Google is our answer to everything be it writing a Master’s thesis, looking for a new car, a new job, doing your homework or putting together an analysis on a fortune 500 stock. I, for one, use Google every single day to get to the bottom of which ever startup I’m writing about. Yet, Google is not perfect and its job is getting harder by day when the amount of information on the web grows. And it grows very very rapidly.
This is something that Kristofer Kimbler, CEO of Azouk, has also recognized when he started working on his latest venture. Azouk is a Swedish online service for professionals that provides an alternative way to reach the best content and information and to ‘meet’ top experts. The company’s HQ is in Malmö, Sweden, but marketing and sales in UK and R&D in Poland. Kimbler who was previously at Appium Technologies that was acquired by Aepona Ltd. In June 2007. Appium Technologies developed telecom application servers based on the Parlay OSA and VoIP standards.
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There’s no “One way” to do search. Traditional search engines compete for space and co-exist with nisched, inspirational, visual, social and now with the latest trending topic, real-time search. As the blogosphere with user generated content keeps growing, the search space keeps expanding with it. Our personal online presence increases through social networking etc. which means we need to keep track of our own digital footsteps, preferably real-time.
Regardless of the lack of an existing business model, search remains a very attractive space, and within past three months, three Swedish players have been added to the fields of nisched, visual and real-time search.
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Auktionsfynda, Swedish online auction search engine service launched today. It’s focusing on listing the auctions about to close, thus triggering the great feeling of satisfaction when finding the best bargain. The service initially indexes five auction sites (Tradera, Auktionskompaniet, Brabud, Metropol, Lauritz) and is planning to add two more in the next coming weeks. For time being only Swedish auction sites are included.
Auktionsfynda is a service with a simple search and clean GUI, the main page displaying random selection of items that have 10, 30 or 60 min. left to bid. The search results include a short description of an item, time left to bid and link directly to the respective auction. No transactions, nor bidwatching is handled by the service, at least not yet. I think on demand notifications on auctions closing shortly would add value, since many of the bidwatching applications and services on the market are made service specific, especially for eBay.
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Booli is a real estate search engine service in Sweden where the market demand for Internet search is reaching new heights. According to a recent study (in Swedish) done by Skandiamäklarna, 84% of the buyers find their new home today via Internet, showing a 25% growth just from last year.
The service doesn’t require registering and is free for both users and the over 600 real estate agencies in Sweden. By registering to the service one can for example save a search profile to receive notifications for matching objects. The real estate agencies are offered to add and update information on the objects they have for sale. Booli indexes and updates all available objects once a day, always linking back to the origin of the object descriptions.
The company is privately owned by its 10 employees together with private investors and the Firm Factory Network. The business model is based on advertising focused on the services close to housing, such as insurance, electricity suppliers, banking and broadband.
I sat down with Anders Kyhlstedt, VP Marketing, to talk about what’s been going on since Booli left beta in the beginning of this year and how they are copying with the current economic state affecting the real estate business.
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