Next Generation Shopping

Yup, Facebook launched an API to the public yesterday. You can see more information and a list of calls to their database on their documentation page. TechCrunch and ProgrammableWeb both have coverage on it. There is already a Mashup created that was put together in 2 hours by the developer. It is called Facebook Friend Mapper, and guess what, you can see your friends as they are geographically located on Google Maps.

I tried it out quickly, and it is pretty interesting. As you can see from the screenshot below, most of my Facebook friends originate from the East Coast.

We’ll soon see what other developers come up with.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Facebook API, Facebook mashup, mashups, web 2.0

I have been keeping a close eye on mashup progression over time. Back in April 2006 (about 4 months ago) I had predicted that the total mashup count (on ProgrammableWeb) would break 1,000 mashups by the end of Summer 2006. The forecast was largely based on the current daily rate of mashups x my own estimation of acceleration due to new technologies and API releases. At the time of the prediction there were just under 600 mashups (about 580).

Recently John Musser reported 900 Mashups listed in his ProgrammableWeb database. As of today there are 907 mashups listed, with an average rate of 2.74 mashups per day. Back in April the rate hovered around the same amount (~ 2.73).

My estimation was that Mashups/Day would hit between 2.75/day over time. The date was April 11th, and it is now August 12th. So for roughly four months my estimation is as follows…

4 months x 30 days x 2.75 mash/day = 330 new mashups

580 existing mashups (April) + 330 estimated = ~910 total

This is about where we are at (907 actual). Summer ends roughly 40 days from now.

40 days x 2.75 mash/day = 110

910 + 110 = 1,020 mashups by end of Summer

At the current rate today, the number of mashups should indeed break 1,000. Unless of course all the mashup developers take an extended vacation. While my estimates are very close to target, the acceleration of mashup development is a tad bit lower than I originally anticipated. So I’m surprised that the aggregate average rate of Mashups/Day has not increased a bit more.

Well if you followed all that this far, I’ll tell you something that is actually relevant to the shopping industry… Shopping mashups are still holding a 7% stake of all mashups!

Technorati Tags: mashups, mashup, mashup growth, mashup development, programmable web, web 2.0, web2.0, Internet, The Internet, mashup industry

It is again a dreamy period of time for web entrepreneurs. As technology continues to improve, with information becoming ever more standardized and easily accessible, related costs continue to diminish the barriers to entry for new web startups to extreme minimal levels. It takes only certain knowledge and a few bucks to get started with a web business. These low barriers to entry are great for startups. Seeking out further capital can come later. But good investors know that this also means any startup with such low barriers is an easy target for competition. Furthermore, once the business is established, protecting it from competitors and newer innovations continues to grow harder.

“It’s a Good Idea” Syndrome
You have a “good idea” and you just want to do it. And in today’s world you CAN do it without huge investments. Hobbies continue to transform into legitimate businesses at an alarming rate. The bad part is the business model is now often being left behind. If you have a good idea, then by all means proceed with it. Just remember to establish what you want out of it. Is it an additional revenue stream, a quick addition to your resume, or something you see becoming your full time job? At least determine your goals before diving into something new.

Read more »

For those who don’t know too much about Mashup Camp, the guidelines serve as a great summary.

Mashup Camp is governed by a few essential principles:

• Whoever comes are the right people.
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
• Whenever it starts is the right time.
• When it is over, it is over.

Winners of the Speed Geeking

#1 - WeatherBonk

#2 - HotCaptcha (+ MeCommerce, something fishy here, perhaps they combined nickels)

There are a ton of pictures from the camp event found on FlickR.

And it looks like I got picked up a few places as well.

• In the background of a picture currently on the frontpage of the Mashup Camp blog, seen here, during a session about “Social Networking for Young People” run by a 16-year-old girl.
• Someone snapped a shot of me during Speed Geeking, where I was demoing SecretPrices.com.
  

Finally, I’d like to personally thank David Berlind and Doug Gold for organizing the event as well as a quick thanks to the sponsors who made it possible. By the way, the conference was free.

