Ecommerce titan Amazon has launched Amazon Birthday Gift, a new service that lets you and your friends chip in to give Facebook connections Amazon gift cards.

Amazon gift cards are popular for birthdays and holidays because they let people buy from Amazon’s humongous selection of stuff. It’s certainly more broad than giving someone a gift using a service like Facebook Gifts, which lets you send friends items like Target gift cards, Starbucks cards, coffee mugs, and more.

But perhaps the best part of Amazon Birthday Gift is that you can essentially “crowdfund” someone’s present. The app lets you and your friends put in money for the Amazon gift card. You can start collecting cash early for the gift card online, and it will not appear on the person’s Facebook Timeline until his or her birthday.

“Birthdays have always been social occasions, and sites like Facebook now make it possible for anyone around the world to send birthday wishes to friends – with Amazon Birthday Gift, those many individual messages can become a big gift,” Steve Shure, Amazon VP of traffic, said in a statement. “Whether it’s your best friend or your old high school teammate, Amazon Birthday Gift lets you join a social gift that will grow as more friends participate, which makes giving and receiving birthday messages on Facebook even more fun.”

Check out the video below for more on how it works.

Screenshot via Amazon/YouTube

Cards are like regular, plastic gift cards, except that they work at a wide range of retailers. (For the initial rollout, the partners Facebook is naming are Jamba Juice, Olive Garden, Sephora, and Target. Company reps were tight-lipped on what partners may or may not be signing up for Cards in the near future.)

And when you’ve used up the value of the gift card, don’t throw out the plastic; the next time anyone sends you a Facebook Card, that gift’s value will be added automatically to your existing gift card. You can check the balance at any time from any Facebook app or site, and the network will send you a mobile notification when your balance is running low.

It’s like Facebook is getting into the land of prepaid credit cards via Gifts. It’s all very interesting stuff.

Here’s a sneak peek:

U.S. Facebook users will be first to get the shiny, new toy; rollout is starting now and should be complete in the next few days.

More deets from the Facebook press release:

First, select a gift for your friend from Jamba Juice, Olive Garden, Sephora, or Target in the Gift Cards & Digital category.

Next, choose the value you would like to send. Your friend will be notified about your gift instantly and will receive a Facebook Card in the mail a few days later. As soon as it arrives, they can use the card at the store you’ve chosen for the amount you have gifted.

…Your card can hold multiple gift balances, and each balance is dedicated to the specific retailer associated with the gift. For example, you might have a gift of $100 at Sephora, $75 at Target, $50 at Olive Garden, and $8.25 at Jamba Juice.

Facebook first launched Gifts in the final months of 2012. By trafficking money and goods between users around the globe — and taking a small cut of each transaction — Facebook has the potential to build Gifts into a huge part of its business eventually.

“Gifting is a very unique form of e-commerce, and we thought there was a lot more innovation that could be going on there,” said Gifts creator Lee Linden in a recent VentureBeat interview. While he couldn’t get specific about how much Facebook takes in the transactions, he did say, “We’re starting with the U.S., and we’ll evaluate in the future what makes sense,” indicating that the company does plan to go global with the new e-commerce product.

“I think these can be big opportunities for us in the long term,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a call yesterday, “but for the next year at least, our work around ads will have by far the biggest impact on our business.”

Facebook’s earnings just hit the wire, showing $1.585 billion for the quarter and a grand total of $5.1 billion for all of 2012, narrowly beating estimates of $5 billion.

But the real standout line item was mobile advertising revenue — the most hotly anticipated and debated figure in Facebook’s books and the one where Facebook far outstripped any forecasts.

Here’s a quarter-by-quarter look at Facebook’s revenues over the past two years:

Obviously, the majority of this comes from advertising — and with its new Graph Search, Facebook is poised to take an even larger share of that market from reigning champion Google. In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbrg said in today’s earnings call that he considers Graph Search the company’s most important product from the past 12 months and that he looks forward to building Graph Search into a meaningful part of Facebook’s business.

Online ads in the U.S. were a $10 billion market in Q4 2012, with Facebook taking home $1.33 billion of that — 13.3 percent of the total market. Advertising made up 84 percent of the company’s total revenue and increased 41 percent year-over-year for Q4.

News Feed ads “turned out even better than we thought,” said Zuckerberg. He said the company is working on more innovative and effective ad products. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also noted that 65 percent of Facebook’s advertisers are using News Feed ads, which also run in mobile interfaces.

Mobile ads and revenues

As for mobile figures, mobile monthly active users were up to 680 million at the end of 2012, a 57 percent hike year-over-year. Mobile revenue made up nearly one quarter of all ad revenue in Q4 — a (relatively) huge $306 million.

While the analysts at eMarketer pretty much nailed their figures for 2012 revenues, they were surprised at how fast the social network’s mobile revenue has grown.

“The company outperformed expectations again — by a wide margin,” an eMarketer told VentureBeat today via email. “With 25 percent of revenue going to mobile in the fourth quarter, Facebook has cemented its position as the leader in mobile display advertising in the U.S. by a wide margin.”

Facebook’s entry into mobile advertising was a big part of the entire segment’s boom last year, an overall 180 percent increase in mobile ad spend in the United States.

eMarketer estimates that Facebook took home more U.S. mobile display revenue than any other mobile ad publisher in 2012, up to and including rival Google. The firm estimates Facebook earned 18.4 percent of the total U.S. mobile display ad market, up from 17 percent last year.

“The social networking giant offered no mobile ad opportunities at the beginning of 2012 but grew its mobile business at an astonishing — and unexpected — rate,” said an eMarketer rep.

