V-Commerce for Service-based Marketplaces
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:
- Download JyvePro
- Setup your account to receive funds
- Take Skype calls from potential Clients
- Negotiate your price
- Switch a regular Skype call to a paying Skype call on the fly
- Market yourself and get more calls
- 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
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Not to underestimate Skype/Ebay, but from what I remember of the Jyve suite of tools introduced to the Skype community a while back by a persistent developer, I don’t think they were popular or well rated. I believe there were a lot of issues and a lot of disinterest in general. Then again, this is a new service so it just depends on if they can iron out the bugs I guess.
Sooo… these apps are for voip phone-sex hotlines? Sorry, just couldn’t resist. Really, I tried.
Ja
ps. I’d like to hear your take on Yahoo’s full adoption of Microformats and what it could mean to affiliates and those using Yahoo’s apis.