YoYo – YoYo.com is the toy store you’ve wished for – helping you save the day with last-minute birthday gifts, pointing you to toys that teach and entertain and giving you ways to strategically tackle your holiday gift list.

Farmingo – Farmigo’s mission is to enable households across the country to receive fresh, wholesome food direct from local farms and producers delivered direct to convenient pick-up locations. Farmigo provides an online marketplace for consumers to find, select, and receive fresh food. Through group buying dynamics and subscription pricing, consumers attain affordable prices for organic food. Each farm and producer listed in the marketplace receives an Internet based logistics management system to track harvest, packing, routes, and member payment.

Rare Bird Finds – Rare Bird Finds is a magazine chock full of unique and unusual shopping finds.

Of a Kind – Each week, Of a Kind select one designer to feature on the site. They share a series of stories about that designer—inspirations, personal life, taste, training, you name it—along with a limited-edition piece designed exclusively for Of a Kind.

Editions range in size from five to 50 pieces, and each piece comes with a certificate of authenticity that’s signed and numbered by the designer. You can display it proudly wherever you wish.

StyleCaster – StyleCaster is a leading platform that creates and curates the best content from across women’s lifestyle into a comprehensive style experience. They are committed to bringing you the most innovative experience that streamlines the process of style discovery by combining premium content, discussion through an engaged community and the seamless ability to purchase through e-commerce into one exciting platform.

Singer22 – Claiming to be the headquarters for the latest in fashion on Long Island’s North Shore, Singer22 is a powerful retailer store that offers top fashion brands along lesser known yet celebrity-worn clothes. And I’m pretty sure their customer audience has long expanded from Long Island to the entire country.

Foodzie – We keep hearing how supporting our local economy -local businesses- is a beneficial way to minimize global warming and to help small businesses rid of the hardships of globalization. I’m a firm believer in buying produce at your nearest farmers market rather than at corporate chain store supermarkets. Foodzie is yet another small business supporter, connecting you with numerous small scale food producers and growers.

At Foodzie you can find cool gifts any foody will love, but it’s also the perfect place for you to sell your artisan food as well. It’s “an online marketplace where you can discover and buy food directly from small passionate food producers and growers.” Search for food goodies by category, gift, region or brand. I think I just found the perfect gift for my father’s B-Day: The Bourbon Sauce Trifecta Gift Set, a perfect match for my BBQ-obsessed dad!

Quirky – Now these guys mean business. Quirky offers a mighty innovative platform where anyone from the global online community can pitch an idea for a practical, life-ameliorating invention, or a radical improvement of an existing product. Quirky handles the actual product development and marketing aspects, which pushes forward amazing ideas and makes them a solid, retailer-sold reality.

Quirky’s framework is so brilliant, they produce a new product every few days, and users are invited to take an active part in products’ development. Depending on their level of participation, contributing community members earn hard cash from the products’ sales in stores. Here’s more on how Quirky works.

My favorite part of Quirky? The Shop. It’s where you can buy many of Quirky’s manufactured products that make life so much easier, induced by people like you and me who shared their great idea. That’s where I found these two amazing products. The first is Weigh To Go, a multi-functional travel accessory whose compact form packs a digital scale, identification tag, and built-in lock to prevent theft. Available for presale ($33).

The second cool gadget I’d like to share is called Splash Stacks, a cushioned mat set that is easy on your knees when bathing a baby or a pet in the tub. Instead of kneeling on hard bathroom floor tiles Splash Stacks is the perfect alternative ($39.99). This product is in production.

BookDaily – Where do you go to learn about new interesting  books? NY Times’ bestsellers list? That’s a good start. But there’s now an even better way to tap into book discovery via BookDaily.

BookDaily lets you find great reads by giving you access to the entire first chapter of each featured book (over 80,000 titles!) via email. The obvious added value is that you can actually ‘taste’ the book before deciding to buy it. Sign up to start exploring the books on 1st chapter-basis, and get regular updates on your preferred genres and publishers. The BookDaily platform also offers book reviews by other readers like you, and weekly columns from credible sources.

When it comes to books, I’m more of a sci-fi fan, and I gave BookDaily a try to see if they have my personal must read for August, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Sure enough, I found it and was immediately offered to read the first chapter. Why, thank you very much!

TaskRabbit – Our hectic weeks these days don’t leave much time for those small errands we need to do, and we end up putting those off for the weekend, right? No more. TaskRabbit is a sweet community of reliable runners who willingly (and for a reasonable fee of course) run your errands, deliver supermarket purchases or whatever else you need done, for you.

TaskRabbit works by matching task posts and background-checked runners able and ready to do the task. When posting a task, the user will specify how much he or she is willing to pay for it, and commits to that sum. This way, runners know beforehand what’s the compensation, and the system will make sure the runner is paid once the task is closed (complete) by its creator. Want to meet some of the TaskRabbit runners? See them here.

The TaskRabbit service is currently offered in Boston, NYC, Orange County CA, San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, although more locations will be available soon including Chicago, Portland and Seattle. Want to become a TaskRabbit runner yourself? Click here. TaskRabbit is a terrific idea – we loved it!

Groupon Getaways – If you’re a happy Groupon camper and love their daily deals, you’ll love the company’s new collaboration with Expedia, Groupon Getaways.

Wag – Aside from its beautifully designed and user-friendly interface, Wag.com is an all-in-one pet supply store you should visit, whether you’re the proud parent of a dog, a cat, a parrot, a rabbit or a snake. Wag’s huge product collection has everything you and your pet could possibly need, whether it’s toys, medications, bedding or furniture.

Wag.com offers free shipping for all orders above $49 (US territories), and even if you don’t reach that amount, the store offers fast delivery of up to two business days. I’ve already explored Wag and I want to buy its entire cat department. And if you are like me, you, too, will be impressed to find a commendable eco-friendly product section on Wag.com.