“Before Facebook’s Q3 earnings call, most researchers and analysts expected U.S. mobile ad revenues of roughly $45 to $100 million, according to figures examined by eMarketer. While the company’s total ad revenues were, for the most part, unsurprising, the share of revenues attributed to mobile advertising was far from it.”

Share prices

Analysts had previously forecast Facebook’s 2012 revenues at $5 billion, a significant decrease from a previous $6 billion estimate. Facebook had underperformed analysts’ expectations in the first two quarters of 2012, and with the downgraded annual revenue estimate, share prices dipped below $18.

This morning, the company’s shares were trading at $31.28, their highest price since the stock’s nosedive came to a slow halt last fall. In after hours trading, prices dropped slightly to $30.71. Take a look at Facebook share price performance over the last six months:

This kind of uptick has put Facebook stock squarely in the “most improved” category for consumer-facing tech companies, with share prices rising around 35 percent in the past six months:

Shares have been closing above 13-day and 50-day exponential moving averages (EMAs), indicating bullish performance for the near future.

The company’s initial public offering saw shares trading in the low to mid-$40s before the bell; throughout the day and the months to follow, share prices dropped dramatically. However, as many analysts and investors pointed out, Facebook was and is still at the beginning, both in terms of share price and revenue.

“This is an eight-year-old company,” pointed out Rebecca Lieb, an Altimeter Group analyst. “When Google went public, they had only recently developed ad products. Facebook is at the beginning of mobile products, advertising products — and it hasn’t even started with commerce products.”

“Facebook has just scratched the surface of its revenue and advertising,” said Menlo Ventures managing director Mark Siegel. “They’re going to grow with a much more diverse income stream than what they have today.”

And speaking of diverse revenue streams, let’s take a closer look at one of the stars of today’s show: Facebook’s mobile revenue.

Gifts

Another entirely new line item on Facebook’s budget is Gifts, which the company launched to a small group of users near the beginning of Q3 2012. Initially, the service, which let users send physical gifts to one another and let Facebook keep a small cut of the profits, seemed like a great addition to Facebook’s revenue streams.

“Gifting is a very unique form of e-commerce, and we thought there was a lot more innovation that could be going on there,” said Gifts creator Lee Linden in a recent VentureBeat interview. While he couldn’t get specific about how much Facebook takes in the transactions, he did say, “We’re starting with the U.S., and we’ll evaluate in the future what makes sense,” indicating that the company does plan to go global with the new e-commerce product.

“I think these can be big opportunities for us in the long term,” said Zuckerberg, “but for the next year at least, our work around ads will have by far the biggest impact on our business.”

This was Facebook’s year. The social network made its debut on the public market, and it crossed the unprecedented one-billion-users mark. For many of the social network’s earliest employees, it was the stuff dreams are made of.

But so much happened to make those two dreams into realities. And the realities weren’t always all they were cracked up to be: The initial public offering got off to a painful start. In fact, stock prices for Facebook still haven’t recovered. And a billion users means a billion opportunities for bullying, privacy mishaps, and user data breaches.

Still, all highs and lows being considered, Facebook came into its own this year in a way no one in the world could ignore. Here are the biggest moments of Facebook’s 2012.

10. Zuck’s first patent

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got his first-ever patent this year. Some found it ironic that the patent dealt with online privacy. But since Facebook customers first began expressing growing concerns with how the network displays and handles user data, the company has viewed privacy in a much more serious light. And a few international lawsuits and investigations didn’t slow down that quest, either.

The story: “Patent #8,225,376 limits what users reveal online by implementing a privacy policy on their status updates and profile information … dynamically generating a view of a user’s profile page that is compliant with the user’s stated privacy preferences. … My friend gets all my information; my business contact only gets some.”

9. Facebook’s war with Google over data-center design

Facebook fired up its Open Compute Project a while ago. Its goal: to open-source the specs and designs for wildly innovative and efficient data centers, making the planet greener and lowering costs for large-scale Internet companies. In 2012, Facebook got a bunch of companies to sign on to the project, with one major exception: Google.

The story: “‘The benefits of sharing so far outweigh the benefits of keeping it all closed,’ said Facebook exec Frank Frankovsky. Of Google’s ‘competitive advantage’ argument, he added, ‘I have trouble getting myself in the mindset of thinking the infrastructure is a strategic advantage from a cost perspective. It’s really more about serving the end users — that’s what differentiates a business.’”

8. The GLAAD Award

After a few years of constant crusading for LGBT issues, especially antigay bullying by and toward teens and young people, Facebook got a huge vote of approval: a prestigious award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). At a star-studded event, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg both sent a video message of support from Facebook to the LGBT community at large.

The story: “‘After violent antigay images and comments were posted on a memorial page for LGBT youth, Facebook worked with GLAAD to monitor the highly visible page and launched, in conjunction with several LGBT organizations, the Network of Support,’ a Facebook rep said.”

7. A big mobile mistake?

After months of leading the charge in campaign for the mobile web, Facebook saw its leadership do an abrupt about-face. At a September event, Zuckerberg told a large audience, “The biggest mistake we’ve made as a company is betting on HTML5 over native.” But it reversed positions in a later, private chat.

The story: “Doug Purdy, the social network’s director of developer products, said HTML5 work at Facebook isn’t going away. ‘I have an entire team of folks that are focused on HTML5,’ said Purdy. ‘And [mobile browser standards project] Ringmark continues to be important to us; we have a team of people working on that.’”

