Did The Bubble Just Burst?
On Oct 25th, 2005 Jux2 was sold on eBay for over $100,000.
On Aug 11th, 2006 Yoosi.com was sold on eBay for over $5,000.
Yes, Jux 2 has much higher traffic (Alexaholic). But, my god, Yoosi has tons more technology than jux2...
Yoosi Technology = 20X of Jux2 in manhours to develop (I’m guessing but I dont think I’m off that much)
Jux2 traffic(in Oct 2005) = 5x of Yoosi (today)
that doesnt compute to 20x difference in valuation in favor of jux2 ...
(BTW, noticed jux2’s pageview really took off, anyone know why?)
Online Shopping Swarm
Its been a while I posted an idea online ... I guess my brain has been on execution mode lately. So here goes the setup ...
There are 3 major themes happening on line today:
First one is obvious ... the online world has moved quickly from replicating the one-to-many relationships in the offline world to quickly creating its own interaction models through the many-to-many model. In many ways, web 2.0 is the lichpin of the explosion of the movement.
Broadcast -> Peer Participation
Second is the driven by the fact that more people are online and those that are online are spending more and more time on rather than off. What this does is create a critical mass of people online doing EXACTLY the same activity at EXACTLY the same time. This has enable activities such as MMOG, BitTorrent, and various site centric chat features to gain value and critical mass. When the web was first “invented” most of its applications are asynchronous (email, forums), it quickly evolved to realtime (IM, Chatrooms), and now is going through an exponential participation and fragmentation phase.
Asynchronous -> Realtime -> Swarm (to borrow a phrase from bittorrent)
Lastly/Thirdly, ebay was the first to create the p2p transaction model for e-commerce; but missed out (until now) the p2p nature of online shopping between buyers. There are many many social shopping bookmarking sites out there, Yahoo Shoposphere, Wist, MintPages, something Hive?, and Kaboodle etc . All of them are asynchronous. (There is a good reason ofcourse - they want natural search traffic). But what we know through reams and reams of research with consumers is that what makes people like shopping offline vs. online (ie walk the mall on weekends for no particular reason/window shop) is that online shopping has been tainted by search and thus lacks a social/group aspect to its experience. (e-commerce growth in general is slowing because people still spend majority of their wallet offline.) You shop online when you NEED something, you shop offline when you WANT something. Women(and many men) go shopping with their friends at the mall as much as for buying a new pair of jeans themself as for eachother’s company.
Search to buy -> Browse to buy -> Share to buy
Long setup for an simple (still flawed) idea ... the world need a IM/Skype plug-in that allows people to co-browse and co-navigate online shopping destinations. (If x-fire can do this for gaming, someone can do this for shopping) Invite friends or join an existing “raid” (borrowing from WoW). Instead of emailing friends cool stuff or deals asynchronously, the activity could be done in real time. The interactions could come form discussions (is this vacuum really the best, other recommendations?) as well as discoveries (look at what I found ... great for eBay). It should allow co-shoppers to diverge from eachother’s path but still show what the other people in the group is looking at so they can converge again. The business model is simple ... advertising/affiliate program ... in the short term. But also, the ability to create somesort of wallet could be huge (security, group discount etc). I can see people do this during work hours :) as another incremental entertainment above just IM between friends. There still some scalability issues (not techincal but usability) I havent thought through ... but I know the problem exists and this could potentially be one solution.