Less-lethal weapons-makers are busy coming up with their own brainy bullets…Like a munition that senses when it strikes soft flesh, and then deploys a devastating payload to “attack three of the five human senses.”

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LuxeYard, a members-only e-commerce website that sells discounted high-end furniture and home decor products, is launching Tuesday to users in the United States and Canada. Yes, it’s technically another flash sales site. But what’s interesting about LuxeYard is that it’s doing things a bit differently from the established players in the space such as One Kings Lane and Gilt Groupe.

Crowdsourcing the inventory selection

Firstly, rather than populating its site with objects selected by a group of buyers operating autonomously based on their own taste, LuxeYard is taking cues from its users on what items to sell. LuxeYard members can post photos of the type of items they’d like to buy on social media platforms, and other members can vote up on products they would also like to buy. Essentially, the items for sale on site will be crowdsourced according to users’ wants.

LuxeYard screenshot (click to enlarge)

“We’re really establishing a pattern of listening,” LuxeYard COO Steve Beauregard said in a phone interview Monday. “We’re really trying to build a conversation around certain pieces, and that will help focus our buyers and attune them to our users’ tastes, rather than just buying something they think is interesting.”

Taking group buying one step further

Secondly, LuxeYard is employing truly flexible group buying. This is where members use their social networks to encourage their friends to buy the same product on LuxeYard they’re buying, thereby driving down the price of that item. For example: I could buy a chair on LuxeYard for 0, and then post about that chair on Facebook. If a certain number of other people end up buying the same chair, the final cost for everyone buying the chair could be driven down to 0.

A unique financial starting point

And another unique thing about LuxeYard is that it’s hitting the ground running from a financial perspective. The company has raised .5 million from private investors, but has technically already gone public by conducting a reverse merger into a publicly-held shell company. Details are still being ironed out, so there is no public float to LuxeYard’s stock, but it will begin trading under the ticker symbol “LXRD” at some point in the coming months. Access to public market investors will potentially give LuxeYard the monetary wherewithal to compete head-to-head in the flash sales and group buying space already filled with solid players such as Wayfair, One Kings Lane and others, not to mention more general e-commerce sites such as Amazon.

But how long can exclusivity last?

Now, LuxeYard also claims it will be more choosy about the items it selects to sell on the site. According to Beauregard, if a company’s products are already being sold on existing e-commerce sites or major chain stores, LuxeYard will not sell any of its products. That’s an honorable goal, but true exclusivity is not always an easy thing to maintain when you’re also balancing the demand from investors for constant growth. And being that LuxeYard is starting out as a public company with notoriously demanding Wall Street-style investors, that could be an even harder balance to strike. But overall, LuxeYard’s offering seems unique enough that the company has a good shot at success — even in the hyper competitive world of e-commerce.

Here’s one more screenshot of LuxeYard (click to enlarge):

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As it prepares for Netflix’s 2012 UK invasion Lovefilm appears to be taking a page out of its competitor’s strategy, and it’s all because of the studios. When streaming to Windows PCs and Macs it will only support Silverlight as of the first week in January (we should mention it’s coincidentally timed alongside a particular electronics show), ditching Flash encodes for its video. Like Watch Instantly, that will mean a lockout for non-Intel Macs and Linux users who don’t have a player that supports the necessary DRM, but it’s just those three letters that are behind this. Streaming Project Manager Paul Thompson writes on the company blog that Silverlight beat out Flash and new challenger HTML5 in order to meet studio’s anti-piracy requirements, as well as take advantage of its Smooth Streaming adaptive bandwidth adjustments. Everything will stay the same on other streaming devices, while Netflix has been able to support Chromebooks via plugin and is rumored to be working on a Netflix solution, we’ll have to wait and see if Lovefilm can do the same.

Lovefilm’s movie streaming will switch from Flash to Silverlight on PCs in 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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On this week’s edition of the Gadget Lab podcast, we talk about Adobe’s decision to kill mobile Flash and the ongoing iOS 5 battery problem saga, then take a look at Motorola’s tough but slender new Droid Razr smartphone.

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Today is a big day for flash-storage startup Nimbus Data Systems: It’s rolling out its second-generation platform and it gets to announce online auction giant eBay as a major customer. In fact, eBay has deployed a non-trivial 100TB of Nimbus gear. Have we finally reached the inflection point for primary flash storage?

Traditionally, flash has been used as a cache layer either within storage arrays or within servers themselves to speed delivery of hot data. The latter model is how Fusion-io’s flash components are delivered into data centers.

Recently, though, there has been a strong movement toward using flash for storing all an organization’s primary data, not just the hot stuff that needs special attention. This has been spurred by lower prices for flash memory at the component level, as well as by a greater understanding of the energy savings and and price-per-transaction savings that flash can provide. Flash might require a bit more capital investment upfront, but it pays off in the long run.

eBay is a prime example of the benefits of flash. Nimbus Data CEO Thomas Isakovich told me that eBay had only 2.5TB of flash installed six months ago before recently upgrading to 100TB. Within the PayPal division where Nimbus is deployed, Isakovich said eBay has cut power costs by 78 percent, cut its rack space by half and is able to better meet performance demand overall by spinning up virtual machines even faster.

Virtualization, actually, is another driving force behind the uptick in flash interest lately. Its benefits around consolidation and flexibility also bring performance overhead for storage operations.

As for the Nimbus gear, it comes in 2TB, 5TB and 10TB chunks and is scalable up to 250TB. It uses ELC NAND, which the company claims is 10 times more durable than standard MLC NAND, and runs a specially designed file system and software set. Among the features are advanced compression, deduplication, replication and thin-provisioning capabilities.

Isakovich claims that when one factors in lower file-system performance overhead and the fact that Nimbus doesn’t charge a licensing fee for its software, his company’s systems can actually come in at a lower price per gigabyte than spinning disks. His math must not be too far off: Nimbus has more than 200 customers just over a year into selling its product, and reached profitability on the back of angel funding alone.

Nimbus Data is just part of a greater market, though, which is why the notion of mass flash adoption seems more realistic than ever before. There’s also Nimble Storage and Tintri serving small enterprises with a hybrid flash-and-disk approach, Violin Memory serving the highest-performance customers, and even SolidFire serving cloud providers as its target market. And they’ve all been raising lots of money and building their customer bases.

Add in the recent surge of flash support by mega storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp, and customers soon won’t be able to escape the flash onslaught.

Isakovich thinks Nimbus Data can become a billion company — “the next NetApp” — by capturing the hype around flash and maintaining its competitive pricing model versus hard disk drives. That’s a long way off, and Nimbus has plenty of competition, but someone has to make that money.

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Google dropped an amazing amount of stuff on us this morning, up to and including using your phone to turn off a lamp and a tablet to control a giant wooden labyrinth. Move past the flash, though, and the news with the most immediate impact to Android users is the release of the Music Beta by Google, plus the availability of movie rentals on the go. Now you can take your tunes all up into the cloud and pay too much to bring some movies along with you. That all sounds great, but we have somewhat mixed feelings about the whole thing. Check ‘em out below.

Continue reading Editorial: Engadget on Google Music and Movies for Android

Editorial: Engadget on Google Music and Movies for Android originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 May 2011 16:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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