6. Timeline launches to the world

Zuck introduced Timeline to the world back in 2011, and we got up close and personal with Timeline’s design mastermind just a month later. So when the new look and features of Facebook personal profiles finally rolled out to the world in January of this year, we were more than ready to share the good news and great design with everyone.

The story: “‘We think that people are really going to like these,’ said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. ‘We wanted to design a place that you’re proud to call your home. It’s a completely new aesthetic for Facebook.’ This ‘new aesthetic’ is probably the biggest change you’ll note when you start using Timeline.”

5. Real friends, real Gifts

Facebook acquired gift-giving startup Karma in May, and it took the company just a few more months to roll out its own, fully integrated version of the service. Facebook Gifts was the social network’s way to let you give real gifts — wine, toys, cookies, even Uber car rides — to the ones you care about most. Not just sweet but also savvy, Gifts should be great for Facebook’s bottom line. And the service rolled out to all U.S. users just in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.

The story: “‘We think gifting is really a form of communication,” said Gifts creator and Karma founder Lee Linden. ‘We think people want to give gifts the moment they think of someone … and it may not always be convenient to pull our your purse or wallet and find your credit card right now.’”

4. Facebook Actions take over the web

With Actions, Facebook began its long-promise invasion of the web. The company has a vision that its buttons and social graph and commenting system — its very architecture — will someday soon be present on every website and mobile app imaginable. That your bank will use Facebook for your logins; that your actions and interactions on every website will find their way back to your Timeline — if you want them to. And in January, that invasion began in earnest.

The story: “Ideally, said Facebook exec Carl Sjogreen at tonight’s event, any app you find meaningful will be able to connect to Facebook in a way that’s more meaningful than just clicking a “Like” button or automating shares from that app to your Facebook wall — and that all your stories will be told, not through a universe of apps, but universally on Facebook and with a structured context.”

3. Instagram

Zuck & Co. bought a billion dollars’ worth (more or less) of hipster-ized photos with the surprising purchase of Instagram in April. As Facebook continued on its march toward total global domination and Internet ubiquity, it saw a couple things in this upstart mobile company. First, an emphasis on capturing and sharing images quickly and well that Facebook couldn’t duplicate. Second, a devoted (and huge) following of iPhone app fans. Both the users and the tech made this buy a one-of-a-kind for Facebook.

The story: “Instagram cofounder and CEO Kevin Systrom told VentureBeat when the Android app launched, ‘This release brings us closer to the idea that we can help every person on earth share their lives and discover the world through a series of beautiful images.’ Every person on Earth — did you notice that choice of wording? Can you think of any other apps aiming for a userbase of every person on earth? ‘Providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook, and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together,’ said Zuckerberg.”

2. One bill-i-on.

One billion users — not just registered users, but monthly active users. Aside from Google web search, we can’t think of a single web application that’s reached that mark. The truly interesting part: With Facebook’s focus on the developing world and feature phone access, the first billion is just the beginning.

The story: “‘Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling, and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life,’ Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. ‘I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world, too.’”

1. IPO

The shares were priced — conservatively, almost everyone in the Valley thought — at $38. The night before the initial public offering, Facebook employees celebrated at the HQ with a hackathon. On IPO day, Zuck rang the NASDAQ opening bell with a look of pride and elation on his face. But the same day, the company got slapped with a privacy lawsuit. Amid technical snafus from NASDAQ, the stock started to slide, taking other tech stocks with it.

Faceboook stock dipped as low as $17 in its tumultuous first months on the market, although it started clawing back some of those losses this fall, and it’s now trading at about $27 (as of this writing).  The most highly anticipated IPO of the decade left investors and onlookers — even Zuckerberg himself — disappointed, while the faithful (or optimistic) must wait and hope.

The story: “Analysts who had previously been bullish on Facebook are surprised. Early investors are disappointed. And social media enthusiasts are at least somewhat shocked. ‘I think it is a good long-term investment,’ said Mark Siegel, managing partner at Menlo Ventures. ‘The nature of the product itself makes it difficult to be displaced … I think it’s that kind of a core, bellwether company in a tech sector. It’s gotten there remarkably fast, but it’s there.’”

FB data by YCharts

Just in time for the gift-giving season, Facebook is rolling out its Gifts product to all U.S. Facebook users. Gifts was recently in a walled-garden beta; with the new rollout, all us American types will be able to shoot presents back and forth with a few simple mouse clicks.

Gifts is a really fun new feature for the social network. It lets you choose and send a real or digital gift to any f your friends, no address needed and no credit card required for checkout.

On the company blog, we read that Facebook is adding a new gift category, wine, and is also adding a new charitable cause to its lineup: Hurricane Sandy donations via the Robin Hood Foundation.

Facebook launched Gifts back in September 2012. From the outset, we realized it wasn’t just convenient; it was also darn good medicine for the company’s financials, since Facebook gets to keep a cut of the revenue in most non-charitable cases.

Here’s what Facebook Gifts looks like:

All the gifts you’ll see are hand-curated, making the app perfect for finding last-minute gifts for hard-to-buy-for friends. Gifts are sorted by category, such as gifts for kids, culinary gifts, household items, and wine. You can als buy virtual/digital goods such as iTunes gift cards.

Other gift options include donations to Blue Star Families, Girls Inc., Donor’s Choose, and now the Robin Hood Foundation’s Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

Facebook Gifts is the reborn version of Karma, a startup that launched back in February 2012 and was quickly acquired by Facebook. As Karma founder and current Facebook Gifts lead Lee Linden told VentureBeat in a recent visit at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, “We think gifting is really a form of communication,” Linden said. “We think people want to give gifts the moment they think of someone … and it may not always be convenient to pull our your purse or wallet and find your credit card right now.”

