TechCrunch writes today about Zilok.com, a French start up now in the United States that facilitates people renting stuff from strangers… kind of like eBay, but you get the things back. The comments mention several competitors doing the same thing.
Front Porch Forum sees a lot of exchanges like this among nearby neighbors, but without the rental fee. We like to call it “borrowing something from the neighbor.” Some readers with long memories may remember such a practice from days of yore. And, while borrowing, you actually get to know the people who live around you a little better. Gadzooks!
FireEagle sounds interesting. I’m eager to see what grows up around it. From TechCrunch…
Yahoo isn’t just announcing Kickstart this evening. Salim Ismail’s Brickhouse is announcing a very useful new platform service tonight tentatively called FireEagle, which is currently in closed alpha testing. The team is working on the launch name and final launch date now – it’s expected to be open later this month.
FireEagle, which is built entirely on Ruby on Rails, was originally inspired by Yahoo’s ZoneTag research product. It is a platform for controlling people’s location information. Tell it (directly or via a third party application built on FireEagle’s APIs) where you are (give it specific lat/long, or a city name, or a zip code, etc.) and it will note your location. Alternatively, users with GPS phones (or other GPS device) could set it to periodically update FireEagle with geo information.
From TechCrunch today…
Sometimes products are easy to sum up in single sentences, sometimes they are most definitely not. Whrrl, a new site by Pelago, is one of those that eludes definition. Hence, Pelago’s need to describe it unhelpfully as “a seamlessly integrated Web and mobile experience that is social, useful, and fun”.
Let’s start with the fundamentals and go from there. Whrrl is at heart a social network, as are many websites we see these days. But it’s a social network with a purpose (or, several related purposes, as we shall see). Members primarily use Whrrl to share their opinions and knowledge about local outfits, such as restaurants, bars, retail stores, and hotels. In the spirit of Yelp, users can find basic information about establishments and then, more importantly, share reviews of them (with brief descriptions and a star rating system). You can also write simple notes that correspond with particular locations, notes you can choose to share with all Whrrl members or just your friends…
Pelago raised $7.4 million last November from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Trilogy Equity Partners. They are currently running a promotion campaign with American Eagle to get the word out to Whrrl’s target demographic, 18 to late 20 year olds. Robert Scoble recently recorded an interview with Pelago CEO Jeff Holden.
I have no idea if this will be successful… perhaps it will turn into a real champ. What catches my attention is how much venture capital is flowing into dot.com start-ups with silly one-word names that are aimed at gear-heads living in major urban areas who have too much time on their hands. That’s not a knock against Whrrl, just an observation about the online universe.
Perhaps the division I’m groping around is between those who use the internet primarily for entertainment and those who use it as a tool to get things done more efficiently, cheaper, better, etc. Seems like internet-as-entertainment has won the day. Maybe we should start calling PCs mobile devices “the new idiot box.”
Ghost of Midnight just turned one! That’s 12 months of blogging. About 425 posts. One comment for every 2.5 posts. Mostly me tracking the “local online” space and reporting updates about Front Porch Forum and stories lifted from our various neighborhood forums. We get about 100 visitors/day to this blog.
I’ve also read thousands of blog postings over the past year and learned lots… about the topics, about people, and about the medium. There’s a tremendous amount of repetition and amplification in the blogosphere… a kind of conventional wisdom machine. Instead of being in the hands of the old guard traditional media powerbrokers, the conventional-wisdom-setting power has shifted to the blogging elite. And they’re mostly tuned into the big players (“What did Google do today?”) and dot.com start-ups that are following the venture capital model.
Reminds me of the sports page being half filled these days with details of the players’ contracts… and the other half taken up with articles about the Yankees, Cowboys and Lakers. So be it.
eNeighbors is making steady progress in its work in serving neighborhood’s online needs.
26 neighborhoods online.
2,797 registered users at 2,628 unique addresses. We now have neighborhoods in Kansas, Missouri, Florida, Virginia, California, Texas and Arizona.
With 9,745 potential addresses in the neighborhoods that have signed up so far, we are at 27% adoption rate for our entire resident base.
Congratulations eNeighbors!
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more