Online fashion marketplace Bellaga launched Thursday, a site that connects shoppers to independent fashion designers with Bellaga-based boutiques. While sites like Etsy give anyone with a crochet hook or a silkscreen the opportunity to make a little cash on the side for indulging in their hobby, Bellaga is for serious seamsters only.

For designers and shoppers alike, the site is 100% percent free for the time being, says co-founder and systems lead George Shammas. The Brooklyn-based site will eventually adopt a sales commission business model. The shopping cart is powered by the Amazon Payments system, so Bellaga is US-based only for now. Sellers only need an Amazon Payments Business account, and when an item sells, a seven percent transaction fee is charged [updated: since Bellaga is not yet charging, only the Amazon minimum of three percent is currently charged per sale].

For now Bellaga wants more styles and more members. With only about 45 pieces and seven designers at last count, they have yet to reach one-stop-shopping status, but the perks for indie labels are enticing - featured designers get top billing on the homepage, and each brand gets their own shop analytics - and according to Shammas, that’s "[s]omething no other marketplace on the Internet gives you."

The focus of the site is to create dialogue between seller and buyer, as the Bellaga launch blog post explains. "The direct connection between buyer and seller on this platform creates a level of communication that accentuates the style, exposure, precise comprehension and attention to details that may otherwise be lost in an online environment." Bellaga’s success will be due to its focus on the individuals that will make up its community - creating an ideal interface for fashion-lovers, giving powerful tools to the creatives, and encourage conversation between these groups. "The boutique approach allows sellers and buyers alike to have a place to deliver and discover unique fashion and style that may otherwise go through a lengthy process to reach consumers directly."

What if you could feed a monkey, donate a meal to the homeless, plant a tree or deliver a life-saving vaccination to people just by adding an app to your smartphone?

CauseWorld was designed for that. Owners of iPhones and Androids open the app, go to nearby stores (indicated by GPS) and earn “karma points,” which they can donate to the charity or the cause of their choice — even if they don’t buy a thing at the store. Since the app’s December launch, companies like P&G, City Bank and Kraft have donated more than 400,000 dollars for causes, which is huge.

Some skeptics will say that this is just another way for multinationals in need of good publicity to make themselves look good. We can’t say the skeptics are wrong, but still.

This simple application is unique. It is the only one to add a charity dimension to geolocalization and shopping apps by using virtual money. Causeworld converts its currency, “karmas,” into real dollars with real impact. So why use Foursquare, Gowala or brightkite to communicate your location and find stores if you can do the same, and much more, with this app?

Causeworld has a very simple business model. Its monetization is based on a background in the retail industry: companies are ready to pay a little to have clients entering their shop.

The app seems to be quite a success, as in two months more than 300,000 people have downloaded it. It is one way  to do something good while you shop and for the retail companies to convert individuals into customers. But what’s important at the end is more than the click on your phone, it’s that you helped.

Hulu often seems to be at the mercy of its network and cable television content providers, as when Comedy Central pulled The Daily Show and The Colbert Report - the shows will cease to be streamed by Hulu on March 9th.

While this could lead to an uptick of questionable content that involves prehistoric prepubescents, Hulu seems to have gone in a more mainstream-constructive direction.

If I Can Dream is Hulu’s first foray into original content, and the project has a fairly solid backing of established creator Simon Fuller and big name branding with Pepsi and Ford.

The main If I Can Dream site features a 3D rendered map of the house, and promises an immersive experience with different ways to interact with the "dreamers" and the 60 cameras.

The "Just Watch" option does provide a classic Web cam meditation on banality. A quiet moment with cast member Ben folding and putting away clothes while singing "O Canada" probably won’t make it into the edited version.

So far there is one full episode on Hulu, "The Journey to Hollywood Special." It’s somewhat like network TV, as Mashable says, in the aspiring performers are not going to be the only people of interest on the reality show. In the future, auditions for new places in the house will be ongoing, culled from the MySpace upload page.

The show could be successful, though it takes a handicap for its lack of celebrities or originality, as it is deemed by the Huffington Post. As they quote Robert Seidman of TV By The Numbers, "in general it would need to average about 4 million adults 18-49 for the duration of the show to be considered a success."

While there was no translation to a success threshold on an Internet-based show, if this program were to reach such levels, we could at least expect to see even more perky hopefuls on the Internet, now in HD.

Freescale Semiconductor says that its i.MX508 applications processor will drop e-reader prices to $150 this year. In addition to lower prices, the processor will result in faster page turns, longer battery life and will enable developers to build richer features.

The San Jose company’s processors power 90 percent of all e-readers.

While there are still people out there who claim the printed book has something inherent that e-readers lack – most often it’s the smell – the most prohibitive factor is price. $200 and up is just too much for many consumers to pay for a single-function device. $150? Getting warmer.

“There’s a big unsaturated market out there, and price is a big factor,” Freescale marketing director Glen Burchers told Bloomberg. “We do see the price of e- readers [sic] coming down this year, and Freescale is trying to facilitate that. That’s a lot of what this chip is doing.”

The potential big threat to e-readers right now is the iPad, which will have e-reader technology. Not only is the iPad (while more expensive) more functional, it also has something that Amazon and Sony do not: the rabid consumer base.

We’re seeing more and more e-readers being used by the public, but the danger is that if the price doesn’t continue to drop, demand could be replaced by multi-function devices like the iPad and other devices yet to be launched on the tablet/smartbook market.

