Santa-Clara based Dealplumber, which went live yesterday, is a new service from the makers of iNods. The site has been in development for six months, and aims to make it easy to find and share deals using a community-based approach. It’s a fairly impressive play.

If you’re looking to save money on a web-based purchase, you can search Dealplumber to find coupon codes. For a new site, the database seems to be fairly large - especially when it comes to popular products like cameras and MP3 players. When you see an offer you like, you can save it in your Dealplumber account and come back to it later. And if you don’t have anything in particular you want to buy, you can browse the latest deals, the latest coupons and the deals that are about to expire.

What’s more, you can post deals to Dealplumber and make money - just provide your affiliate ID when you submit a coupon. What’s great about this model is that everyone has a motivation to join in: consumers are always interested in saving money, and submitters are incentivized by the opportunity to earn affiliate commissions. That’s a win-win. I expect Dealplumber itself will also make money from affiliate relationships. The only risk is that users will try to upload spam offers in bulk, but Dealplumber claims there are ways to prevent this - they don’t allow xml uploads, for instance.

The biggest weaknesses with iNods (which hasn’t really taken off) were the sparse design and distinct lack of social features. Dealplumber is doing much, much better here - you can subscribe to deals via RSS or email and get Dealplumber widgets, badges and banners for your blog or webpage. They’ve also had the sense to add Digg and del.icio.us buttons to the front page, helping to retain those visitors who would normally visit once and never return. Additionally, they’re planning to roll out an API - if they include some kind of revenue sharing deal with the developer, then we could see plenty of Dealplumber mashups pushing traffic back to the site.

The social shopping space is a fairly active one - RightCart, MyPickList, WhatsBuzzing, ShopWiki, Zlio, Kaboodle, Wists, Crowdstorm, Pepperjam and Jellyfish are just some of the new entrants. When it comes to finding deals, there’s also a choice of players - Dealbundle, Dealtagger and Clipfire (”Digg for deals”) are among the contenders. However, I think Dealplumber has done a good job in a number of ways: it fulfils a real need, it’s simply designed and they’re leveraging the community to help with promotion. It’s not a new idea by any means, but I think the execution is commendable.

Habbo Hotel’s parent company, Sulake Corporation, announced a 6 million Euro investment today. The funding comes from Movida Group (a joint venture between SoftBank and Asian Groove). The company, which is based in Finland, will use the money to create merchandise and mobile games for the East Asian market. They’ve also revealed some fairly impressive stats: 53 million Habbo characters have been created, and they have 7 million unique users per month. The company launched in 2000 and has more than doubled its revenues every year. Sulake now employs 270 people.

As mentioned previously, Habbo Hotel is a virtual world similar to Cyworld, Hive7 and Gaia Online. It’s extremely popular with pre-teens, and makes money by charging micropayments for virtual items - these include furniture for your room and gifts for your friends. The future looks extremely bright for these character-based communities: as mobile payments become more popular, Habbo could really move to the next level.

[via AC]

MommyBuzz, which launched last week, is a new social network for moms. Users can create profiles, post photos, join clubs, write blog entries and create classified ads. There’s also a tiered friends system: users add their immediate friends, then use the system to find friends of friends - all the way down to the “fourth level”. Profiles can be made public or private, and public profiles show up in search results. Additionally, there’s an on-site instant messenger - you can see the online/offline status of other members and send them an IM.