Ideas for next time:

• My first suggestion is to have a time slot allocated for developers to checkout each others mashups. The problem was that those of us who did Speed Geeking both days had no time to see the other developers’ mashups.
• Secondly, a session for Speed Geeking Best Practices… Generally how to market your mashup to people in the five minutes you have. Identifying what is the most important to cover, identifying what you want the audience to take from it, establishing contacts, etc.

Technorati Tags: mashup camp, mashup camp 2, mashup, web services

This was another packed day (07/13/2006) of sessions, not quite as many that I was directly interested in.

Here are the sessions I attended:

1. Speed Up Mashup Development
2. Social Networking for Young People (run by a 16 year old girl)
3. User Acquisition and Retention – Part 2

In the afternoon, another speed geeking session took place. I had great response to the demoing of SecretPrices again. I had some very enthusiastic women “bargain hunters” giving me some very positive feedback, as well as a developer saying it was “the best site idea” he had ever seen. By the time speed geeking was over I had ended up collecting enough wooden nickels (used to cast votes) to lock in around 5th or 6^th place. I edged out Nasser of Frucall by just a few nickels! But he had also allocated enough nickels to place and received a copy of Visual Studio 2005. I’d say this is probably one of the best (un)conferences I have attended thus far in my young career. I’m truly excited for the next one as it sounds like the event will take place on the East coast!

Technorati Tags: mashup camp 2, mashup camp, mashup

I’m currently at Mashup Camp 2 in Mountain View, CA.

To recap day one below are the sessions I attended:

1. User Acquisition and Retention (by Nasser Manesh – Frucall)
2. Google Checkout + Google AdWords (by Thomas Steiner – Google)
3. Monetization Models for Mashups (by Dave Nielsen – StrikeIron)
4. Voice-enabling mashups (by Nasser Manesh – Frucall)

Aside from attending the sessions, during Speed Geeking I demoed my own mashup website, SecretPrices.com, to almost a dozen groups of 5 within a very short hour.  It was great to get the site more exposure and quality feedback from fellow developers, API providers and others… but very tiring (to say the least).

Technorati Tags: mashup camp, mashupcamp2, frucall, google, strikeiron, secretprices.com, api

In a few short hours I’ll be hoping on a plane to sunny Mountain View, California. There I will attend the two day “Mashup Camp 2″. It should be a great networking opportunity, learning experience, and most important of all, a lot of fun! As it is an “unconference” the agenda is setup by those who attend, developers being the first priority… So I am really not sure what to expect. There is already a ton of great discussion ideas, but I’m sure there are many more to come.

I definitely plan on attending the Monetization Models for Mashups discussion proposed by Dave Nielsen of StrikeIron (who I previously met at the eBay Developers Conference), as I see this as a necessary. Of course if I go into it and the only thing written on the whiteboard is “Google AdSense”, I’m leaving the room immediately! Other than that I will probably wing it and decide once the ideas are more solidified.

To learn about Mashup Camp, check out the official Mashup Camp homepage.

For Mashup Camp coverage, stay tuned to the Mashup Camp Blog, as well as John Musser’s ProgrammableWeb Blog.

Don’t know what a Mashup is? It’s ok! Check out the Mashup definition found at Wikipedia.

Technorati Tags: mashup, API, web services, mashup camp

The Jellyfish website, a shopping comparison engine that integrates a “cashback” feature for every store listed, officially launched today. At first glance the site looks very clean-cut, and load-time is generally fast.

The search engine seems to need a bit of work. A search for “Apple iPod 60 GB” shows no results, while “Apple 60GB iPod” lists some relevant results.

When you do finally reach the product page, it has a very nice setup. Upon selecting a merchant, the right-hand side of the page changes to give a very nice overview of all the pricing information.

It makes you feel almost like you are making the actual purchase (not sure if thats a good thing or not!).

Look for a followup to this post when I have spent sometime fooling with the site.

Until then you can read their official press release here.

Technorati Tags: jellyfish, jellyfish.com, web 2.0, shopping comparison, comparison shopping engine, cashback

Some recent activity in the world of “V-Commerce” has gained my attention. The fact is I have been intrigued by eBay’s acquistion of Skype for some time now… This along with some recent news in the “voice commerce” sector, have both played a factor in my decision to write an entry about the emergence in v-commerce marketplaces.

