eBay Motors founder Simon Rothman announced on Monday that he has officially launched a new e-commerce site, Glyde.
According to the press release, Glyde's goal "is to democratize e-commerce." The site was born out of Rothman's desire to make it easier for Web users to buy and sell products online.
But Glyde throws in a twist. The site's marketplace is designed for Web users to sell used goods. They can sell books, CDs, DVDs, and video games.
"The average American household has $3,000 worth of unwanted media collecting dust," Rothman said in a statement. "We built a service that makes buying and selling a used DVD as simple as trading a share of Disney stock. It's the NASDAQ for physical goods."
It's an interesting take on what Glyde is all about. But after using the site for awhile, I would agree that it does make it extremely easy to buy and sell goods.
Glyde lets you search for DVDs, CDs, Games, or books.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Glyde's design is extremely simple. If you decide you want to buy some products, you can flip through the listing of available inventory, pick what you want, and learn more about it by clicking on it without much trouble. Unlike sites like Amazon or eBay, which deliver you to a product's individual page listing, Glyde displays the listing over the search results. When you're done looking at it, simply click the "X" at the top right of the panel and you'll be returned to your spot in the results.
Placed prominently on all product pages is a "Buy Now" button. Users have the option of buying a used copy of the product from a seller or a new copy.
Glyde shows off a product listing.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Glyde's buying process isn't all that unique. It's standard fare. And even though it offers discounted pricing, I just don't think it competes well against Amazon's Marketplace or eBay. Those sites have far more products, competitive pricing, and simpler checkout processes. Unless Glyde can improve upon that, it might have a problem.
But it's Glyde's selling side that will probably appeal most to users. The site makes it incredibly simple to sell products. Users need only to list the product, set a sales price, and wait for someone to buy. Once they do, Glyde sends them a prestamped, preaddressed mailer. Sellers need to insert the item they're selling into the mailer and place it in their mailbox. Once the buyer receives the product, the funds are deposited into the seller's account, less the cost of the mailer and Glyde's fee, which is 10 percent of the sales price.
Even better, those selling products on Glyde can opt for the proceeds to go to the charity of their choice. It's a nice option.
Glyde provides a simple, efficient e-commerce solution. But by taking on giants eBay and Amazon in the used-goods market, it will be difficult for the company to stay relevant and capture significant market share.
Automakers have been in the news quite a bit lately. The future of some is very much in doubt. And since the economy is hitting most of us quite hard, I thought it appropriate to take a look at sites that help us find high-quality used cars.
Many of the sites in this alphabetical roundup will provide the research and information you require before you buy a car. Others will allow you to find cars in your area or buy them right on the site. Either way, they're all worth a look.
AOL Autos AOL provides some of the best informational resources on the Web, if you're looking for a car. Whether it's reviews from some of its experts, information on sales, or news, the site has it all. It's a full-featured resource that you'll want to check out.
Automotive.com provides outstanding research.
(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)Automotive.com Automotive.com is a huge site offering car availability in your area, research pages, and loan information. But where it really shines is in its reviews, which provide everything from value and pricing to quality and miles-per-gallon information. It's a very useful site.
AutoTrader.com AutoTrader makes it easy to find used cars for sale and even lets you sell your own car right on the site. But if you're looking to research some models, the site's "Research and Compare" page enables you to find the right car for you based on its make, model, type, and price range. All of the reviews are informative.
Carfax Don't even consider buying that used car until you consult Carfax with its Vehicle Identification Number. Once you get to Carfax, you can input the VIN into the search field, and the site will return the vehicle's history report. The report details past owners, when it was manufactured, where it has been registered, and most importantly, whether it has been through a major accident. It's a paid service (one report will run you $29.99), but it's a necessary step in buying a used car.
CarGurus A community of car lovers combined with vehicle information, CarGurus is a nice site, if you want to find out about a car from those who already have owned it. The site has active discussion forums, which are helpful when you need to ask questions. And its research pages and automobile history reports are worth checking out. But the real value of CarGurus is in those forums.
CarMax Much like AutoTrader and Cars.com (below), CarMax provides you with research information on cars in which you're interested. It also allows you to find cars for sale in your area so you can find what you're looking for sooner. And if you're looking to get rid of your old vehicle, the site will buy your car from you for its estimated value. It then sells the car on CarMax to turn a profit.
Cars.com has some outstanding reviews.
