LetsBuyIt Blog

I have been to the Film Festival in Cannes last week: sun, great movies and stars!

I’ve been really amazed by the increasing links there are between those kind of happenings and the web usages.

Appart from of course the real-time information and images broadcasting of the event itself - you can also see extracts from selected movies - two main trends are to be highlited:

• MySpace sponsored one of the beach in partnsership with Smiley: a very nice space with a stage, where artists, actors, producers could meet and some events like movie projection or music concerts were displayed. The atmosphere and events were also relayed on the web.
• I have met a lot of producers and directors who had planned physical meetings in Cannes through networks like aSmallWorld and.. really met and had instersting and very professional meetings!

The 60th Cannes Film Festival has really been a proof that social networking is really becoming an efficient business media, at least in certain industries..

Found that on the Internet

Comments ?

Too busy reading Founders at work to blog right now…

The Google search results landscape has forever changed. Yes, this is a huge deal. With the launch of Google Universal Search, you will see a totally different approach to search results that you have never seen before.

You’ve compared feature lists and read all the consumer reviews. You’ve narrowed your choices to one or two models. Now you wonder: Who carries this product near me? Is it on sale?

You’ll find the answers at Krillion, but that’s for the US.

Krillion is the leader in actionable local search; local search that results in consumers taking action to buy. Krillion’s mission is to transform the way ready-to-buy consumers find and buy national brands, locally. Based on its unique Krillion Localization Engine, Krillion search results are more accurate than any local search information available on the Internet. Krillion, founded in February 2006, is funded by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

You have a similar service for the UK with Ask The Local.

What about the rest of Europe?

Of course LetsBuyIt studied this trend closely … stay tuned

Emmanuel strongly recommended me to read this great book (”Ils ont réussi leur startup” written by Julien Codorniou and Cyrille de Lasteyrie) about Kelkoo’s success story.

I just finished reading it and I have to admit Emmanuel was right. It provides a great overview on the whole Kelkoo’s story.

A MUST READ for any web-entrepreneur.

Have you ever walked down the street and thought of an item you wanted to buy or simply wondered what store nearest to you had the latest hot new product?

Slifter - a free cell phone application - gives you the information you need, such as:

• How much is it?
• Where is the nearest store where I can buy it?
• Is it in stock?
• How do I get there?

All this, plus product images and maps to nearby stores. Slifter also lets you text products to friends and family so they can add them to their Slifter shopping lists. Slifter works on almost any mobile device including nearly all cell phones (with data services), Treos, Blackberries as well as any computer with an internet connection.

GPShopper website : http://www.gpshopper.com

Get ready for the new commerce generation!

In the edition of the month of Capital (a french business magazine), Kelkoo has been strongly criticized for not beeing fully trustable, for several reasons :

• Kelkoo does not show lowest prices first (requiring users to click on “Sort by price”)
• Kelkoo does only show results of affiliated partners, eliminating small players who don’t have enough money to get on Kelkoo
• Kelkoo belongs to Yahoo! and therefore isn’t fully independant

Do you think it’s an issue for you as a user?

Boo.com is back but everything has changed. The new concept of boo.com was developed on the belief that the online travel experience is frustrating.

Boo.com makes the whole process of planning a trip much easier and lets you do it all on one site. You can search available accommodation, filter out places that you don’t like and then either book direct with the supplier or with boo - boo doesn’t mind as long as you get the right place.

boo launched the portal with one million reviews from real people. They have booked and stayed with them in the past. Simple. Now all you need to do is decide where you’d like to go.

“A virtual representation of a person or a person’s interactions with others in a virtual environment, conveying a sense of someone’s presence (known as telepresence) by providing the location (position and orientation) and identity; examples include the graphical human figure model, the talking head, and the real-time reproduction of a three-dimesional human image”.

Apart from the virtual worlds’ trend such as Second Life I was talking about, Avatars seem to be the other fashion feature of the Internet (which is actually used a lot in virtual worlds).
A lot of websites offer users to create their own avatars from a predefined model: change clothes and small physical specificities like hair or eye color for example. Those avatars can be used in the website where they have been created, in addition with community features and also integrated in a virtual world like Zwinky and its new Zwinktopia:

From Avatars: www.zwinky.com

To Virtual World integration:

A lot of websites offering avatar creation now make this service paying, and people can then use their own customized avatars on their personal websites, on eBay, or on any other support.

What I couldn’t find during my researches was one offering to create an avatar from your own image or picture.. Any idea?