Twitter-based shopping website seeks retailers
Buying something online can be a frustrating process. The shear numbers of websites offering the same product can lead to endless hours of surfing to try to find the right deal. Consumers often become overwhelmed and end up not buying anything at all.
Prashant Nedungadi (see Nedungadi’s personal five-day entrepreneur journal, exclusively for Reuters.com) has been one of those people and decided to use that frustration to launch IMshopping.com, a website that utilizes a combination of software and sales experts to direct buyers to the precise product they’re looking for. What Nedungadi has dubbed “human-assisted shopping” is a network of retail experts, or guides, and the broader community of IMshopping’s more than 30,000 registered users.
IMshopping leverages Twitter to help allow consumers to pose shopping-related questions around the clock.
The Twitter part works by submitting your shopping query to @imshopping, which spits back a response to your Twitter account, usually within 15 minutes, with a link to the answer of your question. Photos of the product and other recommended products may also be included in the response.
Every user who registers on IMshopping automatically has an online profile generated when they either ask or answer a question. Their bio page also includes a numbered ranking, a list of their retail expertise (electronics, automotive, household, cosmetics, etc.) and an archive of all the questions they’ve answered so the questioner has a way to judge how credible they are.
IMshopping just released a merchant side to their website and hopes to follow that up in the coming weeks with the announcement of an iPhone application. That is likely one of the key reasons IMshopping garnered $4.7 million in venture capital from SK Telecom prior to the site’s April launch.
The idea for this service stems from Nedungadi’s first-hand experience with Andale, a website he co-founded in 1999. Nedungadi noticed a drop in traffic to the site, which offered cloud-based services to help small- and medium-sized businesses manage their inventories online. Thinking it might be a problem with his software, he started calling customers to see if they were displeased with the service. What Nedungadi discovered was that an explosion of online retailers competing for customers had driven prices down, while subsequently ratcheting up the costs of buying traffic, through services like Google’s AdWords.
Ex-Googlers seek traffic for how-to video startup
The Web is full of user-generated video, but for Sanjay Raman’s tastes most of it is too bland and poorly produced to actually watch.
That’s why Raman launched Howcast (http://www.howcast.com) – a high-quality, how-to video-sharing website – last year with former Google colleagues Jason Liebman and Dan Blackman.
While at Google the three Howcast co-founders noticed how popular do-it-yourself content was, but how little of it was in video format.
“How-to content is something that is really popular in terms of user search queries,” said Raman, who left his job as product manager for Google Apps to launch their startup nearly 18 months ago. “As video was really exploding online we saw the opportunity to marry those two concepts together.”
Unlike other DIY sites that predominate search engines, such as About, eHow, Expert Village, Videojug and 5min, Howcast utilizes a more entertaining and humorous approach. Some of its most-popular videos are less practical and more tongue-in-cheek in nature, such as “How to find out a girl’s name after you’ve slept with her” and “How to grow grass in someone’s keyboard.”
“We try to take the format of a how-to and make it more exciting and engaging than it would normally be,” said Raman.
In order to boost its video content, Howcast pays filmmakers, mostly students, between $50-100 to produce videos for them.
Assuming to begin with that the hunger for how-to videos is sufficient to be monetizable, I think its safe to say that the market will have to weed out a few of the players here. Thus success over the other video sites that can do the same thing seems to rest with their differentiation. It seems like this differentiation is the quality of videos and entertainment value of the videos–so they have to be able to establish some sort of loyalty from the most creative and talented video producers. Given the immense competition in this area, it seems like this is an exceptionally difficult goal. Furthermore, this seems like a differentiation that is more aligned with some sort of entertainment video site–say one focused exclusively on comedy or drama–than one that ostensibly has a practical “how-to” purpose. Perhaps a focus on making it easy to learn and teach through the site would be more strategically aligned than making the videos funny and in claymation.
This is bring a competitive choice to the on-line market; I believe it will also be a great buyers option for online shoppers like myself. I will join this site todayLa Martina