Kaboodle says it has improved its end-user experience by offering real-time product search, which provides the ability to see products that are the most popular based on user-set parameters, such as items from a specific store, within a specific category, and related items.

Users will be able to see a timeline around product discovery on Kaboodle, creating relevance, context, and value by knowing something is popular based on a particular time frame.  This is the beginning of an ongoing initiative to create and improve Kaboodle’s real-time product search and will lead to the rollout of more upgrades throughout the year.

With the re-launch, Kaboodle has made its "Add to Kaboodle" easier for retailers to embed directly on their sites. Users can still add products via the "Add to Kaboodle" button from anywhere on the web in one click.

"Our enhanced product discovery engine provides an even richer, more relevant and more personalized shopping experience for our users, making it easy for shoppers to find the great products added by our fast growing community in a very simple way," said Manish Chandra, CEO and co-founder of Kaboodle.

"Today’s launch marks another key milestone for us, and in 2010, Kaboodle continues its mission to lead the online shopping space through both business and technological innovation."
 

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Kaboodle and Kaango are hardly identical, but their names and identities (a social shopping community and classifieds site, respectively) are comparable.  MediaNews is entirely new to the scene, though, and in a filing with the SEC, it stated, “Kaango will be held by a newly formed limited liability company, which is 50% owned by each of Hearst and the Company.”

The same filing also spoke to the future of this venture, continuing, “The remaining 20% of Kaango is owned by its founders and is subject to a call option and is expected to be purchased in the future.”

This sounds like an odd situation, yet is a fairly routine arrangement, and amounts to a bet on the part of Hearst and MediaNews that Kaango will become more valuable.  There was no hint as to when (or at what cost) the option might be exercised.

In other news related to this deal, Rafat Ali states, “MediaNews also reported its revenues: it lost $1.01 million in Q3, compared to a profit of $13.3 million in the year-ago quarter.  Revenues were $334.7 million, up from $295.3 million a year ago, thanks to acquisitions of San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, The Monterey County Herald and St. Paul Pioneer Press.  It didn’t break out its online revenues, but did say that revenues remained flat.”

Onlookers seem to agree, at least to some extent.  While covering the deal, Under the Radar voiced its support for Kaboodle.  And Read/WriteWeb’s Richard MacManus wrote, “Kaboodle leads the social shopping pack, with a clean UI and the most comprehensive feature set.  It also appeared to have more traffic than the others.  So Hearst bought the right one!”

The Hearst deal shouldn’t lead to any major changes in Kaboodle’s setup; instead, a press release hints at the integration of some magazine content, and given the scope of Hearst’s kingdom (Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, etc.), that ought to work out just fine.  In fact, the CEO and founder of Kaboodle, Manish Chandra, believes “[t]his partnership will provide Kaboodle the flexibility and resources necessary to continue building the premier social shopping platform.”

Kaboodle already receives over 2 million unique visitors per month; don’t be surprised if that number rises significantly following the implementation of Hearst’s plans.  The shopping site won’t be the only beneficiary here, however – a new report predicts that newspapers (in which Hearst has a significant stake) will soon be outpaced by online advertising.

She told me she didn’t have any ulterior motive other than she didn’t brief enough people and got heck for it (even Business Week’s Rob Hof says he wasn’t briefed). I told her don’t brief me, but start with the Z list – a blogger with four readers will get noticed almost as quickly as if Michael Arrington wrote it. She told me that she’ll try to make more use of the email mailing lists that Google is building over on the Google Press Center, so if you’re a blogger you might want to subscribe to their mailing lists if you want to get news from Courney. Anyway, I respected Courney a lot for coming out and meeting with me. That’s the sign of a good PR practitioner, they take the bad with the good.

Speaking of good and bad PR, did you see Frank Shaw’s blog? He runs the Microsoft account for Waggener Edstrom and he had to clean up a mess by another PR guy in the UK who said “I don’t get blogs.” If a PR person said that to me I’d say “I don’t get why you’re still employed.”

It seems to me that if you don’t understand something you should work hard to understand it.

Which, brings me to Google Calendar. I wrote last week that I don’t get why I should use Google Calendar instead of Exchange and Outlook. So, yesterday I met with the Google Calendar team to explain why I missed Outlook. Really I do.

Some things that bugged me, though, like how when I just accidentally click on the Google Calendar it wants to create an event for me, are actually features that they discovered in user testing. At least that’s what Carl Sjogreen, the guy who runs the Calendar team, told me. He said that before they added that users couldn’t figure out how to add a new event and after they added that they could.

He also showed me how they build the Web into everything they do, and don’t just make it an afterthought. For instance, I can share my calendar with you in a variety of ways. I could just share my calendar out with you as a Web page (I almost did that, but I realized there’s some stuff on there that people sent me in confidence, so can’t share that, sorry). Or, I can build a specialized calendar and share that with you in a box on my blog to the right. That kind of Web-thought is deep at Google and is going to be how they come at the Enterprise world.

You might not switch your Outlook/Exchange calendar to Google for many years to come, but they’ll come in the back door by getting you to start new calendars that you can share with your family, friends, and with the Internet at large. I’m going to do a new calendar just for my video show, for instance, and share that with you so you’ll be able to see both interviews that are upcoming as well as shows that I’ve both published and that are going to come up. I’ll try to have that calendar done by the end of the weekend.

Yeah, he admitted that they have a lot of work to do on mobile phone sync and the other stuff I asked for (offline, for instance and better email integration). When Google solves those problems they’ll have something very interesting that will see usage inside corporations.

Anyway, after talking with Google yesterday I headed off to meet Kaboodle’s CEO, Manish Chandra. He designed Kaboodle to make it easier to keep track of projects you’re doing on the Web. That sounds pretty cold compared to what it really does though. Let’s say you’re planning out a vacation and you’re visiting dozens of sites, keeping track of the places you want to visit, or the hotels you’re considering and you’re working with other family members. Kaboodle helps you store all those Web sites and pieces of things you’re tracking, and put them in one place, and also collaborate with other people on them. Pretty cool stuff.

Last night Daniel McVicar (who has been an actor on the popular soap opera “The Bold and The Beautiful” had dinner with me last night). I didn’t even realize just how big a star he was until I read his Wikipedia page this morning. He has a funny vlog. Last night he was wearing a Ze Frank t-shirt (I snapped a picture of that on my Flickr feed. Hey, he’s in the ORG! Watch out for those “little duckies.” He can’t get the damn song out of his head either. Heh, Rabbit Bites made fun of his vlog already.

Hope you’re having a good Friday. While I was out meeting the geeks and interviewing people more than 50 more emails came in that haven’t been answered yet (and that’s after cleaning out the ones that aren’t important or were spam). Yikes. I’m gonna take the weekend off and see if I can catch up on my email a bit. Have a great one (it’s Labor Day weekend here in the United States, thanks to everyone who does the work that keeps this world running).

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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