Data & Analytics

Crowdsourced grocery delivery provider Instacart is expanding its same day and one-hour service to new markets after receiving $44 million in funding from some big name Silicon Valley investors.

Amazon’s Appstore selection has nearly tripled in the past year and developers continue to report strong monetization from the apps they offer in the store.

The Amazon Appstore now has more than 240,000 apps and games, and is available in nearly 200 countries and on a multitude of devices. Additionally, Amazon Coins have become widely popular, according to the online giant — customers have spent hundreds of millions of Amazon Coins on apps, games and in-app items, it said.

New York -- Instacart, the same-day grocery delivery service, has raised $44 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The San Francisco startup currently operates in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and seven other U.S. cities. With its new funding, it Instacart expects to expand into 17 cities by the end of 2014.

Montreal – Raymark is releasing a new mobile retail store operations solution called Mosaic Inventory Management. The new solution complements the suite of Raymark Mosaic retail enterprise applications with tools for end-to-end management and optimization of inventory from a handheld device, including support for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Quill Ideas is the name of a new crowdsourcing platform the online division of Staples launched for customers and employees to share ideas in new and interesting ways.

Quill.com, acquired by Staples in 1998, is calling Quill Ideas an online-innovation community that is designed to solicit and implement ideas, review and rank them based on various protocols and then implement those that score the highest. A soft launch that began two weeks ago has already garnered more than 13,000 interactions made up of ideas, votes and comments, according to the company.

New Delhi, India – Wal-Mart Stores In. has reportedly opened an e-commerce site to serve the small retailers that shop at its members-only cash-and-carry stores in India. According to Bloomberg, Wal-Mart is piloting the site for small retailers located in the cities of Hyderabad and Lucknow, with full rollout across India planned in January 2015.

Pitney Bowes has launched Mailstream On Demand — a tool designed to give small and midsize businesses an outsourced solution to better manage their transactional document design, production and delivery across physical and digital channels.

Ann Arbor, Mich. -- Domino's Pizza, in conjunction with Nuance Communications, is launching voice ordering for its iPhone and Android apps.