We're taking an underground, behind closed doors, and offline "staking" marketplace and bringing it online with more transparency through technology.
For eBay, this is a way to bring its retail technology to the offline experience.
Zynga says this partnerships represents a way for Zynga to bring its brand to the masses offline.
But although it has a goal to make it easier for people to bring offline family connections into the online world, it has yet to integrate a way for people to print and send physical photos to each other.
"They need to look at this through the eyes of the online customer and not try to bring the offline experience online," said Thomas Wurster, a senior vice president at the Boston Consulting Group, a management consulting firm.
And on the flip side, HouseFix wants to be a resource for these contractors as well, providing them with platform on which they can keep track of their own projects and bring their offline business online.
As Microsoft notes on the Tag site, the service was meant to help its users "bring [their] offline materials to life with a single, free source to develop, manage, and measure campaigns".
To bring the online offline is to cut it out and see its edges.
People worry that "online contact and networking might replace offline interactions, but offline is still so precious that we're creating ways to bring offline even more front and center," said S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the Media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University.
"It's really bringing the offline world, where you're drinking our products, and the online worlds together," said Carol Kruse, vice president for global interactive marketing at the Coca-Cola Company. There.com is not as famous as the virtual world Second Life, where companies like Adidas and Dell are advertising and selling products.
It took just hours for the Swiss bank, PostFinance, to be brought offline after announcing it was closing Assange's account.