Image courtesy of jocic, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Steep me. Fill me. Remember me. Those messages greeted me upon opening my blue, tea-themed gift set, which Matt Brezina selected for me using his latest mobile-gifting venture called Sesame.

Brezina is CEO and co-founder of two-year-old Sincerely, makers of Postagram, Ink, and now the just-launched Sesame gifts service for sending perfectly paired and packaged boxes to friends and family members.

Source: Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat

Hello, Sesame!

Brezina sent me the “Afternoon Tea” set, which included four types of Zhi tea flavors, a For Life Tea Mug, a three-inch picture frame from Umbra, and a Postagram pop-out photo. The set is just one of 13 different varieties offered exclusively through the stunning Sesame mobile application available today on iPhone and iPad.

Sesame’s sets are priced at $29 or $49 a piece and are created for people who love everything from coffee and cocktails to snow and puppies. Each set includes products curated by tastemakers that are designed to delight. Delight they did.

Source: Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat

Afternoon Tea? Yes, please.

Brezina’s non-verbal message, conveyed through my lovely little set’s packaging and presentation, was that Sesame is Facebook Gifts done right. When we chatted about Sesame over the phone yesterday, his words communicated the same thing.

“What we wanted to make Sesame do is be the best experience that you could deliver in a box,” Brezina told me. “What we noticed missing in the market is the presentation of gifts. The biggest violator of what a gift should look like is the new Facebook Gifts. You receive one of those, you get a thing in the mail. It’s delivered in a brown box with packing peanuts and a packing slip crammed in there.”

Brezina can be so brazen, because, and you’ll have to excuse the extra enthusiasm, Sesame surprises in every way possible.

The iOS application is an inviting, photo-centric place to peruse sets and get excited about the goodies you’re about to send to loved ones. Bright pictures, creative text, and a fluid design make the application such a joy to use that I’ve already ordered a set for a close friend.

The satisfying experience extends, as it should, to each gift set, which is delivered in an impossible-to-miss bright, blue box. Open your Sesame box and you’ll find a “Hello” greeting card, a guide to what’s inside, matching gift tags, and products that go together like peanut butter and jelly.

“Ninety precent of the value of giving somebody a gift is the surprise and the presentation,” Brezina said.

“The ‘Snow Day!’ gift set includes snowball makers, an inner tube for going down the hill, and hot chocolate for when you get back inside.

‘Baby Playdate,’ which is good for kids ages one to two, includes a tugboat that’s great for pouring water over their head in the bath, a book, and a little cool, car for the kid to play with.”

Sesame seems to be only lacking in one way: a brand name. Brezina is a B-list Silicon Valley celebrity who has achieved some level of fame and fortune with his first startup, Xobni. With his postcard and greeting card business Sincerely, a two-year-old toddler, Brezina’s drummed up a moderate following of 1.2 million members and 200,000 paying customers. Getting Sesame, an infinitely riskier venture, off the ground isn’t going to be as easy as if Sincerely were, say, a retailer like Walmart. And this isn’t social software; Sesame comes with inventory and overhead nightmares included with each box.

“Problems where you’re willing to get your hands a little bit dirty are problems that scare away a lot of other entrepreneurs and create opportunity for a company,” Brezina said confidently. “We want to take on pains so our customers don’t have to.”

Sesame will get at least two more fresh gift sets before Christmas rolls around. Some sets will stick around for awhile; others will be swapped out to make room for boxes themed around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and other holidays.

Disclosure: I accepted the Sesame “Afternoon Tea” gift set, valued at $29, in order to review the product for this story.

Holiday shopping is so awful, it’s no wonder so many of us suck at it.

It’s not just the crowds and the cold-weather germs and the screaming toddlers in all the stores. It’s the endless consternation and analysis paralysis that comes with all holiday gift-giving, whether brick-and-mortar or click-based. With all that pressure, how can anyone blame you for sending out a cheese grater and a pair of socks to your 9-year-old niece?

Lucky for you, we’ve got your back. Here’s the easy, painless way out: online stores that offer a limited, hand-picked selection of the best gifts for everyone on your list. No Amazonian breadth of options to confuse you; no SkyMall-esque tackiness; no toddlers; no pressure.

Pick a site or two, settle in with your credit card, and you’ll be done with all your holiday shopping in an hour. Our list isn’t in any particular order, so just pick the sites that appeal to you most.

Wantful

Wantful is the best. It completely takes away all the pressure of choosing the perfect gift by letting your recipients choose the specific item themselves.

The Wantful product is a pretty, beautifully printed booklet containing 12 gift choices. You enter a price range and answer a couple simple questions about your loved one’s personality and interests; Wantful generates a list of great products for him or her. You choose the 12 you like best, and your work is done. It’s more personal (and better-looking) than a gift card, and it’s almost guaranteed to leave your loved ones smiling.

Etsy

Etsy ain’t just for humorous taxidermy and upcycled motor parts, folks. The handmade-and-vintage-focused online retailer is a village of micro-boutiques, and some will surface truly delightful, one-of-a-kind finds. You’ll find the expected assortment of rustic, retro, artsy tchotchkes, but you can also find beautifully designed iPad mini cases, hip laptop bags, and other thoroughly modern stuff.

The site’s holiday section is especially great if you’re looking for ornaments or kids’ toys to send as gifts.

Fab

We love us some Fab.com around here, and the e-tailer’s holiday shops leave nothing to be desired. Here, you’ll find discounted, unique gifts sorted by type of recipient — a shop for moms, a shop for pet lovers, etc.

