October 30, 2006, 2:29 PM PST
Ski resorts get load balancing with Liftopia
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

The ski season will be opening up soon in the West, and with it there will be a new way to find and buy lift tickets.

A team of San Francisco-based entrepreneurs have just launched Liftopia, a marketplace for ski lift tickets that will bring airline-type dynamic pricing to ski resort operators--and also airline-style restricted fares to customers.

To the user, Liftopia will look like a market for lift tickets. You'll be able to compare prices at resorts in an area and buy discounted lift passes online. Liftopia will sell only advance tickets for specific days, but the discounts should be substantial. The company will report to all its resort customers where there is the most and the least demand for lift tickets, so that the resorts will be able to modify prices accordingly, adjusting rates for prime weekend times and lowballing prices midweek, all in an effort to maximize resort occupancy and spread out the load of visitors. As low-traffic days get closer, the smart resort operator will hopefully drop prices dramatically, in order to build traffic and make at least some money from the mountain. (Price-insensitive skiers may continue to opt for season passes at their favorite resorts.)

This idea has worked well in other industries. Airlines give passengers incentives to help manage yield by selling advanced, restricted fares for less than they charge for flexible tickets. Also, in many cities, OpenTable does a good job for both restaurants and their diners. Notably, it wasn't until OpenTable came along that diners could compare the reservation availability of multiple restaurants at a glance; Liftopia plans to bring that same level of transparency to skiers.

The number of participating resorts right now is quite small and geographically dispersed (one resort at Tahoe, two in Colorado, and so on). Since skiers won't be able to comparison-shop, Liftopia will not be the indispensable ski lift marketplace this season. But if the team does a good job of schmoozing the resort operators over the next few months, by next winter, it might be a very useful service indeed.

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October 19, 2006, 6:30 PM PDT
SwapThing improves services exchange
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

I covered SwapThing in July, and criticized its user interface. I'm happy to report that a new version of the service, launching tonight, is a lot more attractive and easy to use, and it's also much simpler to enter items you want to exchange: Just type in the UPC or ISBN, and the system will get the name or title of your item.

SwapThing is also rolling out a redesigned services exchange. Previously, you could swap work for goods, but it was a bit of a force-fit: Services were treated much like physical items, and people who were interested in services offered couldn't easily get enough information on the provider to decide if they wanted to make a trade.

The new services trading system allows service providers to buy placement on SwapThing ($8 a month for local exposure, $10 a month national), and to display more information about their company, turning a listing into a good and persistent online advertisement. (SwapThing is also integrating the Rapleaf reputation system.) It still costs $1 per swap when swapping with a service provider, but there are no additional fees for the provider.

It is, in many ways, yet another services directory, but it's integrated into a growing trading network, which could make it very interesting to individual service providers, most of whom would probably be happy to occasionally exchange their work for physical goods--or other services on the network.

See also LinkedIn's new service provider network.

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October 19, 2006, 3:22 PM PDT
Still more reviews aggregators: Retrevo, DigitalAdvisor, and TheFind
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

There are now three more sites that want to help you spend your consumer dollars wisely, but that don't actually review products themselves.

Retrevo is a useful "vertical search" engine for technology products. It does a very nice job of categorizing links. For example, in my search for "Nikon D50," it broke out its results into four categories: documentation, info from the manufacturer, reviews, and blog posts. Very handy. It's missing pricing data (and thus a big revenue stream), but it looks like it will be extremely useful if you're looking for anything about a product that's not buying-related--if you're still in the research phase or if you already have the product, for example. Also, it previews each result in a window, so you don't lose context during your search. I like it. (I like CNET.com more, of course.)

DigitalAdvisor is a reviews site that rates products based solely on user reviews from around the Web (people may find Wize's rating system more useful). The site has its own community reviewing products as well and recently launched a feature where users can ask each other for advice on particular products or categories. It is very nicely done, and a quick scan indicates that there's a knowledgeable and friendly audience on the site ready to help folks out.

TheFind is a shopping search engine. It goes beyond tech products and covers housewares, beauty products, clothing, and so on. The press materials claim that it scours the Web and extracts products and pricing, instead of relying on data feeds to populate its database. My quick test of the product was positive: Searching for some slacks I had recently purchased online, I found more outlets on TheFind than I had on Google--or at least the presentation of the results was clearer than Google's, so it seemed like more. TheFind also has a handy "save bar" where you can park your "finds" and compare them to each other. TheFind needs to keep an eye on Google, which earlier this year acquired consumer search company Dulance. So Froogle may not be dead just yet.

Consumer product search is a huge business, and these services are not the only ones in it, just the youngest. See my recent posts on ViewScore and Wize, and older coverage on Dulance. See also Become.com (and this video of it on PodTech).

