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	<title>Mike Butcher &#187; Retail</title>
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		<title>Videocast: Interview with Seatwave</title>
		<link>http://mbites.com/2007/06/07/videocast_interview_with_seatwave/</link>
		<comments>http://mbites.com/2007/06/07/videocast_interview_with_seatwave/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Mike Butcher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Funding]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Retail]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tbites]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dev.mbites.com/?p=142</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Click To Play This week tbites interviewed Joe Cohen, CEO of UK startup Seatwave, the fan-to-fan ticket exchange. You might think selling unwanted tickets to concerts and events is a market normally populated by ticket touts and those selling on eBay &#8211; and you&#39;d be right. But Seatwave hopes to bring some order and safety [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><center>															<script src="http://blip.tv/scripts/pokkariPlayer.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script src="http://blip.tv/syndication/write_player?skin=js&amp;posts_id=260088&amp;source=3&amp;autoplay=true&amp;file_type=flv&amp;player_width=&amp;player_height=" type="text/javascript"></script>
<div id="blip_movie_content_260088"><a href="http://blip.tv/file/get/Mbites-InterviewWithJoeCohenCEOSeatwavecom753.flv" onclick="play_blip_movie_260088(); return false;"><img src="http://blip.tv/file/get/Mbites-InterviewWithJoeCohenCEOSeatwavecom753.flv.jpg" title="Click To Play" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://blip.tv/file/get/Mbites-InterviewWithJoeCohenCEOSeatwavecom753.flv" onclick="play_blip_movie_260088(); return false;">Click To Play</a></div>
<p>										</center>  <br /> This week tbites interviewed Joe Cohen, CEO of UK startup <a href="http://www.Seatwave.com">Seatwave</a>, the fan-to-fan ticket exchange. You might think selling unwanted tickets to concerts and events is a market normally populated by ticket touts and those selling on eBay &#8211; and you&#39;d be right. But Seatwave hopes to bring some order and safety to this market, estimated to be worth around &pound;1bn a year in the UK alone. It has even given evidence to the Parliamentary Committee looking at ticket touting in the UK. This week it raised $8 million in Series B funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, Atlas Venture and Oliver Jung, one of Germany&rsquo;s most successful early stage business angels. <a href="http://blip.tv/file/255554?filename=Mbites-InterviewWithJoeCohenCEOSeatwavecom753.mov">(Quicktime format)</a></p>
<p>Although it&#39;s not going to be a cake-walk. Viagogo.com, launched last year by Eric Baker of US ticket reseller StubHub, is a well funded competitor in the UK, having raised $20m from Index Ventures and others. It is also backed by lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman and David Katz, head of Yahoo&rsquo;s sports and entertainment unit.</p>
<p>Seatwave says it already has over 400,000 tickets for sale on the site, 20 times more than eBay. Hitwise stats put the site in the top 15 of the ticketing website category.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>mbites Podcast: The customer is king of Reevoo</title>
		<link>http://mbites.com/2006/05/23/mbites_podcast_the_customer_is_king_of_reevoo/</link>
		<comments>http://mbites.com/2006/05/23/mbites_podcast_the_customer_is_king_of_reevoo/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Mike Butcher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[mbites]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Retail]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dev.mbites.com/?p=234</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The mbites.com podcast this week features an interview with Richard Anson, CEO of Reevoo.com, a new UK-based start-up. The idea behind Reevoo is that customers can only review products they&#8217;ve actually bought, rather than the millions of half-baked reviews out there on things people have barely looked at. It is also a handy CRM exercise [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbites/151856150/" title="Revoo"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/47/151856150_5b19b19661_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Richard Anson, CEO, Revoo" /></a>
</p>
<p>
The <a href="http://www.mbites.com/">mbites.com</a> podcast this week features an interview with Richard Anson, CEO of <a href="http://www.reevoo.com/">Reevoo.com</a>, a new UK-based start-up.
</p>
<p>
The idea behind Reevoo is that customers can only review products they&#8217;ve actually bought, rather than the millions of half-baked reviews out there on things people have barely looked at. It is also a handy CRM exercise for online retailers. But listen to the podcast to get the full story.<br />
<!--break-->
</p>
<p>
Download the MP3 file here (approx 12MB, 13 minutes long) or subscribe to the <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/MikeButcher-MbitesPodcasts">podcast feed</a>.
