LetsBuyIt Blog

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/

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!

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.

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.

Judging from the latest news, Google should launch its new browser : Google Chrome !

Windows users will be able to download a test version from 9 pm tonight.
To understand the concept and Google’s aims regarding this new browser, read the very clear and simple comics by Scott McCloud !

According to the last newsletter of my private bank the new security requirements for online payments with VISA are becoming effective as of today. Apparently the secured payment system of “Verified by Visa” demandes your “date of birth” now in addition to the other information like Credit Card number, expiry date, VCC, name of the Credit Card holder and address. Have you experienced that yet?

We are reading a lot of stories about the new search engines lately and after Cuil claimed that it wants to be the new competitor of Google we found it was time to test it. We searched Letsbuyit.com on three different often mentioned search engines namely SearchCloud, Cuil, Searchme and Google to see how relevant/useful/advantageous the results are for us in 2008:

SearchCloud

The fact you need to click twice to execute a search is a negative point. Secondly we find that the search result only returned articles about us from 2001, which didn’t really impress us. Unfortunately we are not convinced that this is the future despite offering that grid function (whatever that is for?!)

Source: SearchCloud Screenshot

Cuil

If Cuil wants to be the new competitor of Google.com then we hope for Cuil that they have endless updates up their sleeve because to get Google down on their knees because of Cuil is rather unrealistic as of now! The page set-up is definitely interesting because you receive so much preview text however the order and relevancy to Letsbuyit 2008 is not obvious and the summary text for letsbuyit.com is very out-of-date! Maybe they have indexed trillions of pages but for Letsbuyit definitely not the most current nor relevant!

Source: Cuil Screenshot

SearchMe

The visual search engine SearchMe definitely gave us the most up-to-date results with the screen-shots of our latest website and blog design, which means that their indexing is up to scratch! We still like it the best because it is most relevant to our 2007/08 relaunch. To compare visual search engines with text-based search engines is questionable, we agree, but still our most favorable search engine result!

Source: Searchme Screenshot

Google.com

Google did quite well with the pages shown on the first page but still too many articles about the former Letsbuyit.com of 2001. Also not very favorable for us yet and definitely improvable!

Source: Google Screenshot

Our Conclusion is that in order to have the most favorable Search Engine Ranking without having a website is to create your own search engine and beat Google at its game ;).

Two news have drawn our attention today, which we think should be noted:

Winner of the day

We had previously mentioned the Download World Record attempt for the Mozilla Firefox Version 3.0. According to Mozilla and the BBC, Firefox has been downloaded 8.3 million times within 24 hours, which is quite noteworthy. There have been server problems, who could not cope with the amount of simultaneous downloads and apparently some security flaws have already been discovered but the number of downloads is still very impressive. Congratulations and you can count us in for those 8.3 million.

Loser of the day

Another news, which needs mentioning is the fact that the Swedish government has passed a law, despite the civil uproar, that permits the state to check everybody’s emails, sms, phonecalls and any other telecommunication without any court order. Isn’t this disrespectful against the privacy of the individual? Besides the common argument that “you don’t need to be worried if you got nothing to hide” we consider this as an incredibly distrust against its people. Let’s say that we were less than positively surprised to put it that way!

This is a viral marketing campaign as it happens: Mozilla Firefox is promoting its Firefox Version 3 by attempting to break the download world record, which is the amount of times the browser is being downloaded within 24 hours. There is currently no world record and this first attempt will be the world record but the goal is to beat the download record of Firefox 2, which was downloaded 1.6 million times on its launch day.

If you wanna be part of this World Record Attempt then go to the Spread Firefox Download Day 2008 website and register. We are part of it!

I have taken a particular interest to Mobile Marketing and M-Commerce and after having heard about Mobile Banking in developing countries I came across this article “Pakistan: Begging for alms via SMSe“. Apparently beggars are asking for mobile phone credit instead of money for food. This might sounds strange but most probably these beggars themselves treat mobile credit as some sort of virtual bank/money account, which they can use in return to pay for goods and services. I heard about this phenomenal idea, which seems to have been developed in Africa. If you have more information please don’t hesitate to letting me know.