(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)Cars.com Cars.com is one of the best ways to learn about vehicles in which you might be interested. Its research menu boasts outstanding reviews on practically every car dating back nearly a decade. The site's shopping-advice page comes in handy when you want to determine the real value of a vehicle. It's a must-see before you start your search for a used car.
CarShopSmart CarShopSmart, affiliated with AutoTrader, is a nicely designed site that might be useful. If you want to research vehicles, it boasts some basic information. But the focus of the site is on finding a car in your area or locating dealers close to your home. Unfortunately, though, the size of its vehicle database is a little too small for my liking.
CarZen If you'd like some car-buying advice, CarZen may be the place to find it. From negotiating tactics to in-depth vehicle information, the site will provide you with all the resources you need to place a strong offer. It even helps you find the right car with the help of its fantastic tool, CarConsult. Try it out. You might be surprised by what you find.
Consumer Reports Consumer Reports provides outstanding car reviews, and its simple scoring system helps you quickly determine if a car is for you. The reviews aren't as in-depth as they are on other sites, but what Consumer Reports lacks in quantity, it makes up for in trustworthiness.
Craigslist Craigslist might be a classifieds site, but it's a great place to find cars that are available in your area. Whether you're buying a vehicle or are putting your own up for sale, you can do your research elsewhere and then hit the popular listings site. A variety of vehicles in any price range are always listed.
... Read more
Tendril shows off its iPhone app for monitoring home power use.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)PALM DESERT, Calif.--At Demo 09, new conference honcho Matt Marshall led a panel where three companies showcased their new technologies to save power, and with it, they hope, the planet.
Google's Thomas Sly started by comparing buying power to what it would be like if you bought groceries without an itemized receipt--just one bill when you left the store. Google's goal is to collect and help distribute the data on power use, which, Sly says, will encourage people to consume less.
Google is currently in a test with about 100 devices that track power use, and that should grow to about 200 soon, Sly said.
The goal is to get 50 percent of households to cut 10 percent of their power. Sly said that would be as much as all the solar and wind power now produced in the U.S., or the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road.
Tendril's CEO, Adrian Tuck, showed off hardware devices that monitor and control AC power. Small devices plug in between an outlet and an appliance or lamp, and transmit power use to a home device that then puts the data on a Web service where consumers can see what they're using. The devices also control power (turning off lights, for example). Tuck showed an iPhone interface that told the user not just how much power they were using but that also let him turn on and off outlets, or change his whole house to a different power-using profile.
AMEE, "the world's energy meter," sent Vice President Robin Baker to pitch his company's goal to create the global platform for tracking energy used (and thus carbon consumed or emitted) "for everything on the planet."
The overarching theme of this panel is that these companies are all working on the same thing: collecting information about power consumption. It appears that they are also moving to shared data, so that, for example, data from Tendril devices can feed both Google and AMEE databases.
However, the picture from Washington, D.C., is not so rosy. As we reported earlier today, our power grid isn't currently set up to collect and distribute this information.
Useful Networks, a mobile location firm that has been operating in the U.K. and Scandinavia, announced Monday that it has brought its mobile and Facebook-integrated friend finder, Sniff, to the U.S. through the Sprint Network.
Sniff allows users to find friends automatically and in real-time and provides them with exact coordinates to let them know exactly where they are throughout the day. In order to alert its users to their friend's location, Sniff automatically sends a text message to their mobile phone or a note through the company's Facebook application.
Once users ask to follow friends, Sniff requests the friends permission. As soon as confirmation is received and it's determined that both individuals are Sprint customers, Sniff starts providing the user with a detailed map view of their friend's location in real-time. But if friends don't want their locations revealed, they have the option of becoming "invisible" through the Sniff service.
"There is inherent value in allowing your close friends and family to know where you are but only when you want them to," Useful Networks CEO Brian Levin said in a statement. "Friends can now 'sniff' each other out easily and quickly. That is, if they want to be found. You can easily become 'invisible' if you'd rather not be 'sniffed out.'"
The major issue facing Sniff is privacy. Few people really want others to know where they are at all times, and the company claims that it understands that. In order to combat the obvious privacy issues, Levin was quick to point out that all users are given notice and asked for consent. His company also provides multiple confirmation notices to new users reminding them of their current privacy status.
