Gadgetory

hey everybody I'm Hollywood from cnet we're here at South by Southwest 2012 we're here in the second market house this is like the recovery lounge you need a lot of those who stopped by Southwest it's pretty great because it's in a bar but it starts out the day with blue bottle coffee always a good thing I'm Brian Thomas seen it of course and also today we're joined with Lee Linden he's a CEO of karma this is a really cool gifting app that's plugged into Facebook and leave for people that really don't know about it I got to see for the first time can you kind of explain what it's about yeah you bet so we're a new social commerce service for in the moment gifting karma reminds you of the important events and your friends and families live so someone gets engaged they have a baby they move new job and right from your phone you can instantly send a beautiful and really thoughtful gifts it's sent immediately to someone else's phone or their Facebook they can choose their color flavor or size they enter their shipping address and it's delivered as a beautiful gift straight to the door a few days later see that's what I like about it those because you're taking advantage of kind of a digital nature of the giving the people can put in their own address yes and choose the specifics of the gift you don't think people know each other's shipping addresses anymore and furthermore if you had to wait three days for something to be delivered you kind of miss that moment and so karma is all about in the moment gifting right when you think of them you can reach out and help celebrate say I miss you or congratulations or happy birthday now with Karma do they do both users have to be on the service or only one of the one of the people has to be in there for the transaction so we've designed it so you can tend to gift to anyone they can have a blackberry and iphone and android a Windows Phone there's the desktop PC still receive your gift still see your card customize it into their shipping address have a great experience but they do have to have email right they initially have to receive that email like my grandma maybe not so much so a gift recipient can receive their gift via SMS email or Facebook one of those three channels so this is interesting because you know there's a lot of sometimes people become friends viewers that you don't really know on Facebook sometimes they compete people of the other sex that you might be interested does karma work to someone someone's advantage like that you know so totally effective flirting all the time well she can be like yes or no by your presence yeah we r we gonna have pepper lunch and we have had people writing in and saying you know using karma they just met someone at a bar maybe they have their phone number or their Facebook they want to send some chocolate or something else that's kind of nice and let them know that they drew enjoyed meeting he's the Facebook hook right yeah well and actually let's talk about that it sounds like so if you connect with facebook you have those reminders just on a broader level how important it is it right now to build an app that talks to every other social network available or is it just about Facebook well I mean we started with Facebook we think there's a lot more to do out there Facebook has experienced II you know people's engagements or they move cities or that have a new job but what karma does actually is a a semantic analysis on top of people's Facebook walls so we'll look to see if people are saying congratulations or I'm so sorry on your friend's Facebook walls and kind of extrapolate that to be okay this is a moment you might not want to miss about one of your friends and and that's a unique thing to Facebook that we we kind of took advantage of and we're very proud of so it'll alert someone like if something happened let's say a great thing happened to Molly and it would alert me that oh I might want to be aware of this and send Molly gift exactly you might have a lot of noise and you may have a lot of friends but if if ten people were posting I'm always wall in saying congratulations I'm so proud of you that'll pop up in karma and you'll be able to see that context and you can send a gift right there that's cool so what would it say like hey we think maybe something good happen to Molly everything maybe something bad happen to talk alright you know that so we have two categories one called celebrations one called once called tough days and we pick up people and then we show you the comments on Facebook so you can see right from karma and kind of figure out what's going on oh that's a good time because I know another thing that we liked what we saw about the app is you know a lot of people we love choice and even if you give give someone a gift through karma you can either choose let's say the color of a product or you let them decide which one they want that's pretty unique yeah you know we felt that there's this analysis paralysis around giving people gifts and so there's a bunch of beautiful great products out there but they come in different sizes flavors colors styles and with Karma you can just give you know a bottle of domaine chandon and let your recipient shoes there right and you can give it that's a good one for the bar exactly the resident that user tip shim good always work so we're speaking of the gifts what is the catalog where are you drawing the gifts from and how are they curated yeah we have a team of curators in San Francisco that reach out to really great and beautiful products we have over 50 partners including domaine chandon jawbone this week we just added kate spade and jonathan adler and the cliff family vineyards and every week you'll see us adding really amazing products from partners we trust and we think make beautiful gifts are you going to get like good deals on them well we work with them in a long-term relationship we're not trying to discount or liquidate their inventory we think their products are great for gifts all year round and so we do partnerships to make sure that they're photographed beautifully they look good on mobile to consume them and they can be gift packaged and sent directly to your recipient so now you guys launched before South by Southwest right was that on purpose where you're trying to avoid some of this noise well we certainly want to get out there as soon as we could we thought people one in our product we had been beta for a couple of months and we were getting some great feedback and you know it's been a week and a half and we're already sending in a thousands of gifts people are using it at South by Southwest they meet someone new every child and connector in front yeah where it works see where it's right yeah I got all this time awesome yeah no that's great well congratulations on the lunch and any new features that you've rolled out since launch that we need to know about um so you know we have some new partners coming on and mentioned kate spade and Jonathan Adler I think you'll see some other great partners coming on board from new partners and from New other companies and next coming weeks and so forth you can also browse by price now and so that's a great functionality item and yeah we're just getting started so I think you know as the as the weeks and months ago value you'll see us really expanding this category social commerce and we're excited do it that's great I haven't seen anything like it so we're looking forward to playing with it thankfully yeah all right we are here at South by Southwest 2012 check seen at tv.com for a lot more interviews just like this one you