Five Stars for the Dot-Com Revival
What makes Cyworld particularly interesting, though, is its revenue strategy. While most American Web companies depend on advertising-both Ning and Vox are counting on ads as their main source of revenue-Cyworld has a powerful E-commerce component. Since the service started in 1999, the site has sold 160 million songs, making it the second-biggest music store in the world behind iTunes. Its primary source of income, though, comes from $300,000 in daily sales of digital items used to decorate user Web pages. A U.S. version of the site appeared in beta this summer.
Sphere. The goal of this new blog-search technology, CEO Tony Conrad said during its launch demo, is to make the blogosphere "a little less geek oriented." The free service allows users to search across both blog and news pages to find information relevant to what they're reading on one of Sphere's partner sites-expanding the blogosphere "conversation," says Conrad, to the readers of mainstream media.
It works like this: When readers on a member site finish an article about, say, the Democrats' taking control of Congress, they come across a small "Sphere It!" button at the bottom of the page. When they click it, Sphere launches a search that uses the words in the story they just read to find contextually relevant articles in the blogosphere-bringing up a box onscreen with links, for example, to the commentary of a range of popular political blogs. This bridge between media sites and the blogosphere may not make bloggers any less geeky, of course, but it could provide a critical link between two fast-growing, but still separate, worlds on the Web.
Ether. The idea for Ether came to cofounder Scott Faber when he first encountered eBay in the late 1990s. The E-commerce giant had created the ultimate marketplace for products online: Global supply and demand curves met, as sellers and buyers found each other. But products were one thing, Faber thought. What about services? After all, from legal advice to healthcare to financial expertise, there is more to the economy than the exchange of tangible products.
With Ether, Faber may have the beginnings of an answer. Created by Ingenio, a pay-per-call Internet phone company based in San Francisco, Ether offers an online phone service for professional advice. A blogger who's an expert in fixing cars, for example, can add an "Ether" button to his site that will allow readers to call him. He can set his own rates-$10 for 30 minutes, say-and when a reader clicks the button, an Internet phone call is set up between the two. Before the connection is made, both parties must agree on a price; the transaction is then completed electronically. "Your phone will not ring unless you've been paid," says Faber. It may exist only on a small scale, but the services industry is on its way to a website near you.
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