"Privacy is the most important aspect of Sniff," said Levin. "With varying permission levels, Sniff allows consumers to manage if, when, and how their location information is shared with other parties. In addition, users have the ability to set up notifications via SMS of key events, such as being located or invited by another user to be part of the Sniff network."
Registering for Sniff is free, but all users are charged $0.25 "per sniff" from a Sprint device, which are applied to the user's mobile bill. Standard text messaging rates on top of the Sniff's fee charges still apply.
You love this story and you want to Digg it. Or maybe you want to put it on Reddit. Or maybe you're just in love with Delicious and feel like saving the story there. We're open to anything, but we don't always know your tastes.
The same goes for a lot of sites, which is where Add to Any has created a really smart sharing tool that will read your browser's mind instead. Well, actually it will just give your history a once over to do the heavy lifting. Based on where you've been the most, relevant sites for sharing will come up in the very top of the menu. If none are there you can also expand the menu downward to choose from one of the 200 other sharing and bookmarking sites.
It's not unlike other competing services that do the same thing (ShareThis and Add This), although it's the only one of the three giving people targeted sharing options based on what they're probably using. In case you're wondering what happens if you've got your browser history turned off or are working off a public computer, the top of the list will just revert to the dozen most popular sites by use.
I've embedded the widget below. Feel free to give it a spin.
The nonpartisan alliance that formed this spring to advocate the open use of presidential-debate footage isn't very happy about Fox News' cease-and-desist letter to Republican presidential candidate John McCain's campaign over a McCain ad that used footage from a Fox-sponsored debate.
On Thursday, the nameless group announced that it has called on Fox to rescind the letter, as well as related missives to other Republican presidential candidates.
The McCain camp, meanwhile, has continued to air the ads, claiming that using 19 seconds of a 90-minute debate constitutes fair use.
"John McCain deserves praise for taking on Fox and opposing corporations (that) want to be gatekeepers of political speech," MoveOn.org representative Adam Green said in a statement that had been issued by the online leftist hub on behalf of the group.
The left-right alliance is helmed by Stanford law professor and copyright reform advocate Larry Lessig, and it counts a host of new-media luminaries among its ranks: Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, Craigslist's Craig Newmark, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, MoveOn founder Eli Pariser, and Redstate co-founders Mike Krempasky and Erick Erickson. In April, shortly after forming, the group issued letters to the Democratic and Republican national headquarters, "calling for presidentia- debate video to be liberated--so that footage could be freely excerpted, shared, blogged, and YouTubed," according to a statement.
Eventually, CNN, ABC, and NBC/MSNBC responded to the initiative, announcing varying degrees of "openness" for debate footage. Fox News and other Fox broadcasting stations have not participated, and some right-leaning members of the open-debate alliance have indicated that they may encourage Republicans to follow the Democrats' lead in shunning the News Corp. division.
"Already, Fox is viewed as a partisan network by the Democrats, who will not use that forum for debates," said Redstate's Erickson. "It would be a shame if the Republicans now shut out Fox altogether from the debate process. Every other news organization has liberated their debate footage, and Fox should either be no different or no longer have the privilege of airing debates."
Fox has not yet responded to the organization's criticism.
PreClick announced its photo-messaging service last week at the Demo conference. The free app, called Instant Photo Messenger (or IPM) lets you share photos with others using a simple drag-and-drop interface. On the receiving end, users with the IPM software installed get a taskbar notification letting them know photos have been sent their way. They can then view the shots without leaving the program.
(Credit:
Preclick)
IPM doubles as an e-mail program of sorts, letting you send photo messages to any e-mail address. You also have a contact list, as you would on any other instant-messenging client. Contacts are added automatically after the first time you send them some photos.
IPM also automatically resizes your photos, making it simpler to fit more photos into one message and stay under the 10 MB cap of most Web mail applications. It also lets you view received photos as a slide show. If you use Apple's Mail program, then you're likely used to these features.
PreClick's IPM service is an interesting take on sharing photos. I find it effortless to send shots to friends using regular Web mail, but I can see how some might find it difficult on the receiving end if they're not sure how to view attachments. Another option is to use a photo-sharing service such as Webshots, Flickr, or Yahoo photos and send your friend or relative a URL to that photo set. PreClick's IPM may make it easier to share and view photos, but requiring a Windows-only install on the recipient's side to enjoy some of the cooler features such as slide shows is a big barrier to entry.
- prev
- 1
- next