Most important, the focus is on design with a capital D. Each collection is meticulously curated by robot elves with impeccable taste. We’ve been doing shopping on Fab for a while now, and we’ve yet to find anything but the most modern, elegant, and delightful items in its inventory. But shop fast; popular finds sell out fast.

Facebook Gifts

Facebook Gifts is pretty new and pretty dang convenient. The social network launched Gifts just a few weeks ago, and it’s been adding products and partners ever since. Here’s what we love about Gifts: 1) You can choose unique and elegant items tailored to your friends’ and family members’ tastes; 2) you don’t have to know their addresses or screw around with shipping details. Facebook takes care of the dirty work for you.

Just go to the profile page of the intended gift recipient, and above the box where you’d normally enter a message, click the Gift button. You’ll get a few gift recommendations off the bat, and in our experience, they’re usually spot-on.

ThinkGeek

If you have a nerd, scientist, graduate student, or die-hard Trekkie on your list, look no further than ThinkGeek. There’s a special menu (on the left-side column) for gifts sorted by price and gender, or you can look farther down the menu to explore gifts by interest.

You got a Mincraft fan on your list? They’ve got Minecraft foam swords. Lego freak? Check out their grown-up-enough Lego-shaped storage cubes. Star Wars guy? He’d get a kick out of the Han Solo Carbonite ice cube tray. It’s so nerdy, it’s delightfully embarrassing — or embarrassingly delightful, depending on your perspective.

Threadless

No one doesn’t wear T-shirts, right? But the Threadless holiday shop is ever so much more than just T shirts. You can find backpacks, stationery, gadget accessories, kitchen towels, and even pet gear in popular Threadless designs.

Of course, you’ll also find Threadless’ famous stash of funny, interesting, gorgeous, thought-provoking, and terribly cute T shirts to suit an infinite range of sizes and personal styles.

Svpply

Svpply is something different. It’s not a marketplace per se; rather, it’s a gorgeous gallery of collections, again curated by high-taste-profile robot elves, with items from a variety of online stores, for a variety of recipient types. Think of it as a Pinterest just for great products, but run by design Nazis rather than bored women in their mid-30s.

You can shop by type of person, type of object, or by keyword, or — cooler still, especially if you’re pressed for time — you can check out Svpply’s recommended local stores, sorted by city and even by neighborhood and selected based on the quality of products you’ll find inside.

Best Made Co.

Best Made Co. doesn’t have something for everyone on your list. What it does have is the sturdiest, simplest, and, well, best-made items for the butch and/or outdoorsy types in your life — your camping/hiking enthusiast parents, your back-to-nature sister-in-law, your would-be lumberjack best friend, or any other Ron Swanson you might know.

Best Made Co. is perhaps most famous for its iconic axes, but you can also find more practical items in its online store. The quality of workmanship is superb; each tumbler, map, and rucksack seems destined to last for roughly 900 years of adventure. And the brand’s simple, iconic logos and typefaces are a surefire hit with designers; check out the Best Made line of journals, pencils, and journal cases, or even its rustic Best Made Soap.

Gilt Gifts

If your intended gift recipient is more into conspicuous consumption, hey, we ain’t here to judge. Just head on over to Gilt Gifts, the home of all things super-luxe, for a look at the site’s holiday gift shop. You’ll find discounted items sorted by type and by price, each hand-picked from top-shelf brands in every shade, texture, and flavor of indulgence. There’s an entire section just for cashmere. Think about that.

Also, if you get stymied, you can check out the Gilt Live ticker to see what other savvy shoppers are picking out.

Donors Choose & Heifer International

For that super-rich retiree on your list who really does have everything (love you, Dad!), sometimes the best gift you can give is a heartwarming donation to a cause he or she really cares about.

Personal story time: My husband and I just got married, and since we’re both in our 30s and already have every imaginable household decor item and kitchen utensil imaginable, we asked our guests to make a donation and tell us about it as their gift to us. Reading those cards was amazing — our grandparents made a donation to an Alzheimer’s research foundation; a couple we love gave money to a first-responder organization for abused children. Knowing that our wedding itself had a positive impact on our community was the best collection of gifts we ever could have gotten.

Donors Choose and Heifer International are two safe choices. The former lets you choose an amount, then your recipient gets to pick a real classroom in need and donate toward a special project or item the kids need. Who doesn’t love supporting kids and education? Heifer is all about creating sustainable animal husbandry in the developing world. E.g., you buy a flock of chicks for a family, and the family then passes on some of the chicks to another family in need, creating a positive chain reaction in the community.

We’ve got a whole ‘nother list of great charities for holiday gift-giving, so check that out if you’d like more options.

Top image courtesy of Miriam Doerr, Shutterstock. All other images from the e-commerce websites mentioned in the article.

Facebook has added a major new partner to its Gifts program: Apple’s iTunes. The collab lets you send iTunes credit and recommendations through Facebook.

Facebook launched Gifts with a limited group of users back in late September, and opened it to “tens of millions” of users in the U.S. a few weeks ago. The pitch behind Gifts is easy: Facebook recommends high-quality items your friends might get a kick out of based on their Facebook Likes. You put in your credit card info and send a gift to a friend. That person confirms the gift, puts in their address, and the gift is headed off in the mail.

While Gifts has accumulated more than 100 partners, including Starbucks, Fab, Brookstone, Dean & Deluca, BabyGap, and 1-800-Flowers, the addition of Apple certainly doesn’t hurt. iTunes gift cards are a relatively popular item to give during the holidays and birthdays, so it makes sense to also give these cards through Facebook.

