mini-console has some growing pains

Sony had a tiny surprise to share just ahead of the Tokyo Games Show: the PS Vita TV, appearing from inside SCE President Andrew House's jacket pocket. Having already announced a new, slender PS Vita handheld less than an hour earlier, Sony showed off this minute console -- roughly the same footprint as a smartphone -- that plays Vita games, PlayStation games and streams video content, as well as music and video from Sony's own store. It can also connect with multiple PS3 DualShock controllers, allowing for proper, responsive gaming -- something we're not quite used to getting from something so tiny.

You could see it as a brutal counterstrike from the PlayStation team against the cheap, mini-console likes of OUYA and GameStick, even Huawei. Aside from contemporary Vita titles and indie games, you can also tap into an ever-increasing catalog of hits from yesteryear -- something that the Android and iOS platforms also dip their feet into, but with the peace of mind (read: stability) of PlayStation hardware, and the ability to steer the action with a DualShock controller. Sound like something you'd like to try out? Well, unfortunately, unlike the new PS Vita, this is currently a Japan-only deal. What's more, availability in Nihon is directly tied to compatibility there, too; you'll need a Japanese PSN account to even use it. We're still getting a vague line from SCE on whether it will eventually arrive outside of Japan. (It would be a convenient bit of hardware to sell alongside Sony's PlayStation Now streaming-game service, set to launch in the US later this year, right?)

So, is this just a tenuous experiment or a whole new console line for PlayStation? Or, given that it's practically got all the same internals, would you be better off just buying a Vita? Sony PlayStation Vita TV review

View the Original article

Bitcoin’s Recent Price Stability Could Point To Growing Maturity

The nearly boozy Bitcoin rallies and crashes of 2013 led to endless media coverage, rising mass market knowledge of its existence, and piece by piece, the growing maturity of its underlying network.

No asset that regularly loses or gains 50% in a day can be treated as anything more than a speculative tool, and an incredibly risky one at that. However, in the new year, as the media firestorm has mostly abated around Bitcoin and its network of buyers and sellers has continued to improve and expand, something interesting has happened: Bitcoin has found and stuck to a trading range.

Now, compared to more traditional currencies, Bitcoin still moves around too much for the good digestion of those close to it. At the same time, over the past nearly two weeks, it has shown remarkable flatness, meaning that those wishing to use and accept it for commerce have had a period in which they could trust their sales and purchases to not swing to wild profit or loss by whim of the market.

The Bitcoin D1 chart remains as humorous as ever (in this case, D1 means that every chart point represents one day’s trading):

View the Original article