LetsBuyIt Blog

Almost everybody has watched some YouTube Videos and several videos tend to pop-up again from left, right and center. The list of the 10 most viewed YouTube Videos of all times (as of September 2008) therefore is particularly interesting. As Richard MacManus pointed it out in his article on ReadWriteWeb, the fact that hardly any of these successful videos is User Generated Content (UGC) but rather professionally produced videos gives a clear sign for the future of online content.

Does that mean that content production companies like Blinkenlichten, the German startup that produces professional, journalistic video content, is the way for the future instead of UGC?

Our favourite video:

On the Googlewatchblog, we discovered that the Software company Hexolabs has come up with the first YouTube-embedded, interactive game with the help of the recently added YouTube functionality YouTube Annotations, called “A car’s life”.

These short, animated videos show a car driving along a road until an obstacle appears, that will get the car to crash. However just before the potential crash the YouTube Annotation shows a little button in the video. By clicking on this button the car crash can be avoided and the player will be led to the next level. With each level increase this button appears for a shorter period of time, which makes it more and more difficult.

The game might not be ingenious however this might the beginning of an entirely new wave of other YouTube embedded videogames! There is a high potential for a viral effect! Let me know if you of any other games!

Bad news for Facebook… The famous social network platform seems to face a gaping hole which could allow hakers to break into your FaceBook account. In other words, that gap could enable attackers to change your privacy settings, add or delete some of your Facebook friends or even read and send messages from your account. The problem has been reported to Facebook by a German developer, Artur Wachelka, and Facebook’s Managers are still working on it.

Watch out until the problem has been resolved !

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 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/

Jupiter Research published a study saying that branded communities are a failure and don’t reach their consumers. As stated in Internetworld and Acquisa the average number of members of branded communities in Europe are 6,494 members with more than have half of the communities only counting 1,000 members in comparison to the investments sometimes going far beyond EUR 100,000. Viral marketing is also out of date and is not lucrative anymore for those branded communities in most instances because most companies don’t understand the modern internet users. They try to just give information to the members instead of making the effort of understanding their consumers and providing them with interaction possibilities or even reasons to communicate. According to a report by David Eicher, CEO of the internet agency Robert & Horst, one just needs to merely be smart and integrate the users at the beginning of the development of the community instead of creating an expensive “community platform” and then looking for members. That sounds easy! What do you think?

Fleishman-Hillard Inc. and Harris Interactive have published an excellent study about the influence the internet has on modern consumers. Their “Digital Life Index Study” highlights the main aspect of the modern shopping behaviours and compares the different impacts between the UK, Germany and France. The four key findings of the report are worth reading up on:

You should read the article, which you can find here.

Youtube has come up with a white label YouTube called Startyourtube. Now you can just create your own YouTube with the look, feel, name, URL, content, etc. that you want such as Snowboarderstube as you can see below. To increase the capacities, number of possible views, blogs, etc. one needs to pay but it still means that you have your own Videoportal!

Some other names of similar sites are Ning, Magnify, Reality Digital, KickApps, and VSocial. Let us know if you know any other sites.

In the last two weeks we have received some interesting statistics about social networks and webpages in Europe, namely Germany, that might interest you:

First of all it needs mentioning that there are currently around 149 social networks in Germany according to the ranking - list of zweinull.cc.

The Forsa-Survey, which was initiated by Sevenone Interactive, concluded that the average German only visits eight sites per month. Such a high loyalty makes it very difficult for new websites to become popular, because the average man checks out 21 new sites and the women check out 13 new sites on an average per month. To see what these main websites are and which age group is loyal to which site, see the statistics.

Another interesting fact is that according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 85% of the German internet users are in some sort of social network. What makes it interesting is that these people are willing to rather receive targeted advertising instead of having to pay for the service however don’t like to be monitored/tracked while surfing the internet. In correlation to the previously mentioned loyalty of internet users, German are interested in staying the same social network for the entire life instead of joining too many new networks. To read the entire analysis of this interesting PWC study click here.