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Gumiyo & Edgeio: Is there a market for mobile classifieds?
Gumiyo lets you post classifieds from your mobile/cell. Edgeio - Michael Arrington’s hyped “edge aggregating” classifieds site started as a blog-listing aggregator, but now appears to be an awkward mix everything-aggregator in the style of Oodle and traditional classified site in the style of Craiglist.
Anyway, a recent press release announced that these two companies are going to be working together. It doesn’t really say how, other than to suggest that Edgeio listings will be browseable on cellphones, and that browsers will be able to contact sellers with text messages or “web-activated telephony” - which I assume is a fancy way of saying “clicking a link to dial a call.”
The question I’d like to ask is: how many people want to search classifieds from their cell phone? What use case does this support? I suppose I could go to a car dealership, find a car that I like, and comparison shop vs. classified listings… that scenario seems to be a reach though. Gumiyo’s tagline is the vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless “connecting buyers and sellers” - the question is, what’s the marginal benefit to connecting them in realtime? eBay and Craigslist have done a good business connecting them asynchronously because that supports observed behaviour - i.e.: people generally like to shop & research from home where all of their resources are at their fingertips, and then go and transact. I don’t imagine Gumiyo/Edgeio’s mobile browsing will enjoy the same level of success.
Gumiyo’s cellular posting, however, is a different story. Posting stuff on ebay or wherever is a PITA - out comes the digicam, take some pictures, dump them to my PC, crop and resize, upload to whatever classifieds site I’m using, etc. Gumiyo - see below - makes this a one step, all mobile process that looks to save a tonne of work (for posting simple items, anyway).
IMHO, Gumiyo would be doing the world a favour if they built hooks into eBay to allow Gumiyo posting to an auction - fast, streamlined, and easy.
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4 Responses to “Gumiyo & Edgeio: Is there a market for mobile classifieds?”
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The most interesting things to read about us are those that reveal where we might not be communicating our value proposition well enough. Thanks, Rod, for taking the time to not pull any punches.
For buyers, Gumiyo is not about searching and browsing for classifieds from you phone (though, you can do that). Gumiyo let’s buyers submit search queries to Gumiyo and then we alert the buyer every time a new listing is posted that matches that query. In this way, Gumiyo is a “personal shopper” that pays attention when new ads come online. The alert comes in the form of an SMS with a link to a WAP page that allows the buyer to review the listing and connect with the seller right away.
There’s actually no clickable phone number to the seller on the listing page. We anonymize the seller’s phone number, whether the buyer attempts to contact via live call or SMS (much like craigslist anonymizes email addresses). In this way, a buyer can reach out to a seller anytime from anywhere as listings come online in real-time. This is especially handy for hard-to-find or in-demand items when “connecting a buyer and a seller” as quickly as possible becomes key.
Before we started Gumiyo, I was selling a great car at a really great price. This guy called, drove 50 miles, and paid full price. The several people who called afterward were really bummed that they missed this deal–if only they could have been alerted and connected to me as soon as I listed it!
For the seller, his listings become even more visible. Edgeio sellers now have reach into the mobile space, and they are available wherever they are. For certain sellers, being immediately available to potential buyers is very important–think real estate agents or car sales. If he misses a communication, he could miss a sale. Being able to communicate directly with an interested buyer is the lifeblood of a salesperson. This will become all the more important as people become increasingly used to using SMS and mobile Web browsing for certain things. We think this makes sense for the mobile environment.
BTW, I’d love to build a mobile app to submit eBay auctions. My guess is that the complexity of the process may require a thick client rather than the basics of SMS, MMS, and WAP. Gumiyo is about simplicity right now, and I’m sure eBay is working on it. Auctions isn’t our thing anyway.
We’ve got a lot of new features in the hopper that will further add value to the buying/selling experience in the mobile classifieds world. Let me know if you’d like me to keep you in the loop as we announce them.
Rich - thanks very much for stopping by and explaining a bit more about Gumiyo. I’m out of time today, but I’ll take a good look when I’m back in two weeks and reply properly then.
Until then, best regards,
–R
I agree Rich…the value ad here should be to the seller…have you seen IQZONE?…saw them at CTIA They are the ones that pioneered this space and they are doing exaclty what you described as the value proposition - Posting from your cell phone as a one step process to all kinds of sites weather it be a ‘craigslist/ebay’ type site or a pay-for site like a cars.com… that I can see useful as it simplifies the process and u can do cool things like auto categorize based on keywords in teh text msg and video…u should check them out…I still think GUMIYO has a decent idea, as people are doing more and more WAP searches…
PS IQZONE they also deal with Edgeio and Oodle like sites and does mobile searching as well it looks like…I just tried it on IQZONE and my listing appeared on both sites..pretty cool…I tried GUMIYO and got a pretty cool WAP page, but then it errored out
We’ll definitely have to look into what errored out! It’s software development, after all. Luckily, we have some brilliant engineers to attack the inevitable programming challenges.
A great idea (IMHO) is likely to have spontaneous genesis in more than one spot independently. We had a live working prototype back in 1996, but there’s probably room in this space for more than one player. We believe there’s a value proposition for both sellers and buyers, and we’ve got some interesting things in development for the buyer. I’ll admit, though, it’s a greater marketing challenge to get to the buyer.