On top of giving iTunes credit to your friends, Facebook Gifts also lets you recommend albums, movies, games, and apps that you think they’d enjoy.

iTunes digital gifts through Facebook will be available in four different denominations: $10, $15, $25, and $50.

Photos via Facebook

NEW YORK CITY — Facebook has opened up its “Gifts” program, which lets users send and receive real-world presents, to “tens of millions in the United States,” the company said Thursday evening at a private event.

The company also used the event tonight to add Fab, Brookstone, Dean & Deluca, BabyGap, L’Occitane, Lindt, Random House, and others to its roster of partners that you can get Gifts from.

Facebook launched Gifts with a limited group of users back in late September. The idea is simple: Facebook knows your “likes,” so it’s able to recommend high-quality and hand-picked items you might get a kick out of. You just put in your credit card info and send a gift to a friend. That person confirms the gift, puts in their address, and the gift is headed his or her way.

Gifts was tested a bit a few weeks ago when Facebook collected charitable contributions for victims of Hurricane Sandy though the service. Facebook partnered with organizations such as the American Red Cross, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and others to make Gifts work for a good cause.

Not surprisingly, Gifts could be a big money maker for Facebook, which has struggled to monetize its 1 billion users.

Facebook made the announcement for Gifts tonight at a private event held (appropriately) at iconic New York toy store FAO Schwarz. Facebook’s Lee Linden, the mind behind Gifts was on hand to announce the news.

Take a look at the screen shots below to get a better idea of how the Gifts program works.

Two-foil gifts photo via iravgustin/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

One billion versus one million. The numbers don’t compare, and yet social gifting startup Sincerely believes its business, with just 1.2 million members, is safe from the potentially crushing widespread rollout of Facebook Gifts.

Two-year-old Sincerely makes applications like Postagram and Sincerely Ink that mail mobile photos as printed postcards or greeting cards. Today, just one day ahead of a major Facebook press event dedicated to gifts, the young startup revealed user numbers and traction for the first time, and it teased the pending release of its own digital gifts offering.

Sincerely has accumulated 1.2 million members across its entire network, which includes people using the aforementioned apps and the roughly 60 third-party iOS applications tapping its API for postcard printing, it announced today. The startup added that it has mailed cards to more than 800,000 unique households and has built up a database of 1.6 million physical mailing addresses.

Sincerely is also partnered with Facebook and powers the social network’s physical postcard experiment, though neither company is releasing numbers or data associated with that test.

The keepsake company, which refers to itself as a gifting network, next plans to launch its first real gifts app called Sesame in the coming weeks.

“Our strategy has been to start with the world’s simplest gift, a postcard, and expand from there,” CEO and co-founder Matt Brezina said. “Starting with this simple gift, we were able to grow a large network of users and mailing addresses. Now we can take the next step in building out the vision by allowing members to send other gifts.”

Brezina was tight-lipped on the particulars of the forthcoming Sesame app, though he did share a photo of a Sesame gift box (pictured above) and stressed that “beautiful packing” would play an important role in differentiating the mobile gifting app from others out there.

But shouldn’t Sincerely fear the imminent widespread release of Facebook’s social gifting initiative? The social network is currently testing a well-received and easy-to-use Gifts product that allows members to pick from a selection of physical gifts to mail to friends for birthdays and other occasions. Presumably, Facebook will, in an effort to make Gifts a desirable holiday destination, roll out the product to even more members (if not all 1 billion of them) at a press event scheduled for tomorrow at the FAO Schwarz toy store in New York.

“Facebook entering the market was the best thing that ever happened to us,” Brezina said. “Just like when Apple Cards launched on the iPhone, it boosted our business — consumers realized they could send cards from their phone. And I think long term, through a singular business focus on delivering gifts and cards, a focus on customer service … we will end up outshining Facebook in this space.”

We’ll see about that.

Sincerely has raised roughly $3 million in funding to the date. The San Francisco-based startup, Brezina said, is not focused on profitability at the moment and will raise more capital at some point.

Facebook’s iPhone app is now sporting features first seen in the company’s standalone Messenger app: now you can swipe left from anywhere inside the app to access your friends and instantly begin chatting.

With version 5.1 of Facebook’s iPhone app, which just launched today, you can also add friends to the top of your favorites list and easily share multiple photos. It also adds support for Facebook’s intriguing Gifts feature, which allows you to send real gifts to your friends.

It was only a matter of time before Facebook simplified chatting within its app, even though it’s now accomplishing the same thing as the Messenger application. The new chat interface also lets you easily see if your friends are active.

I haven’t had a chance to try out Facebook’s Gift service yet, but as VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell has explored in-depth, it’s a fascinating way for Facebook users to easily bridge their online and real-life personas. We can also thank Facebook’s speedy new app development cycle for seeing an update so quickly after Facebook completely revamped its iPhone app.

Photo via: Fiduz/Flickr

Facebook recently introduced two consumer-facing products designed to help it bring in more dough. One looks to be a money-making bonanza, while the other seems to have flop written all over it.

Nearly 45 percent of respondents in a survey fielded by analyst firm Sterne Agee said they would consider purchasing and sending physical gifts to friends through the newly released Facebook Gifts product.

Sterne Agee surveyed more than 750 U.S. Facebook members, ages 18 and up, across various age groups and income levels, with a near equal split between men and women. In a phone interview with VentureBeat, firm analyst Arvind Bhatia expressed confidence in the sample as representative of Facebook’s larger adult user base..

