Going Out Is Social, Why Shouldn't Local Discovery Be? | The Hoppit Perspective

Choosing a place is very social. Think about it. You decide where to go with other people. You desire to read reviews from people like you. And, you want to go to places that can be enjoyed by the entire group.

But social place searching is hard to do, and the existing players in the market struggle to be social.

For example, let’s pick on Yelp. Yelp struggles to be social because it is impossible to run a search query that accounts for the preferences of multiple users, even though we rarely eat or drink alone. Yelp also struggles to instill trust in its review system because users don’t know the taste of the reviewers – and how can you trust a user that you don’t know?

The same goes with CitySearch, Ness, and Alfred. All these technologies are set up for individual restaurant searches. But every time I eat, it's with other folks.

At Hoppit, we believe that the future of place searching is social, and we designed Hoppit with that consumer psychology in mind. Hoppit is pioneering the concept of social place searching; our search engine and complex algorithms can take into account the taste of multiple users. We're striving to always have an answer to the question - "What should we do tonight?"

Next time your group is trying to decide where to go, check out Hoppit.

Kudos to eBay's Corporate Strategy Team. GSI + Where + Magento = Awesome

eBay's GSI Commerce acquisition, followed by its Where.com acquisition, followed by its Magento acquisition (today) - are the fruits of a very intricate Corporate Strategy. And that strategy will have VERY interesting implications for the future.

Let's take this one step at a time.

1) eBay acquires GSI Commerce. This, in my opinion, is genius. It gives eBay the ability to rival its chief competitor - Amazon.com - by giving them an immediate global logistics network. It also gives eBay the experience to serve mid-size to large retailers in a MUCH more a effective way, as GSI has many notable large retailers. Up to this point, they had been getting beat silly by Amazon in the mid to large size game. GSI's shipping infrastructure levels the playing field.

2) eBay acquires Where.com. Again, great acquisition. Where.com has reach into 120,000 retailers - both large and small, and therefore is a significant participant in the Local Commerce space (which everyone is trying to win right now). What can eBay do with Where.com? Oh, I don't know - only give its ENORMOUS retail base access to intelligence on local markets in real-time. This is huge - especially for retailers with both a brick-and-mortar presence and an eCommerce and mCommerce preserence.

3) eBay acquires Magento - Magento, being the open source eCommerce platform with 90,000 SMB retailers and 1,000 large Enterprise retailers. Magento, also being the first open source mCommerce platform - not to mention the company which recently launched Magento Go, hosted eCommerce for SMBs and emerging businesses. Magento, the company that has Apple's verison of the app store, but for eCommerce retailers - an eCommerce app store, basically. This acquisition gives eBay an incredible retail reach and great additions to its technology portfolio.

So now we have eBay + PayPal + GSI + Where + Magento. Wow. Imagine the possibilities! eBay is well positioned to do many significant things -

• Amazon, beware! The eBay marketplace can overtake Amazon as the market leader. eBay can now offer sellers so many tools and technologies and sophistication (a la GSI and Magento), as well as more channels (Magento and Where.com).
• So. Many. Synergies. GSI and Magento retailers can take advantage of lots of PayPal innovation in the payments space. Where.com can also provide a lot of intelligence layers to GSI and Magento retailers.
• Local, Local, Local. eBay is eCommerce + mCommerce + global + social - and now local. Here's a little forward-looking note: watch out for eBay to rise up as a leading hyper-local services provider for retailers. In the future, eBay can help you reach local consumers in real-time.

So, all in all, I'm quite impressed with eBay's corporate strategy group. Kudos.

Now the only thing is - execution. Which is quite the tricky beast.

Best of luck, eBay.

-Steve