</p>
<p>
This is the latest in a series of regular mbites podcasts, generously hosted at London private members club, <a href="http://adamstreet.co.uk">Adam Street</a>.
</p>
<p>
If you&#8217;d like to be a guest on the next Bitecast, where we&#8217;ll be documenting some of the most interesting new developments in digital and mobile media, contact <a href="http://mbites.com/contact">Mike Butcher</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Open-sourced bar codes for crafts-people?</title>
		<link>http://mbites.com/2006/02/02/open-sourced_bar_codes_for_crafts-people/</link>
		<comments>http://mbites.com/2006/02/02/open-sourced_bar_codes_for_crafts-people/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Mike Butcher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mbites]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Retail]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tech]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dev.mbites.com/?p=136</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Here in Helsinki I met up with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, Researcher, at the University of Helsinki. She has some fascinating ideas about the &#8220;Long Tail&#8220;. In part because of creating Hobbyprincess.com, which was about how you get girls developing technology and blogging about crafts, she got interested in the idea that the stuff which people make [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbites/92690085/" title="Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, Researcher at the University of Helsinki"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/26/92690085_7de3ad5c1f_t.jpg" width="100" height="75" alt="Photo_012706_009" /></a><br />

<p>
Here in Helsinki I met up with <a href="http://ullamaaria.typepad.com/">Ulla-Maaria Mutanen</a>, Researcher, at the University of Helsinki. She has some fascinating ideas about the &#8220;<a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html">Long Tail</a>&#8220;.
</p>
<p>
In part because of creating <a href="http://hobbyprincess.com/">Hobbyprincess.com</a>, which was about how you get girls developing technology and blogging about crafts, she got interested in the idea that the stuff which people make &#8211; perhaps a coat or a sculpture &#8211; will drop off the &#8216;long tail&#8217; because it can&#8217;t be categorised digitally, unlike mass produced items which all have bar codes and unique product codes and identifiers.
</p>
<p>
She met Jimbo Wales from Wikipedia at a conference and has gone onto to produce a sort of product-code-generating wiki called <a href="http://thinglinks.com/">Thinglinks.com</a>.
</p>
<p>
&#8220;Thinklink.org is designed to test the theory about what happens when product codes are attached to things which are hand made,&#8221; she explained to me.
</p>
<p>
Currently there is no site that aggregates things which are non-mass manufactured.
</p>
<p>
So for instance <a href="http://etsy.com/">Etsy.com</a> has an item code for things which are sold on the site which are hand made, but once it&#8217;s sold, the item will drop off the digital map. It won&#8217;t be part of the Long Tail, where niche products can find markets.
</p>
<p>
Why is this important? Well, consider the small producer who normally has to deal with middle-men, retailers and wholsalers to find a market. Or even craftspeople in the developing world, who don&#8217;t have access to the &#8216;barcode&#8217; market.
</p>
<p>
This is almost an open sourced, Creative Commons approach to bar codes, which could benefit small-scale producers.
</p>
<p>
Ulla is now developing the ThingLink database. It will be fascinating to see what happens.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Sweden&#8217;s eBay ain&#8217;t eBay (Scandinavia Trip Part 2)</title>
		<link>http://mbites.com/2006/01/23/swedens_ebay_aint_ebay_scandinavia_trip_part_2/</link>
		<comments>http://mbites.com/2006/01/23/swedens_ebay_aint_ebay_scandinavia_trip_part_2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Mike Butcher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[mbites]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Retail]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dev.mbites.com/?p=126</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Stockholm trip Part 2, Jan 23: I met and interviewed the two founders of Sweden&#8217;s biggest online auction, Tradera.com. Although it&#8217;s an easy pitch to call them an eBay copy, in fact these like-able young entrepreneurs started and stuck with the auction business right the way through massive competitions from outside players like eBay and [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>
<strong>Stockholm trip Part 2, Jan 23:</strong> I met and interviewed the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbites/92247077/">two founders</a> of Sweden&#8217;s biggest online auction, <a href="http://www.tradera.com/">Tradera.com</a>. <br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbites/92247077/" title="Tradera"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/25/92247077_508b57dd23_t.jpg" width="100" height="75" alt="Photo_012306_004" /></a><br />
<br />Although it&#8217;s an easy pitch to call them an eBay copy, in fact these like-able young entrepreneurs started and stuck with the auction business right the way through massive competitions from outside players like eBay and QXL, and the dotcom nuclear winter of 2001-2003. They have emerged with 90% of the Swedish auctions market. In other words they out-ebay&#8217;d ebay.
