Posted by Ingrid Riley on November 26th, 2008
It’s November 25th, 2008 and eBay is going down in flames. Traffic has dropped off 20% this year alone with no hope in sight. What went wrong with the company besides those awful commercials? Here’s 10 Reasons why. Feel free to add to the list.
1. Overpopulated. Ebay got out of control 4 years ago with the whole ‘eBay Millionaires’ hype that spawned into ‘Sell Your Stuff On eBay’ brick and mortar stores and ultimately led to a massive influx of ubiquitous products.
2. Poorly Regulated. Counterfeit items and fake products flooded eBay all the way through 2006. Luxury brands have actually had to hire employees specifically to find people selling illegitimate items claiming to be ‘Real’. I prefer the term ‘Not Guaranteed Authentic’, but either way, it was detrimental to eBay.
3. Scams. Next we saw the Nigerian scandals popping up. For the last 2 years, it has been such a task to resell any technology item like a mobile phone or a laptop. Countless times I tried selling my Blackberry or Apple Macbook only to find the winning bidder is located in Nigeria and is trying to pull off some scam with a foreign bank account.
4. User Experience. Once eBay had it’s millionaires, along came the businesses that made their living off of it. New software was built for on-demand mass listings on eBay where eRetailers were clearing out their warehouses for decent margins. Now, when I search for a golf club or a pair of sneakers on eBay, I may as well be on Shopzilla, sifting through professional listed products. The whole ‘Auction’ experience on the users end has become entirely depleted. The original eBay users went there because it was an ‘event’ and if you were able to get the item, you actually felt like you won something. Now I feel the same budget guilt buying something on eBay as I would buying a Cinnabun. Sometime worse because I waited 7 days for an auction to end and found a better deal on another web site. More
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted by Ingrid Riley on November 26th, 2008
Building a startup is hard. There are many problems that can hurt a startup—perhaps even kill it. This article examines some of the more common diseases that plague startups, and proposes some cures. All of these issues can be remedied if detected early enough, so it’s really worth being aware of them. That way, you can operate before they become fatal.
Startup Disease 1: The Imaginary User Syndrome
A product that’s not geared towards a specific user is unlikely to benefit anyone in particular; hence, there’s no such thing as a generic user. No matter how great your initial vision might seem, if you don’t have a target audience in mind, your startup will lack direction and flounder. In addition, it’s difficult to market to everyone, so not only will your product suffer, it’ll be hard to sell too. More
Popularity: 1% [?]
Posted by Ingrid Riley on November 26th, 2008
If you were offered the choice to create one of two businesses—a web development shop where you do bespoke work for clients, or a start-up where you build your own product and sell it directly to customers—which would you choose?
Both of these business models involve the same activity: building web sites and web applications. Yet they are very different businesses. One is a service business; the other a product business. In this first instalment of a series on start-ups, we’ll look at the differences between these two approaches. Furthermore, we’ll see how they translate into what businesses are all about: making money. More
Popularity: 1% [?]
Posted by Ingrid Riley on November 26th, 2008
A new report from Nielsen finds that television viewership is on the rise (at least in the US), hitting record numbers last quarter in terms of viewership, despite gains in web and mobile video consumption. The report found that users are watching an average of 142.5 hours of television per month, and using the Internet for 27 hours each month. Additionally, mobile video consumption is up to 3.5 hours each month.
That’s approximately 5 hours and 45 minutes spent in front of a screen each day. Across the board that represents fairly significant percentage gains year-over-year in terms of screen time (up 4.1% for TV and 5.7% for web use).
Given that we’re increasingly faced with more and more information, and that ourattention spans are on a rapid decline, there is a finite amount of our attention to go around. With so much added time being given to screens — television, computer, mobile — something must be taking a hit. More
Popularity: unranked [?]
Posted by Ingrid Riley on November 25th, 2008
Just as many Web retailers feared, online shoppers are being unusually frugal this holiday season. During the first 23 days of November, according to a report to be released later on Tuesday by the research firm comScore, consumers spent $8.19 billion online, a 4 percent drop from the same period last year. That marks the first annual decline since e-commerce took off.
“We thought that things would solidify in November,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore, who said gut-wrenching declines in the stock market and the auto industry crisis “spooked people who might have been thinking the worst was behind us.” More
Popularity: unranked [?]