During eBay DevCon 2006, I attended a couple sessions regarding Skype and the Skype API. One example presented was a web application called JyvePro, which serves as a marketplace for experts. JyvePro is a nice example of Skype API usage, but is still in Beta so the user community is rather small. JyvePro allows expert consultants to connect with clients by voice and takes care of the billing for them.

How does it work?
Here are the steps from the How To section of the JyvePro site:

1. Download JyvePro
2. Setup your account to receive funds
3. Take Skype calls from potential Clients
4. Negotiate your price
5. Switch a regular Skype call to a paying Skype call on the fly
6. Market yourself and get more calls
7. Flexible payment options to cater to all types of professionals and service providers.

A more established player that seems to be a fairly direct competitor to JyvePro is Ingenio’s Ether. While this has nothing to do with the Skype API to my knowledge, an announcement yesterday that Ingenio is out of Beta did grab my attention. Since there has been signficant coverage of it around the net I won’t go into the details. Here are a couple highlights though:

“It creates a range of interesting e-commerce opportunities for experts who sell advice rather than products.”

A very interesting concept pointed out by Michael Arrington, who also covered the Ether launch on his TechCrunch blog yesterday.

“… all Ingenio applications capitalize on the voice-based commerce (v-commerce) opportunity by turning a phone call into a revenue-generating event” the press release states.

Another interesting concept in terms of generating ROI from such things as a blog.

You can read more about Ether’s launch, including the press release, from Greg Sterling’s coverage on the Search Engine Journal blog. Pete Cashmore also covered the official Ether release with some nice screenshots, but what is more interesting is that he also utilizes the service. A real world example of Ether in action can be seen on the Mashable website where you can arrange a call with Pete. He mainly offers “Web 2.0” consulting services, amongst others. These types of services could potentially pave the way for the future of consultanting, or at least as another avenue for gaining new clients.

v-commerce; Voice commerce is transacting using Internet communications. The voice traffic is carried over an Internet connection using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology and this enables commercial transactions to take place using voice and an Internet connection.

Also called: Voice Commerce, Voice-enhanced Electronic Commerce, and voice-based commerce.

Technorati Tags: v-commerce, voice commerce, skype api, skype, ebay, ether, jyve pro, web 2.0

My brother thoroughly enjoys picking apart the flaws of the Internet. We often don’t really see eye-to-eye on a wide-range of topics, but this time he has written a piece that has caught my attention for sure. It is on the pitfalls of microformats being used in conjunction with web services incorrectly, or should I say what is seemingly unethical. Straight from the DisconnectTheDots blog:

“It appears that this deals site is using hReview markup in their product pages and getting indexed in the Reviews section of Technorati’s fairly new Microformats Search. I would say that this looks like quite a nice site normally. Unfortunately, the issue is that they use the Amazon.com API for data (as do many) and the way they’ve marked it up, all they do is round up Amazon’s average rating for the product, use the title of the product to markup the name (item fn), attempt to have the amazon user reviews in the “description” field, sneak in the “type” field of product with an abbr near the bottom of the page, and have a link that just links back to Dealazon’s own product page” (Read Full Entry)

So basically, my take from his entry, and from what I see is that Dealazon is submitting Amazon user reviews to Technorati and passing them as their own? (See example here) Why? Free traffic I assume. Not sure if telling people about this is a good idea or not since most will do about anything to get more traffic these days! I knew that this could be done a while ago. Tech.yahoo.com uses its own web services and marks up user reviews in hReview format… So what is to stop other sites from doing the same?

Its tempting to me to test this and see what kind of traffic is gained from this type of activity. However, Shopping.com makes you markup the Epinions reviews in a certain fashion. Amazon and Yahoo! may eventually want to follow this method too.

The trouble in doing this is duplicate content being submitted to aggregators. Duplicate content with no value-added is looked down upon by the majority of the Internet community and rightly so. It is not practical and not effeicient.

So those of you interested in structured blogging, I’ll let you decide. Is this an ethical practice for an affiliate or should the link always be back to the main review source?

Technorati Tags: technorati, pingerati, dealazon, reviews, hreviews, microformats, structured blogging, dulicate content, amazon, web services