</p>
<p>
Now, instead of having to sell the contents of their attic to only three people in the local hamlet, Swedes can sell to all 9 million of their countrymen online. In fact, for many, snapping up items in the newspaper classifieds and then wacking them into Tradera.com has become a lucrative second or even first new income stream. Vintage clothing is now the largest category on site, as Swedes try top up their heavily taxed incomes through auctions.
</p>
<p>
His partner Daniel says: &#8220;Right we&#8217;re in a transition phase where the Internet population is maturing. It&#8217;s going from a behaviour which is to just read, to one where people search and then start to act online.&#8221;
</p>
<p>
Some 50-60,000 items are listed every day &#8211; 10 times as much as the biggest classified sites.
</p>
<p>
As co-direct Jonas Nordlander says, their success is partly down to the weather: &#8220;It&#8217;s COLD to stand outside and do a yard sale in Sweden!&#8221;</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Online house buying just got easier</title>
		<link>http://mbites.com/2005/08/17/online_house_buying_just_got_easier/</link>
		<comments>http://mbites.com/2005/08/17/online_house_buying_just_got_easier/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Mike Butcher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[mbites]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Retail]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dev.mbites.com/?p=164</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As someone who has tried in vain to find a decent site to buy a house from, I have to say, this is going to be big. I know people who have been trying to create this kind of thing for ages. Guess what? Just get a Google Maps API and off you go. Fun [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>As someone who has tried in vain to find a decent site to buy a house from, I have to say, <a href="http://ononemap.com/map/">this</a> is going to be big. I know people who have been trying to create this kind of thing for ages. Guess what? Just get a Google Maps API and off you go. Fun times ahead&#8230;</p>
<p><!--break--></p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Would you like to buy that sir?</title>
		<link>http://mbites.com/2005/05/24/would_you_like_to_buy_that_sir/</link>
		<comments>http://mbites.com/2005/05/24/would_you_like_to_buy_that_sir/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Mike Butcher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[mbites]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Retail]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dev.mbites.com/?p=795</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[That&#8217;s what the RFID tags will be asking shoppers innocently carrying around stuff in Seattle from this week.]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>That&#8217;s what the RFID tags will be asking shoppers innocently carrying around stuff in Seattle from <a href="http://www.thestandard.com/internetnews/001308.php">this week</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Amazon allows picture reviews &#8211; beat that, Which</title>
		<link>http://mbites.com/2004/10/24/amazon_allows_picture_reviews_-_beat_that_which/</link>
		<comments>http://mbites.com/2004/10/24/amazon_allows_picture_reviews_-_beat_that_which/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Mike Butcher</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[mbites]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Retail]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://dev.mbites.com/?p=501</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Amazon.com is allowing consumers to share their photos alongside product descriptions. In their guidelines they say you can post images that highlight a feature of the product (&#8220;here&#8217;s what the controls on this music player looks like&#8221;); images that show the product in use, etc etc. It&#8217;s the new new thing in consumer reviews. Beat [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Amazon.com is allowing consumers to share their photos alongside product descriptions. In their <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-images/customer-image-guidelines.html/002-5951727-5803212?%5Fencoding=UTF8&#38;asin=B0001MBJHK&#38;store=generic">guidelines</a> they say you can post images that highlight a feature of the product (&#8220;here&#8217;s what the controls on this music player looks like&#8221;); images that show the product in use, etc etc. It&#8217;s the new new thing in consumer reviews. Beat that <a href="http://www.which.net">Which</a>.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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