LetsBuyIt Blog

According to the German Newspaper Sueddeutsche.de, Swiss scientists Riley Crane and Didier Sornette from the Technical University “Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule” (ETH) they are about to finalise a mathematical formula that can predict the success of an online video. Apparently there are comparative viewing habits and viral effects of videos that can be measured and expressed similar to earthquakes. It would be quite phenomenal if that was the case because then it would it be possible to improve videos making!

A quick note on the side: apparently HULU, the free video portal specialised on featured movies and series, is catching up with YouTube on the advertising revenue and might overtake YouTube in 2009. This would be quite outstanding because YouTube has almost “83m unique viewers in the US in September, compared to Hulu’s 6m, according to market researcher Nielsen,” as stated in the Financial Times. At the same time, Hulu is online available in the USA and YouTube internationally.

The French version of LetsBuyIt.com is developing rapidly and is now equipped with the brand new social function of SHARING:

Get informed! Check out the latest deals and new shopping ideas simply by meeting the other members!

When users create their accounts on LetsBuyIt.fr, with one click they receive access to a variety of tools created to simplify their shopping experience (search history, wishlists, contributions, etc.) and they automatically join the community of LetsBuyIt members.

Members have access to the shopping knowledge of an entire community. On a member profile, you can find photos, personal information, shopping preferences and the newest comments and videos the member has posted. By adjusting the privacy settings, each member can personalize their account and choose the information they want available to the public. If a member wishes to preserve his/her private sphere, he/she can individually change the privacy settings under “Share” and chose what information can be accessed by the others.

Everybody decides for himself what information they wish to share with the LetsBuyIt Community!

Interested in joining the LetsBuyIt Community? Get ready because the English version of LetsBuyIt is currently under construction! Stay tuned by registering on our homepage: http://www.letsbuyit.co.uk/

After having been watching closely the development of Zilok, the US.American and European market-leader for renting anything C2C, we have just come across a similar concept, which started in Japan, called Sharemo. Zilok is the first address for those people who don’t want to throw something away but would rather rent it to somebody instead.

Sharemo, a company of Enigmo, however has taken a different approach and created a mobile-site where people can just give away, rent, share for free and swap (Swap N’Go) anything that they don’t want to simply throw away until somebody wants to keep that product. The difference to Zilok is that on Sharemo everything is for free and this idealistic idea is what they call “Sharing Economy”. Don’t hesitate to enlighten us on the business model, which we haven’t been able to figure out yet.

According to the comments on Techcrunch this would not work everywhere because it demands a lot of trust but nobody could imagine either that in Scandinavia you find unmanned-stands of strawberries and you throw in money on good faith, similar to the newspaper boxes in Germany, where you put the money in a box and take the newspaper yourself. How about the fact that in Scandinavia and Germany you don’t have to pass machines to check your metro and subway tickets, which is also unimaginable in most other countries!!?? Very interesting and we definitely keep an eye out for those sites!

Source: Screenshot Sharemo

Noticed the QR Code?

In addition to the social community HalloHund, which we had talked about in a previous article, we have discovered a new and English network for dog-lovers called Doggyspace. According to several sources (netzzeitung, msnbc, time) there are about 700 dogs registered with a goal of 2 millions registered dogs (or owners that behave like their dogs) by the end of the year (we can only find 551 doggies while looking at openly accessable “doggy friends“). Best of luck to Levi Thornton, the founder, for that venture and for those that want to share the problems, experiences and joy of their dogs with others definitely should keep an eye out for doggyspace.com

In the last few months we have come across some start-ups that focus on contracts and legal templates, which offer platforms to share, edit, adapt and exchange contracts. The inspiration for the article was originally the mulitilingual OECD Privacy Policy Generator, which generates your individual Privacy Policy after going through a long questionnaire with you. The result is quite minimalistic but quite a good starting point for further research.

However then we have a discovered a start-up last year, which is called Tractis. This a portal where you can share and discuss your contracts or find contracts of all sorts, which you can than adapt to your needs. You can gather your “contracts online and use them offline” they say, the applicability however is questionable because I doubt that contracts can be standardised (except maybe Non-Disclosure Agreements or Power of Attorneys) and be fully useful but again it is a good starting point.

