The social shopping community Wishpot recently announced the closing of a $1 million investment round (Series A). The round was led by Monster Venture Partners, along with Italian internet firm H-Farm and angel backer Adrian Hanauer, who had previously invested. Wishpot is a social shopping service that lets you collect and and share information about items you find online and in stores. By creating a common space in which users can browse, recommend products, get advice, and find new items they are interested in, Wishpot seeks to simplify shopping. Wishpot will launch outside the U.S. later in 2008. Wishpot was founded in 2006 in Seattle by veterans of Microsoft. Co-founder and CEO Max Ciccotosto was previously an Italy-based entrepreneur.

yesterday i visited Lukasz at the spreadshirt / lafraise Office and my first eye-catcher was a nice flat screen hanging on the wall.

this shows logins / sales etc. to the spreadshirt system and is a great instrument to show your staff that “something is moving” and you all doing a great job.

we do something similar at beschenkmich.de (but far more simple). We use a google analytics chart and our internal admin interface:

It has been indeed a very successful year for CNM.

In total 3 different WEB2.0 propostions have been created and supporting teams have been formed from scratch.

These propositions being „Youmato“ a social network around people, places and parties as well as „yagn“ a dedicated gamers network
and last but not least „beschenkmich“ a social „wishlister“ network.

In late December 2007 CNM could close a deal with the well known German publishing house Georg von Holtzbrinck of which their unit eLab invested seed money funding beschenkmich. All thinngs considered the CNM team is proud to have found a competent partner such as Holtzbrinck.

A joint venture named beschenk mich GmbH has been founded driving the growth and expansion of www.beschenkmich.de

Within two weeks the beschenkmich office in Berlin, office equipement and IT infratructure has been set up by the beschenkmich team in order to start operations immediately.

Already the first two weeks of the pubilc beta of beschenkmich have shown decent sign up numbers and thus customer interest in this brand new service.

Having launched www.beschenkmich.de on December 19th 5.000 users and around 250.000 visits have been achieved within 4 weeks time.

In these early days of 2008 the beschenkmich team is now more than busy to bug fix , rolling out new features and planning new product propositions to come soon in order to tighten and rapidly grow their product.

For more details on beschenkmich you can either visit the website: www.beschenkmich.de or have a look at the beschenkmich blog:
http://blog.beschenkmich.com/

CNM now proceed talking to investors about Youmato, yagn and for a second round investment about beschenkmich aiming to further drive CNM´s growth strategy in 2008.

Morgan Stanley offers a interesting slide (download here) sowhing the growth of web 2.0 sites. The slides are based on Alexa statistics. In favor of the right (green) sites, the left (red) sites dropped out of the TOP 10 list.

Social Networks and Social Media Services can now claim six of the top-10 slots.

According to Morgan Stanley, worldwide Internet usage has passed the 1 billion mark last year, and is estimated to hit more than 1.3 billion this year. The provided chart also shows the reach of Internet users by region.

SMAVA:

up-to-date figures: 13.500 members with a total loan volume of 0,6 Mio EUR. The average loan amount is 4.000 EUR.

smava is very satisfied with the results so far. Their business model is a 1% “handling charge” for all successful loan contracts