Analyst firm DisplaySearch predicts that e-book and e-reader shipments will triple this year over 2009, reaching over 14 million units.

“Key to this growth will be improving the quality of the digital reading experience while simultaneously making it affordable,” said Dr. Jennifer Colegrove, director of Display Technologies at DisplaySearch. “The results coming from Freescale and E Ink collaboration are very encouraging,”

In "The Future of Money," Daniel Roth of Wired offers a brief evolution on the flow of cash, and describes how the credit card is poised upon the brink of decline. With the current system of point-of-sale card readers, banks and credit card companies, businesses are at the mercy of an antiquated queue of fees, transfers, and other headaches.

The Internet, Paypal, and the 21st century have a tendency of disrupting other poorly aging industries (see: music, film and art), and are currently putting an expiration date on credit card company executives’ heads. While we observe the inexorable extinction (unless they undergo some fundamental re-inventing) a small panoply of streamlined payment services are lining up to shorten the wait.

A few of Roth’s "New Ways to Pay" highlights:

Twitpay - according to this article, when PayPal opened its code to developers, Michael Ivey used it to link Twitter users’ to their PayPal accounts. The input boxes on the site do the work, tweeting the cash from one Tweeter to another.

Zong - "Frictionless Mobile Payments." A business applies for a Zong account, and once accepted, their customers pay by giving the business their mobile phone number. Zong bills the customers through their moblie carrier, who pays Zong when they pay their phone bill. Because more people globally own a mobile phone than they do a credit card, the Zong site claims that conversion rates are much higher than credit methods.

Square - Using a small piece of card-reading hardware that plugs into anything with an audio-input, anyone can accept credit cards with Square’s service. Square emails receipts, uses card holder photo verification, has a repeat customer rewards program and donates a penny of each transaction to a charity of the customer’s choice. The project was started by glass artist Jim McKelvey, Twitter creator and co-founder Jack Dorsey, as well as a host of other Silicon Valley somebodies.

Also mentioned were GetGiving and Hub Culture.

Image by d!zzy via Flickr

While most people are curious about and looking forward to seeing Apple’s iPad launch in March, we bet some people are not as excited.

That would be publishers.

Presently, when readers subscribe to a digital version of their favorite newspaper, it is the newspaper publisher that gets the revenue while their cost of distribution is virtually zero.

With the iPad, it is more complicated. By reading periodicals on the device, not only are users going to give money to the newspapers, but also to Apple. It appears that thirty percent of the revenue would be go to Apple, with what is left going to the publisher. It makes sense for book publishing, but for a newspaper, whose subscriptions must be renewed every year, it is a bitter pill to swallow.

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Until now, the smartphone market has been divided between the main operators, the most blatant example being the agreement between Apple and AT&T. Each brand has its own app ecosystem. More than 300,000 applications will be accessible in the Apple App Store by the end of 2010, and between 50,000 and 75,000 applications will be provided in the Android Market.

Applications are the symbol of the smartphone, but also one of its main values.

For brands that have invested in the mobile app market or want to do so, the breakup of market forces has caused them to multiply applications across platforms. Strategically speaking, smartphones’ individual OS’s maintain control over the attractive and steadily growing market by forcing developers to adapt to a new format for each ecosystem and seeking the consent of the OS owner before an app can hit the market. Apple, Google, Blackberry and Nokia are engaged in a format war that forgets the consumer and constrains brands.

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I count myself among the growing number of people who are dissatisfied with netbooks.

Wrist pain, poorly formatted and slowly loading web pages, sound so low that watching films just doesn’t work, lack of a DVD drive, the “Pez-dispenser” keyboard . . . all work to offset the device’s low price and portability.

Maybe consumers are starting to see this.

Fifty-five percent of consumers don’t view netbooks as viable replacements for a laptop, according to Pricegrabber.com (PDF). The main reason is the cramped computing area: fifty-four percent replied that this is the primary reason they wouldn’t replace their laptop with a netbook. The other major reasons are lack of a CD drive (50 percent) and minimal storage (49 percent).

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When Apple opens the iBook store in March to coincide with the launch of its computing tablet, the iPad, book buyers will experience something familiar to iTunes store patrons. FairPlay, the digital rights management system that was used for iTunes music purchasing (discontinued last year), will now be reinstated for digital book purchases.

Created to deter piracy for songs, Apple and partnered book publishers hope that FairPlay will benefit sales numbers for iBooks. This goes contrary to the opinion of O’Reilly Media, publishers of technical and do-it-yourself titles, who argues that digitally locking media is harmful to sales, reports the Los Angeles Times. O’Reilly, who is in discussions with Apple regarding iPad publishing, as well as other publishers in agreement, may opt-out of DRM for their content.

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Officially announced today, Google Buzz is an integrated Gmail feature that brings Twitter-like functionality to one of the more popular Webmail services. At the Google Event this morning, the announcement team showed how Buzz is for conversation and updates as well as sharing images and videos.

The Gmail Blog explains that the service is all about real-time, social sharing. As the service rolls-out to more Gmail members, users will find that they are automatically following the people that they email and chat with the most. Conveniently, Buzz also connects with Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader and Twitter.

For anyone who has been using the real-time features of Twitter or Facebook status updates, Buzz is the same suit in a different color. The service even uses Twitter’s signature @replies to send updates directly to a contact’s inbox. A few more subtle options set it slightly apart.

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