“We believe [Gifts] is an area of tremendous opportunity for Facebook,” Bhatia and fellow analyst Brett Strauser concluded in their report on the survey findings. “This will allow Facebook to diversify its revenues away from advertising and should lessen the impact of the shift towards mobile.”

A closer look at the findings shows that a majority of those willing to consider using Facebook Gifts said they were just “slightly likely” to do so. Bhatia believes, because the product is new and not available to all members, that the survey results are encouraging.

Meanwhile, just 16 percent of surveyed Facebook members said they would pay to promote one of their own status updates using the Promoted Posts for People feature, which is still in testing. Worse still, only 1.2 percent of the respondent pool indicated that they would be willing to pay more than $5 for the feature. The pay-to-promote option, which allows regular users to sponsor their own content, costs roughly $7 per status update.

“While we see a significant opportunity for Facebook Pages to promote posts, we view the move into promoted posts for personal profiles as small,” the analysts concluded. “While the margins will be high, we think it’s unlikely for the promoted personal posts to move the needle in the near term.”

Overall, the firm felt very encouraged by the survey results, which also found that Facebook users are indicating equal levels of engagement with the social network compared to their usage six months ago.

Additionally, 77 percent of respondents who indicated that they were Facebook mobile users said they were moderately to extremely satisfied with the mobile experience. The same percentage of people haven’t noticed ads on mobile, which is a sign that the sponsored units are subtle and effective on mobile, the firm concluded.

Bhatia did point me to one troubling finding: 61 percent of respondents said the relevance of Facebook ads was about the same as it was six months ago.

“This is a concern for advertisers,” he said. “They’re advertising on Facebook because they’re hoping to get more targeted ads.”

Facebook declined to comment on this story.

You can find a copy of the report below.

Facebook just launched Gifts, a new service that will let users spend real money to send real products to their real friends — and yes, Facebook is taking a cut of each gift’s price.

More than ever before, the company is going to be able to prove to investors that it has the power to move physical product: boxes on shelves. This isn’t ephemeral stuff, like online advertising or virtual Credits for virtual livestock. Facebook Gifts are as real as it gets, and reality is what the stock market is looking for from the Internet’s biggest success (and most disappointing IPO) in a decade.

What’s more, it makes Facebook a potential challenger to the likes of Amazon and newcomer/force of nature Fab.com.

In a chat with Lee Linden, the mind behind the new service, we got into the details behind the feel-good feature. Linden originally launched the service in February as Karma, a standalone app with the exact same products and features as Facebook Gifts. Facebook acquired Karma just a few months after that launch. While Karma originally combed Facebook for data on birthdays and big life events worthy of a good gift, Facebook Gifts plugged the app into some of the most basic parts of its user interface: the News Feed and your friends’ walls.

“Sharing these types of sentiments is just a core part of the experience, saying ‘thank you, congratulations,’” said Linden. “The company feels like it’s a natural extension of that. … It shouldn’t be so hard to send a gift to someone, and in a few years, this should be the way to send things to people.

“Also, gifting is a very unique form of e-commerce, and we thought there was a lot more innovation that could be going on there.”

What Facebook Gifts brings to the experience is unique. Now, you don’t have to know a friend’s mailing address to send a gift. Heck, you don’t even have to have your credit card handy. You can make a commitment and start a purchase anytime.

Altogether, it’s exactly the kind of seamless, speedbump-free transaction that drastically increases conversions and purchases totals.

Also, we’ve already seen what inclusion in the Facebook Timeline can do for app adoption. Websites and mobile apps that built Open Graph integrations for the Facebook Timeline saw huge boosts in new-user signups, user activity, and other metrics.

Would you like to give Om a gift?

One can only imagine how gift-giving will spread among friends, especially with Facebook-built gifting buttons and gift recommendations scattered strategically around the site.

We asked Linden if vendor partners were prepared for a potentially huge influx of new orders. “It’s a very small subset [of Gifts pilot users] to begin with, and they can limit the number of orders they get every day … and we do real-time inventory.” Facebook is also using the Gifts pilot period as a change to screen and select new vendors, who can apply online.

Still, the small size of the initial user group won’t stay small for long. Every Facebook user who receives a gift gets automatically added to the program. For example, I got on the “white list” for Gifts, making the feature available to me. Then I sent my first gift to my friend Dena. So now, Dena’s on the whitelist, too. If Dena then sends her mom a gift, then Mom also becomes a Gifts user. The viral mechanics are built into the program, and the size of the trial will likely balloon over the next few days and weeks until a general U.S. rollout including hundreds of millions of users and countless individual gifts.

But that’s just in the U.S.; Facebook is also thinking about a global launch. “That’s a huge challenge,” said Linden, referencing the need to hand-curate gifts for a truly universal range of income levels, languages, regional proclivities, and demographics.

“We’re starting with the US, and we’ll evaluate in the future what makes sense. Facebook is a global company … We have employees in many countries, and we already modify our services for other countries based on their needs and tastes.”

There’s a lot we don’t know about the business side of this yet. For gifts around the U.S. and perhaps someday around the world, Facebook is taking on significant overhead. In addition to selecting, photographing, and writing copy for each gift item that makes it into the program, the social network is also assuming all customer service duties for purchases made through the service. Facebook is processing payments, handling orders, and tracking inventory.

Also, Linden couldn’t reveal just how much of a percentage Facebook is taking of each gift’s total cost, but we’re sure it covers that overhead and then some. And we don’t know if, like daily deals systems, Facebook Gifts will be less than ideal in the long term for its merchants.