Now we have come across a recently launched start-up in Germany, which is called “Vertrag-tauschen.de” or translated “contract-exchange”. This is an interesting portal, which will definitely create an interesting discussion, because there you can offer to exchange, sell or buy transferable contracts. Most probably all of us have had problems with lock-in periods for contracts, be it with mobile phones, gyms, club subscriptions, leases, or even hosting contracts. Therefore we consider this portal to have a lot of potential on the C2C market. Maybe this is the place to get rid of your contracts and obligations and perhaps even push the market to liberalise the contractual frameworks that are present everywhere such as the 2 years contractual obligations for telephones in Germany!

Do you know of any other contract sharing, swapping or creation websites?

We would like to draw your attention to a new Blog, which is called Posterous. Posterous is very interesting because it makes the posting of content much easier in comparison to other Blog Management Systems like Wordpress, etc.. You don’t need any log-in because you only email your content to posterous to publish your content. There is only one unique email ID (post@posterous.com) where you send your email (incl. photos, hyperlinks, Youtube Videos, etc.) to, which is then resized and formatted for you and it will be posted to your individual page based on your email ID. We have set up our own Posterous page for Letsbuyit.com that is also to be watched now: http://letsbuyit.posterous.com/

Some of you might remember that we have written about Loopt in July last year (here) already but we would like to introduce Loopt to the rest of you because Loopt is the proof that we are living in a new era. Loopt is a mobile phone application, which acts like a social network (incl. groups, chats, etc.), the difference being that your current location is indicated on a map and you can see the location of your friends on that same map in real-time. Needless to say that the notion of people/companies tracking your whereabouts 24/7 is more than frightening but finding Apple promoting its iPhone Application Store with Loopt is even more fascinating. This is how far you can go in one year with people-tracking technologies.

After having previously reported (blog post here) about Telebid we now read in the FAZ that apparently Telebid has not only expanded to the UK and Spain but is also planning to open up in the US, Korea, Japan and China and currently has a daily subscription rate of 3,000 new members per day! We had also discussed the business model previously in the blog and we know now that apparently Telebid is making a daily turnover of almost 30 000 to 35 000 Euros per day, according to FAZ!!! Judge for yourself.

Concerning the recent eBay sale of Yieeha, a Social Community Shopping Portal, the new owner has been made know now on their blog and is the Net-Line Onlinedienste GmbH from Heilbronn. After quickly checking out their website the company turns out to be a live-erotic-cam provider, which gives the Yieeha slogan “Social winning” quite a new twist! It is good to know the user info in safe hands.

First of all we would like to share some more hidden internet jokes that we have found. There is quite a range of Google jokes or hoaxes that somebody dedicated an entire Wikipedia “Google Hoaxes” article to them. For more jokes or Easter Eggs, as they are also called, check out the site eeggs.com. Back in the days Microsoft used to be quite funny and there were hiding quite a lot of easter eggs in their programs like Excel but that has been reduced because people were complaining about the waste of resources (how mature!).

Secondly we have noticed that the Ebay Sale of the Online Shopping Community Yieeha (we have previously reported) has come to an end at the stunning selling price of EUR 24.550,00 incl. VAT. The Sale has not been commented on their blog as of now (no new entry since June 23, 2008) however the average sale price of 2EUR per registered user is definitely not very satisfactory but it was definitely worth a try. There are not that many Shopping Community Sites for Sale on Ebay to compare with but our feeling is that the price could be more!

After having talked about branded communities there are also the Social Shopping Communities that are widely discussed now. What we found most interesting was that the German Social Shopping Community Yiieha is up for sale on Ebay. It has given all the necessary information that you need to know when buying a shopping community portal on Ebay Alexa Ranking, Page Impressions, Adranks, and much more. Check it out and we will follow it very closely what is happening with it. The bidding is finished on 03.07.08, 14:45:25 German Standard Time.