henrikharsbo.dk

Boo Is Back

I never thought it could happen, but apparently infamous Boo.com is about to bounce back. According to TechCrunch UK the site plans to relaunch some time during 2007.

Boo.com became a metaphor for the dot.com hot air balloon when it burned through $120 million in six months during 1999. Built in Flash (not a commonly used software at the time) by three different development teams spread across the globe the website almost closed before it opened due to lack of money.

I hope Boo's come back is not a sign that history is indeed a cycle and that the balloon is about to burst again ;-)

The Web 2.0 Game

This is a fun blog entry in som many ways. Even I who sees a lot of good in the whole web 2.0 phenomenon has to admit, that there is indeed some truth to the joke:

Thanks to Rune for pointing me to the thing ;-)

The Queen of Denmark and Howard Stern

Knover is a new search engine that attempts to outline relationships between noted personalities and organizations or concepts.

The site works like this: You type in a name, and the search engine will turn up a picture of the person, a small biography, and a list of people connected with the individual. The relations are based on a web search of sites that mention your query and other names.

At times this results in crazy, but quite entertaining, results:

I tried typing "Queen of Denmark" and Knover made a connection to both "Howard Stern" and lead singer in Metallica "James Hetfield".!!??

Not all connections are this far fetched, though!

The company has 16,000 personalities on file at the moment and hopes to expand it to 100,000 in a year or so.

Drive to site

Jellyfish.com now offers a feature called Smack of the Day. It works like this: Every day an undisclosed quantity of an item (e.g an ipod, a camera etc.) will be put up for auction. Starting out at its regular price the items keeps getting cheaper every few seconds.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch describes it like this:

"Users watch the price fall, torn between letting it fall lower and buying the item at the current price before the mystery quantity is sold out [...] On the first day the event was held, 10 people got Apple 2GB iPod Nanos for free. On Friday 50 SD-P1700 Portable DVD Players were sold in the Smack, some for as low at $60. Thursday’s PowerShot SD450 Digital Camera never fell below $100."

To me it sounds like a tremendous idea when it comes to the drive to site-factor that is so important for any web site. I don't have to buy anything. It's amazing to just sit and watch the psychology of buying as it unravels during the auction.