What we do know is that the revenue opportunities are huge. Let’s do some conservative, hypothetical math. If 50 million Facebook users (that’s one-third of U.S. Facebook users) each buy a $20 gift for a family member or friend five times a year, that adds up to $5 billion in gift purchases. Five percent of $5 billion is $250 million. So hypothetically and rather conservatively, Facebook could be getting an extra quarter of a billion dollars in revenue each year with Gifts.

Currently, analysts predict 2012 revenues for Facebook roughly between $4 billion and $5 billion. So in those terms, $250 million is a not insignificant chunk of change — and it’s related to brick-and-mortar products, a fact that old-school investors are sure to appreciate, especially as the winter gift-giving holidays roll around.

Not bad for an entirely new revenue stream that came out of the acquisition of a three-month-old mobile app.

Facebook has just launched Gifts, a new feature that will let you send and receive gifts — real-world products, not animated cattle — with your friends. You don’t need to know where they live or work; Facebook will take care of that for you.

The gifts are high-quality, hand-picked, and appropriate for all kinds of people (or furry friends) and occasions. Example: My friend Dena is as girlie as they come, lives in the San Francisco area, and owns a dog; Facebook recommends I send her chocolates, spa certificates, an Uber ride, or doggie treats.

Gifts appear as wrapped surprises on a friend’s Timeline or inbox until they’re opened. The recipient can then select the right size, color, or flavor and enter a shipping address. Gift notifications come with virtual cards, but the gift packaging itself is Facebook-branded, with special paper, wrapping, stickers, and a hard-copy notecard.

Here’s what Facebook Gifts looks like:

It all started when Lee Linden’s 16-person gift-giving startup, Karma, was acquired by Facebook four months ago. Karma basically became Facebook Gifts: Screenshot for screenshot, product for product, almost nothing has changed from the beautiful, thoughtful app Linden originally designed.

“They really share our vision and our mission, but there’s so much more scale here,” said Linden in a meeting on Facebook’s campus today. (Read more about how Gifts could help Facebook’s bottom line.)

In the new interface, Facebook will show big life events — weddings, engagements, births — in the top right corner of the news feed. Gifting options will also be available when you go to write on a friend’s wall.

“We can recommend products we think David or Meredith will like … and sent it as easily as you’d send a photo,” said Linden. Each Gift icon will show six recommendations instantly, all hand-reviewed, carefully curated, and likely to appeal to your friend’s specific tastes.

“We think gifting is really a form of communication,” Linden said. “We think people want to give gifts the moment they think of someone … and it may not always be convenient to pull our your purse or wallet and find your credit card right now.”

For that reason, Facebook will let you send your friend a notification of the gift right away; you can pay for it when it’s ready to be shipped. Credit cards can be stored for future use, just like they already are with Facebook Credits, the company’s virtual currency. Shipping addresses remain private to the recipient and will also be stored for future ease of use.

The gift vendors themselves are more than 100 in number; they range from companies like Starbucks and 1-800-Flowers to artisanal cupcakery Magnolia. Linden says they’re all thrilled to participate; we imagine they’ll see a Timeline Bump from the extra distribution and promotion just as apps have over the past few months.

“We have a team of merchandisers who are going to be looking at products one by one,” said Linden of Facebook’s ongoing curation process for each of the gifts. “Some of our partners have a hundred products, though. … In the coming weeks we’ll get more and more products, but they’ll still be curated.”

And of course, Facebook will keep a percentage of the transaction cost. After all, the company is doing photography, reviews, marketing, promotion, and even some inventory and order-tracking, as well as customer service.

Facebook is launching Gifts right now to a subset of U.S. users. If you receive a gift, you’ll automatically be added to the feature pilot. Gifts is available on desktop, Android, and mobile web; an iOS version is coming in a few weeks and will be part of the next scheduled app update.

We did a deeper dive on why Gifts is great for Facebook as a business; check it out for more insights from Linden.

Image courtesy of Jorge Salcedo, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Finding the perfect gift for a friend’s birthday can be tricky. Bday today launched the Bday Gift Finder, a Facebook app that scrapes your friends’ profiles to recommend the perfect presents. And the company has already secured the best gift of all for itself: $2 million in funding.

The Bday Gift Finder is a simple concept. After the app connects to your Facebook profile, it scans and analyzes your friend’s “likes” from top brand pages. You can click on a friend’s profile to see from which retailer, physical or online, they might like a gift. You can use the app to buy the gift, which actually comes in the form of a gift card. (The company doesn’t deliver it for you, you’ll have to go through the retailers website.)

Bday plans on making money through partnerships with retailers — ideally it will process the gift-card payment directly in Facebook and taking a percentage of the transaction. However, as of right now, the company is simply driving shoppers to the retailers, which may be the first step in proving its relevancy and landing those partnerships.

Numerous Facebook gifting apps have popped up recently, including Giftiki, which focuses on group gift giving based on friends’ gift requests. There are also some outside of Facebook, including GroupGifting which recently launched CoachGifter.com, a way for groups to easily buy gifts for their coaches.

The main differentiator for Bday Gift Finder appears to be its emphasis on sentiment. The company claims that it can tell if a “like” is either positive or negative. For example, if a friend is protesting a brands environmental regulations, then you wouldn’t want to send them a gift card for that brand, because they were “liking” a negative aspect of it. The company says it uses man-power to scan for these types of brand pages and does not include them.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based company, founded in 2011, secured the first round of funding from Tel-Ad Electronics Ltd., a technology company in Israel. The financing will be used to further expand Bday’s technology and product portfolio.