If you haven’t heard of Fancy, think of it this way: Fancy is to Pinterest as Tumblr is to WordPress. It even has its own verb: to fancy. Users upload images to the site much like at Pinterest, by uploading or using a bookmarklet to identify an image on a webpage. Then friends and followers can see the “fancied” items, follow you, comment, and “re-fancy” an image to post it to their own stream. Fancy is a bit simpler and a little bit more elegant than Pinterest, if that’s possible.

Of course, the analogy breaks down when you look at number of users. Fancy is still closing in on a million users, whereas Pinterest is well into the tens of millions, with over 100 million visitors to the site in January of 2012.

The key update today is commerce. And the big question is whether Fancy is prematurely optimizing for monetization over community and growth.

Buying things on Fancy, whether on the site or the app, is simple: see something you like (or fancy, if you will), and tap it. A buy now button appears; tap it, and you’re ordering the item. The app includes standard shopping cart technology so you can continue your journey through the items that you may or may not have bookmarked, and add additional products.

Users can download the new app here. I have one quibble: it only works in portrait mode, not landscape. Flipboard and similar tablet apps have conditioned users to the freedom to view content as they wish to see it, and it would be nice to have both options.

In a statement, founder and CEO Joe Einhorn mentioned that Oscar de la Renta sold $10,000 worth of product on Fancy in just one week. So Fancy has built an effective social commerce platform. But is it the right decision for the long-term future and growth of the community? Reviewing the app, I have some doubts.

If you look at the Fancy experience, pre-commerce (or even today, on any item that does not have a price tag), it’s much like Pinterest. It’s social, it’s playful, it’s all about discovery and sharing cool stuff.

Adding in commerce changes the equation somewhat. It reminds me of Dan Arielly, who warns in his book Predictably Irrational that mixing social norms and market norms is dangerous.

For instance, take a look at the image to the right. Without the “Book Hotel Now” title and price tag, it’s a great shot of a father, son, and elephant. Wow. But with the price tag … how much different does this image feel?

The danger is that Fancy is transforming art into an ad.

The difference is that between a social space and a store. It remains to be seen whether users will feel as happy socializing, sharing, and creating in a partly commercial space as they did in a purely social space.

App people photo credit: Shutterstock

Cloud-hating Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison has had an about-face: He actually likes the cloud. In fact, he likes it so much that Oracle will be launching a full suite of cloud-based products on June 6.

Ellison has been a self-proclaimed “cloud-hater,” mostly because up until October, 2011 Oracle’s primary business was based on powerful hardware and software solutions. At the conference, he warmed up to the term during an interview with All Things D’s Kara Swisher.

“They don’t call it the Internet any more. They call it cloud computing,” Ellison said, throwing out one of his trademark sweeping generalizations.

“I’m no longer resisting the name ‘cloud,’” he said by way of explanation. In fact, he says, he was responsible for the genesis of some of today’s most successful cloud companies, including NetSuite (“NetSuite was my idea”) and Salesforce.com (“six months later Marc Benioff copied it”). What bugged him before was the notion that the cloud was something radically new, rather than an evolution of the Internet.

Now, however, he thinks differently. “I like the word ‘cloud’ because it’s a charismatic brand,” Ellison said.

Oracle’s June 6 launch of “Oracle Cloud” will include a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering as well as the full suite of Oracle applications, all delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS).

“For the first time you’re going to have a complete ERP and complete CRM suite on the cloud,” Ellison said.

He had sharp words for cloud-based competitor Workday, which he called “frail.”

Oracle has also been doubling down on the hardware business, thanks to its $5.5 billion acquisition of Sun, which Ellison said has already paid for itself.

“Sales are going down in hardware, but the unprofitable part is going away. Our margins are the highest of anyone in the server business. The sales are down 20 percent, but the profits are up,” Ellison said.

One of the reasons he likes the hardware business, he said, is that it’s “90 percent software.”

And, he added, Oracle wants to do more hardware manufacturing in the U.S., starting with its Hillsboro, Oreg. location.

“We are bringing a lot of manufacturing jobs back to the United States,” Ellison said. But, he added, it’s a challenge, because of a critical shortage of manufacturing engineers in America. One way to address that, Ellison said, is through immigration (an argument made earlier in the day by LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, incidentally).

“We have got to have a more balanced immigration policy. Immigration is a good thing,” Ellison said.

On his company’s recent court battle with Google over Java, Ellison seemed pleased, despite a decision that went largely against Oracle. In fact, Ellison said, the court found in favor of Oracle on copyright infringement.

“We won on infringement. They were infringing our copyrights,” Ellison said. But because the litigation is still ongoing (which presumably means Oracle will be appealing the decisions), he didn’t comment further.

As a student at the Harvard Business School, Bom Kim asked his entrepreneurship professor if he should drop put of school to do a startup. The professor told him no. But Kim dropped out anyway, and it was the best move of his life.