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October 16, 2006, 2:22 PM PDT
LinkedIn launches useful service directory
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Like other good social network tools, LinkedIn succeeded by finding a niche. While MySpace became the network for teens and Facebook did the same for college students, LinkedIn has become a robust networking site for businesspeople, with a special focus on helping people network to find jobs.

But there's more to a professional life than finding a job or hiring people for your business. LinkedIn today is rolling out its new service for personal service providers ("PSPs"), the people we hire outside of our work life. LinkedIn now allows its members to recommend and endorse people--dentists, mechanics, nannies, and so on--who are not LinkedIn members. The new directory makes it easy to narrow down the listings--for example, to display only dentists in your area that have been recommended by people you know directly. If you want to contact somebody, you don't have to request that their endorsers make the connection. However, you can't simply send them an e-mail, either--you must use LinkedIn's own e-mail forwarding system, or if the PSP is signed up for the $60 Personal Plus account, you can call them on a toll-free number provided by LinkedIn.

The only way PSPs can get into the new LinkedIn service provider directory is to be recommended by a LinkedIn member. This is a change from the old LinkedIn model, where all providers were listed regardless of recommendation.

As a concept, I think this is great. There are dozens of useful service provider and consumer review directories out there, but this system makes it easier than any I've used to find recommendations for services I need from people I trust. In practice, the directory is new and sparsely populated (I found only one recommended real estate professional in my first-degree network), but it has potential. It will grow if PSPs learn to ask their customers for LinkedIn endorsements.

Ultimately, I'd like to see a combination of this personal referral system with a bid management system, such as the one in ServiceMagic. But this is a great start.

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July 10, 2006, 8:28 AM PDT
Two swapping sites with different philosophies
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Innovation in online swapping services is still at the early stage. The swap companies are still figuring out the basic economics, such as: Should swaps be item for item, or should there be an intermediate fake currency to track the value of things? You can see radically different philosophies in the services, ranging from the points-based system of Peerflix to the pure barter system of Swaptree.

Another service also has a bit of momentum: SwapThing. I'll say up front that it has the ugliest user interface of any of the swap services, but it also has a lot of flexibility that may work to its users' advantages. For one thing, SwapThing doesn't restrict you to just swapping. If you want to get rid of an item, you can put it up for swap, cash, or either.

Also, SwapThing is the first barter site I've seen that explicitly supports the trading of services. So if you're a poor consultant who wants to trade your time for an item on the network, SwapThing will let you barter your expertise directly. Small-business owners might find this useful. As CEO Jessica Hardwick rightly notes, "It's rare to meet a service provider that doesn't have downtime." This gives the downtime more potential value.

Here's another swap site I stumbled across (literally--I was using StumbleUpon): Zunafish. This one is like-for-like only: you can trade DVDs only for other DVDs, books for other books, and so on. That to me, drastically reduces the value of a swapping network. However, Zunafish has a much better user interface than SwapThing, and that counts for something. You're unlikely to enter items into a swapping service if it's a drag to do so, and on Zunafish it's easy.

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June 28, 2006, 9:01 PM PDT
Google Checkout: Amazon's worst nightmare
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

On Thursday, Google is launching its buying service, Google Checkout (known previously by Google-watchers as Gbuy). It's going to make purchasing easier for Web users. You'll just enter your credit card billing and address information once, then on any commerce site you go to that's Checkout-enabled, you won't have to enter your data again.

This is not much of a competitor to eBay's PayPal, as some have predicted. Checkout is designed for serious merchants more than for individuals unloading old Star Trek snow globes on eBay. To be sure, the few merchants that are considering adding PayPal as a payment option (and that don't already have it) might divert their energies to signing up for Checkout, however there's no reason a commerce site couldn't offer both PayPal and Checkout if it desired.

Checkout is, however, a huge threat to Amazon. The biggest thing the online superstore has going for it is convenience. Once you buy an item on Amazon, buying the next one is a one-click affair. But go to another store, and you've got to enter your credit card info all over again. Amazon wins for convenience, and over time it's earned buyers' trust.

Will people trust Google? I bet they will. Google will push its high-end partners -- Buy.com, Starbucks, Timberland, and Levis are all part of the launch -- and the Google Checkout logo will appear on AdSense items from these and other vendors. This flag will take on a Visa-like pervasiveness. If Google is good enough at handling dispute resolution, people will come to trust it, they'll enjoy its convenience, and Amazon's value-add will be thwarted by ten thousand other stores all sharing one payment system.

Stores will pay Google a small fee for their transactions. This is a potentially gigantic revenue stream for Google, but more importantly, if successful, no other online company will end up knowing as much about the spending behaviors of online consumers as Google. This data is no doubt going to go towards making online ads even more targeted and effective (and thus possibly more expensive), which will also add handsomely to Google's income. For this reason, I think the Checkout fee structure is backwards: Google should be paying its merchants for the privilege of capturing all their transaction data, rather than charging them for each transaction.

