For several years Altima has been developing customized online stores based on Magento Ecommerce platform. We feel a need in the solution that allows Magento merchants to showcase products they sell in a better way than plane product pictures. That’s how Magento Lookboox extension was born.

Lookbook for Magento preview (click to view full-size image)

Magento Lookbook allows to show big beautiful images with the references to your product (hotspots) right from the image. For example you may see the photo of leaving room with different pieces of furniture and each piece has a special mark. When a user roll-over to this mark he/she see small window with product name, price and direct link to product’s page.

The product is in the stage of beta-testing now and we plan to release it in late April-May 2012

You may already see LookBook for Magento in action at product demo site http://lookbook.altimawebsystems.com/

The selected style stresses such core Altima’s attributes as “custom/hand-made” and “creative”.

Altima at Facebook

With 2.4% commission this products looks to compete with hot start-up Square that provides very similar solution. Square’s commission is stated as 2.75%

Startup Hackathon Melbourne brings together teams of entrepreneurial IT and design students from universities around Victoria, to launch web-based startups – from scratch – in 48 hours.

We decided to support that great event and sponsored it with our creative design and web development service: Altima created Startup Hackathon Melbourne logo, designed and coded website (main version).

Startup Hackathon Melbourne website created by Altima

We wish Startup Hackathon Melbourne participants all the best in the competition.

It will be a great event!

Ukraine. Just Unforgettable

Ukrainian design now is in a rather unstable state and evokes mixed judgments. Many specialists suppose that one of the problems of the professional Ukrainian design is a brake between “old” and “new” specialists. While new techniques and instruments have being come into service, most young people have to master themselves because instructors of the “old guard” are not always familiar with these techniques. In reference to quality design, the competition level there is quite low, a lack of understanding of design significance being terrific.

So if you have an interest in the graphic design you are welcome to read full article

Industry experts believe that that the deal value is at least not less than $289K (the sum, which Scoopon founders brothers Hezi and Gabby Liebovich asked).

Despite of the deal groupon.com.au domain still leads nowhere at this moment. It’s be interesting to see how fast Groupon will change branding of it’s Aussie venture currently called StarDeals to Groupon.

Author of one of most popular web servers for high load websites, nginx, Igor Sysoev wrote yesterday at his website that he is creating a company to foster nginx development.

According last Netcraft survey nginx is used for over 7% of million busiest sites

Up to date Igor Sysoev has been working in big Russian Internet company Rambler.Ru and nginx was developed as an open-source project while used for Rambler as well.

It’s promised in Ihor’s post that new company will keep nginx open-source.

For now it is unclear will Sysoev combine this new business with employment in Rambler and what will be a revenue model for new company.

Alex told about Altima’s approach to business, proudest moments in the life, business secrets and more. Link to the interview: http://www.flyingsolo.com.au/spotlight/alex-levashov-altima-interactive

Recent research conducted by Professor Utpal M. Dholakia from Rice University contains facts that are not very pleasant form currently booming group buying industry:

• just a bit more than half (55.5%) of businesses recorded a profit after group buying promotion, more than quarter (26.5%)  made losses and the rest broke even
• less than half of businesses that ran group buying promotion are going to do it in the future;
• almost 3/4 of merchants have no loyalty to group deal provider and ready to switch

So the conclusion that the researchers made is not very positive for group buying industry especially for websites that provide deals: the little loyalty, low rate of interest to repeat purchase from merchants and increasing competition will lead to the erosion of the current healthy margin and make the life of group deals providers harder.

The research collected data from 324 US businesses operating in 23 markets that used group buying promotion in 2009-2011.

Other interesting findings from the research:

• over 80% of deal users were new customers, however just around 20% were converted to repeat customers and 36% spent beyond deal’s face values;
• to make the deal profitable merchants should use higher face value, lower discount, limit the maximum number of deals and list shorter redemption period. In addition appeared that item based deals are more profitable than ‘dollar’ based deals;
• daily deals worked best for health and services and special events industries (over 70% of merchants reported profit). Two most popular categories of businesses – restaurants and spas experienced much lower success rate (43.6% and 53.7%) and only 53.7% of spas and 41.5% of restaurants are going to use daily deals in the future;
• businesses used 23.5% of their marketing budget for group buying promotions at expenses of more traditional media such as Yellow pages, print and direct mail

If you are working in the group buying industry or considering to run daily deal campaign it’s highly recommended to read the full research, it’s available at Professor Dholakia web page: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~dholakia/

According press-release, Magento will be used to build new product from eBay, X-commerce:

X.Commerce, eBay’s newly created integrated open commerce platform group, is focused on leveraging the company’s assets and partner technologies to build a strong, robust developer community as a resource for merchants and retailers of all sizes

It’s interesting to track how the situation will develop and what happen with Magento open-source solution. It would be pity if eBay decides to shut it down.