uGenie
The Holidays are upon us again and it's time to do all of our gift shopping, but where o'where!?!? One good option is a new comparison shopping engine: uGenie.com, which was launched recently by Krishna Motukuri, a friend and former Amazon.com colleague. In addition to applying a lot of good Web 2.0 design principals, perhaps uGenie's neatest innovation is leeting you shop for a basket of goods across a number of retailers. They also do a much better job helping you to understand the hidden costs and discounts that you will experience at each ecommerce site.

When I was in business school in 1995-1997, we talked a lot about "low barriers to entry" and minimal "switching costs" in the emerging world of ecommerce ("everything is just a click away!"). The thinking was that this would lead to huge numbers of small sellers competing efficiently online. In reality, the first decade of online shopping saw a relatively small number of retailers dominate the majority of sales. This is because only a handful were truly competitive with offline channels on price, selection, and service.

This is changing, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out on 11/16/06 in an article titled "Web Pioneers eBay and Amazon Face a Threat From Older Retailers." I believe that the 2006 holiday season is shaping up as one of the first years where large numbers of consumers will really want to shop around at a number of etailers. This, combined with the fact that most comparison shopping engines fall short on creating apples to apples comparisons, means that uGenie is a perfectly timed gift!

Yelp!

I spent a couple of years at Amazon.com building a Yellow Pages application and though we came up with a number of cool features, we never realized the full potential for the space. Yelp.com, one of the startups in the space has continued to execute very well and really wrapped a lot of social content into the experience.

I'm really impressed with the work they have done. Check out my profile here: http://barnaby.yelp.com.

Cool Wast of Time

I just discovered this site, Likebetter.com, where you choose what you like better between two images after 10-20 choices, the site guesses things about you. It's sort of like a personality test. I signed up and have chosen quite a few. One of the features allows you to be compared to a friend. Click here to see how similar we are: http://likebetter.com/areyoulike/bdorfman

Blogging 2 Days in a Row!!!

One of the things I've been experimenting with is http://www.prosper.com, it's a community based lending service. Really interesting stuff, check it out. I funded a few hundred bucks into my account and am testing out making a few loans. It's very well organized and could become a great alternative for both borrowers and lenders to cut out a lot of the spread currently collected by the banks.

The other thing I did recently was to post a short documentary on Youtube.com. It's somthing I shot with a few friends in Seattle four years ago. We spent a day at Pike Place Market shooting street performers doing their acts and then interviewing them. Since my childhood in New York, I've always been fascinated by street performers and wanted to better understand the life behind the acts. Give it a watch and let me know what you think.

Fall Post...

I continue to do a poor job of posting frequently, so here are a few high level updates.

Still living in Palo Alto and working for Peerflix.com as VP of Product. Most recently been traveling for work a fair amount including a media tour to New York and then a trip to LA to attend the Digital Hollywood conference. The ongoing explosion of video and user generated content on the web is amazing. As much growth as we've seen this year with YouTube, I predict even more growth in 2007. In particular, I expect we will see more subject matter specific user generated video content. Furthermore, the tools for creating and sharing will improve dramitically beyond the current 10 minute/100 Mb limits. Some of the interesting sites/companies I recently learned about:

http://www.dabble.com
http://www.click.tv
http://www.guba.com
http://www.pando.com
http://www.dave.tv
http://www.jumpcut.com

Earlier this year Sheri and I started Avenida to import leather handbags from Argentina. Here are a few videos I created during a buying trip in February...





Well, that's about it for now, I'll try to be better about posting...really, I will!!!