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June 27, 2006, 9:09 AM PDT
Farecast goes in to public beta
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

If you ever fly from Seattle or Boston, definitely check out Farecast, which went into public beta today (see previous blog post). The service tells you when to buy your airline tickets based on analysis of prices over time. For example, if you want to go from Seattle to San Francisco on July 12, buy today--prices are only going up.

Hopefully the service will add more cities soon. My big hope, of course, is that the airlines will adopt less byzantine pricing structures. But until they do, Farecast's algorithms can at least give you a fighting chance against them.

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June 22, 2006, 4:22 PM PDT
With Zixxo coupons, who needs the Sunday paper?
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Never pay retail. Why should you? Nearly all goods and services can be had at some discount, if you have the right coupon. The coupon business itself, in fact, is huge--you can see that just by looking at your local Sunday newspaper.

But newspaper circulation is declining. So where will tomorrow's consumers get their coupons, and how are businesses going to reach them?

Start-up Zixxo is building a new coupon marketplace. The overall concept is simple: Businesses go online and post their offers and coupons. Then users go online and find offers they want. They print the coupons (or load them onto their cell phones, perhaps) and take them out shopping. Zixxo will charge the businesses for delivering the coupons (right now, the service is free).

Unlike Cellfire, which is oriented around coupons on cell phones, Zixxo isn't pushing the technology curve too hard. It's really focused on paper coupons, which you don't have to train people to use. And unlike Zimini, it doesn't require a software download or that you enter any information. But there are several straightforward coupon sites, such as CoolSavings, CouponSurfer, and many others. Zixxo is different from these sites in that its database is open, which makes mashups possible. It's also more small-business-friendly than most other coupon sites: there's a self-service tool businesses can use to put coupons into the system.

With a solid database of coupons, good mashups should come. It would make sense for the coupon database to surface on travel sites, for example. The site is new, though, and the database so far is a little sparse. And that is the biggest challenge for this company--getting the offers from businesses, not just the same national coupons from the big box and fast food outlets that are already on the other systems.

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June 07, 2006, 1:41 PM PDT
Etsy: craft shopping goes Web 2.0
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

The Web is full of great online shops. eBay is the garage sale of the universe. Amazon is a giant department store. And there are tons of focused shopping sites selling everything from underwear to auto parts. But for the most part, they're all old-school.

If you want a more contemporary shopping experience, try Etsy, a marketplace for handmade goods. Like many of the items that Etsy artists sell on the site, Etsy itself has been crafted with care, love, and a whacked-out aesthetic. Heavily Flash-based, it has unique and fun views into the goods available. For example, there's a "shop by color" function that does just what you'd think (although not all that accurately). The cool thing is that the thumbnail images it displays can be dragged around the screen, which helps you compare items, or even thrown off the screen entirely. There's a similar Flash-based shop-by-location feature, a random item view, and also a hypnotic shop-by-time-added function.

The site pushes the current state of the art in commerce and interactivity. Soon to come on Etsy are social shopping features that will let you browse online in real time with your friends--you'll be able to see their cursors on your screen alongside yours. Useful? I don't know. But if the feature is as well crafted as the other lenses into the Etsy store, it will be a lot of fun.

I like founder Robert Kalin's philosophy: "We're throwing things out there that aren't 100 percent useful, but they get people to use the site." It's like good recreational shopping in the physical world--an experience that's about more than just finding and spending.

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June 05, 2006, 3:47 PM PDT
Farecast and Mpire: Smart sites that will save you money
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

The Web is a fantastic platform for comparing current prices on items. But what about prices tomorrow? Will the price on the thing you want drop? And what about historical data? If you're buying or selling an item on eBay, you could probably use a price history before you kick off a transaction.

Fortunately, pricing analytics are coming to consumers. First up: a travel site, Farecast, that tells you if you should buy those airplane tickets you're interested in now or if you should wait for the price to drop. Farecast uses historical airfare data to predict prices. For a given trip, it will advise you to buy now or wait, depending on its predicted price curve.

Since the airlines are secretive about how they price tickets, the modeling behind Farecast can't be 100 percent reliable, but the system gives a confidence level on its recommendations, and it can make you a lot smarter about spending your money. Farecast goes live later this month.

Also coming soon: Mpire, a system that currently brings pricing analytics to eBay sellers. For any given item, it will tell you how much the item has sold for in the past (which is also useful to buyers). It also recommends the best day and time to end your auction, the type of listing that is most successful, and other information that can help you maximize your selling price. The founders of the site hinted at the release this month of buyer-focused tools, not just for eBay but other commerce sites, too (like Craigslist). I'll report more on this when the news comes out.

It's about time buyers got better pricing transparency and analytics. As I write this, neither Farecast nor Mpire are live with their buyers' services. If you want to experience first-hand what access to pricing data does for the buying experience right now, check out the house-buying site, Zillow.com.

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