Now he is chief executive and founder of Korean e-commerce site Coupang. Kim (pictured) started Coupang in 2010 as a kind of daily deals e-commerce site, before Groupon hit it big in the U.S. Now the company has seen torrid growth and has a revenue run-rate of $600 million in revenues.

Coupang has expanded beyond deals to physical e-commerce and is now the fifth-most-visited e-commerce site in South Korea. But in a presentation at Altos Ventures’ conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., Kim said that is a big deal because of the unique characteristics of Korea as a market.

He noted that the country is very dense, with 50 million people living in the habitable areas of Korea that are about the size of Massachusetts. About 75 percent of Koreans live in an urban area with more than 500,000 people in the city. That means that making deliveries to people is cheap and easy. The country also has 95 percent broadband penetration, and its e-commerce market is the sixth-largest in the world, forecast to grow from $24 billion in 2011 to $45 billion in 2015.

Korea is also pretty allergic to outside tech companies. Groupon has spent tens of millions of dollars in the market but is about a fifth the size of Coupang in terms of revenues, Kim said. Google has just a few percent of the search market.

“It’s like the Greece of Asia,” Kim said. “You can’t invade it from the outside.”

Altos Ventures invested in Coupang in August 2010, when the company had about $100,000 in revenues. Now it has 12 million subscribers, 732 employees, and 25,000 merchants selling goods on its marketplace. Besides Altos, investors include Maverick Capital and other seed investors.

“That’s a testament to the growth in the Korean market and how the social commerce space is hot,” Kim said. “We’ve done this by taking the best practices of the East and West.”

About 80 percent of the company’s business is the delivery of physical goods ordered via e-commerce sites. Most of the revenue is generated by people who visit the site every day. So take that, Harvard Business School.

Every day, 46 million mobile applications are downloaded from Apple’s App Store, according to Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers partner Mary Meeker.

Meeker spoke today about the ways Silicon Valley is changing almost everything we use in a staggering way the All Things Digital’s D 10 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. Indeed, many of her slides included a picture of the way things used to be and the way Silicon Valley has changed it. For instance, one of Meeker’s slides showed a notepad for remembering things and making to do lists. On the other side of the slide was a picture of the Evernote application.

KPCB arrived at this conclusion after looking the App Store’s milestones. In October 2011, the company announced it had hit 18 billion downloads. Later, in March 2012, Apple announced 25 billion downloads.

Many of app developers say that it’s difficult to be found in the sea of billions of apps that live in the App Store. Crawling up to a “top 25″ spot on one of Apple’s app lists, is also difficult, and based on download numbers. Indeed, it seems this 46 million downloads a day is spread thinly amongst iOS apps, who celebrate hitting thousands of downloads, let alone millions.

But it also shows the major interest in smartphone applications. Smartphones are undoubtedly changing the way we communicate, the way we are entertained, the way we organize, the way we listen to music. Indeed, mobile usage itself is growing rapidly with 10 percent of Internet traffic coming from mobile. Monetizing apps is growing as well, but the revenue gained on the desktop still surpasses that of mobile.

Apps image via Shutterstock

Of all the eye-opening stats that analyst and VC Mary Meeker dropped today with her annual Internet Trends report, one of the scariest for marketers and publishers was just how poorly mobile usage is being monetized.

In a world that is rapidly adopting smartphones, tablets, and everything in between, there is a serious disconnect between making money from users of those devices versus users of desktops and laptops. Frankly, it’s a little scary for those who make a living from the web.

First, the good news: People are rapidly adopting mobile devices and mobile Internet traffic is growing quickly. The total amount of Internet traffic coming from mobile now sits at about 10 percent versus 1 percent in late 2009. That means mobile devices are immensely popular and people are responding well to using phones to access web-based content.

And in India specifically, take a glance at just how quickly mobile adoption is overcoming desktop-based web growth.

But — and it’s a big but — the monetization on mobile web and mobile apps is absolutely terrible versus the desktop-focused web. It’s so much of a problem that it almost certainly will affect Facebook’s long-term growth prospects, which is one factor that weighed down its IPO. Also, take note that current comScore projections say the effective CPM per desktop user is $3.50 per person, but eCPM per mobile user is just $.75 per person.

Now, to be fair, mobile monetization has grown over time. Apps have especially have seen their compound annual growth rate (CAGR) rise.

While it’s encouraging to see the value of both mobile apps and the mobile web rise, it’s going to be a tough ride while marketers, publishers, and web-focused companies figure out how to keep those CPM rates going up.

At the All Things D conference today, where Meeker first presented these slides, she did note that some companies, especially Twitter, have done a good job at stepping up their game to monetize mobile.

“It’s early,” Meeker said. “The screen is small and the ad units haven’t been rolled out effectively yet. We’re still early in figuring out local and social, and I think we’re going to get there.”

Top photo credit: koya979/Shutterstock

Slides credit: Mary Meeker, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.