LetsBuyIt Blog

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After much suspense, we are finally announcing this month’s winner of the Sony VAIO chosen amongst the best of the baggers in Round 2 of the Ants Competition.

For this round, MATHIEU LE HENAFF is the one!

In addition, there were other runners-up chosen to receive a variety of admirable prizes from our partners. The complete list of winners is available at www.letsbuyit.fr/game/

The LetsBuyIt team would like to thank everyone who participated in Round 2 of The Ants Competition. Even if you have not won yet, keep your head held high…there are still 2 more rounds for you to get your chance! Step back into the ring: Round 3 has already begun and the next drawing will be December 16!

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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.

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Have you played yet? Round 2 of our big game will be over tomorrow at midnight!
You have one more day to get a chance to win one of nice prices, and most of all the Sony Vaio laptop! Just try it!

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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/

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The technology to present products is advancing at lightning speed. Online retailer such as Shopflick have developed successfully by relying on the use of videos to sell their products in short video clips. Ikea has implemented interactive clips with annotations in their different rooms. These videos require a lot of equipment to make the video powerful.

At the OMD 2008 we were fortunate enough to see a display of how MyClip360 uses their technology to develop those 3D images of products that almost resemble interactive videos. First the product is being photographed from every possible angle and rendered 3D on the computer and then you get product demo like this:

CNN has taken it even a step further now by demonstrating their new hologram technology during the US election day. They have recorded the journalist Jessica Yellin in a small tent in Chicago with 35 High-Definition cameras from all angels, remodelled here in 3D and project her as hologram to hold a conversation Wolf Blitzer in the CNN headquarter in New York in real-time. Impressive work!

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Juice Application is quite an interesting browser plug-in that is built to facilitate the aggregation of information various sources on the same page. It is interesting to browse websites with it because one only needs to highlight a word, drag it to the right and Juice aggregates information from various sources on the right of your screen. Have a look at the video because it is quite tricky to describe but overall it makes the browsing or researching for information faster. Our experience however is that only when dragging from the Juice site.

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After having met Addy Feuerstein at the DLD 08 Conference by Burda in Munich last January 2008, Allofme has now opened their ports to the beta users. Being a fan of timelines, we just had to try out this interesting media-aggregator for ourselves.

The BillyTimeline has been enriched with some few videos, photos and entries and it already looks interesting. Not all the uploading features are active yet however you can upload all some offline files or your data from Picasa, Flickr, YouTube & Twitter already. Check it out because it is an interesting way to demonstrate information on a horizontal chronological timeline in comparison to the top-to-bottom textual way. We are trying to visualise our developments a little and this timeline is an entertaining piece of work.

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We had previously mentioned that the internet start-ups are particularly prone to financial difficulties because of their long Return-on-Investment (ROI) structures as well as the Capital Investments being primarily a luxurious side-effect of other successful endeavours. However when the going gets though these investments tend to be quickly cut, reduced or “restructured”.

The news about the decrease of advertising revenues is our daily bread already but now the first internet-initiatives are looking at reducing staff, like Wikia announcing to lay-off 10% of their staff! These news are hard to accept when they relate to you but this is the real deal when trying to survive among this shark-pool of economies. But how do you tell your staff that their days are counted? Check out how Jerry Yang, fonder of Yahoo, did it in his lowercase style here.

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It is very difficult to avoid news about the financial crisis nowadays and it gets “frustrating” to read the whole banking and finance sector is collapsing. However when it starts hitting home at the foundation of the internet entrepreneur scene, as mentioned by Om Malik, all the start-ups need to listen up.

As Handelsblatt pointed out, the funding of most projects is in jeopardy because the investors and business angels are losing money elsewhere and need to concentrate on reducing the damage. Qitera had to find this out the hard way now after having already shifted to the Silicon Valley to be closer to the investor, stated Handelsblatt.com. That implies that either they stop funding new projects and/or the investor needs to focus on the projects in the portfolio and start cutting costs. The difference to the many industry sectors is that internet start-ups always take significant time to gain a critical mass and break-even because the margins are usually in the cent-area and not hard dollars.

Therefore the financing is very important in the initial start-up phase so get what you can now because the tech-bubble is not actually a bubble but sonner or later as exposed to the harsh financial conditions as everybody else. Be ready because reducing staff in an already small team, really hurts!

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