Posted by Ingrid Riley on November 25th, 2008
It may be better to give than to receive, but for those on the receiving end, there’s no doubt real-world gifts are better than virtual ones. No surprise, then, that we’re seeing the emergence of more and more ways for online friends to give each other offline presents. The latest? GetThemIn, which allows UK Facebook users to send each other real alcoholic beverages.
An assortment of wine, beer, champagne, spirits and specialty drinks are available through GetThemIn from brands including Heineken, Newcastle Brown, Blossom Hill, Harvey’s Bristol Cream and Courvoisier; also available are a variety of complementary snacks. Users simply add the GetThemIn application to their Facebook account, and then choose what gift they’d like to send to which friend. Payment takes place through Google checkout, and users compose a message to let their friend know. More
Popularity: unranked [?]
Posted by Andres Alexander on November 24th, 2008
The new look comes with additional multi-lingual functionality as well as updated family filters and an integrated forum. While the version one videos were migrated under a system user with the upgrade, the users from version one were apparently not migrated forcing users to re-register or in my case, update my bugmenot plug-in. The site seems to have gained traction with over 300 users having reregistered since re-launch.
WestIndianTube is also now offering the pre-roll ads that have become an industry standard in monetizing niche video sites. Time will tell if the Caribbean Youtube is successful at scaling in its niche.
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Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted by Ingrid Riley on November 23rd, 2008
Here’s a rumor that won’t go away – Facebook has been quietly searching for a partner to take over their year and a half old classified listings application, and may relaunch as early as the end of December.
According to our sources, Facebook distributed a request-for-proposal to a number of classified sites earlier this year (the same model they are using for Facebook Music).
The obvious partner is Oodle, which began powering Walmart Classifieds earlier this year. We’ve heard thin reports that they in fact have won the contract. More
Popularity: 1% [?]
Posted by Ingrid Riley on November 22nd, 2008
I’ve been on this continued binge of sharing interesting stuff I find online to share with you as well as writing original stuff that’s solely focused on the rising Caribbean Web. I’m a firm believer that you can learn from everywhere and almost anyone to make yourself better. Found this on mediafuturist.com.
The topic of this video: Shifting values and the Future of Advertising: In an inter-connected and broadband-powered world, pedigree, age, gender, location and cash matters less and less, and reputation, creativity, trust and MERIT matter more. What will this do to Advertising and Marketing?
Popularity: 1% [?]
Posted by Ingrid Riley on November 22nd, 2008
I don’t know about you but I have been observing a significant shift in how people communicate, professionally as well as socially and privately. While only 7-10 years ago, most of the work was done on the phone (I recall living in .com boom-town numero uno, San Francisco, and using up all my 2000 AT&T minutes every single month!), eMail soon became big with everyone, and now eMail is still pretty much the prime vehicle of business communications – thus the rise of blackberry mania. Use of the phone declined heavily as a result.
Now, it seems that… well, eMail is for old people. About 18 months ago, the use of ‘social’ business platforms such as LinkedIn became more prevalent, and all of a sudden people started to have ‘professional’ conversations on LinkedIn, Ryze (remember??), Xing, and then, soon, Facebook, Myspace, and now… Twitter, Skype and GTalk. Now, for me, it has already become the No. 1 method of how people reach out to me: rather than calling (ouch) or even emailing (ehem), people ping me via my various networks – and I think this will increase drastically because it provides a build-in filter as you have to be in my network to ping me via the Network. More
Popularity: 13% [?]
Posted by Ingrid Riley on November 21st, 2008
Cariblogger launched about two months ago and currently has 129 blogs and 615 posts. The site is the idea of an all-Caribbean team – Trinidadian, Bajan and Guyanese whose business case for starting this venture can be summed up like this “The Caribbean has about 44 million people put together. That’s a pretty large market itself. And that’s not counting the millions living in the US, Canada and England who are also free to join. Kester Clarke one of the co-founders added too, “ I think we launched just at the right time as Caribbean folks are now realizing that blogging and the social web is the place to be. We’ll also be launching a social networking site very soon to compliment cariblogger.com.”
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Popularity: 3% [?]
