Archives for year 2007

Dec 26, 2007 Data portability and distributed social networks: concepts that could be applied to social shopping
Every time I hear about a new or emerging social shopping site, I usually repeat the same operations: Create an account, and set up a user profile by adding my points of interest and preferences, Upload a couple of products I own / I like / I want to buy, to start testing the features of the [...]
Dec 23, 2007 Traffic of Google Product Search down 73% YoY
TechCrunch published stats from comScore about the traffic evolution of the Google properties in 2007. If, overall, 2007 is another great year for Google, its shopping service gets the worst evolution with a 73% drop year over year. Nothing really surprising as Google has not really promoted its Product Search for the last year. More [...]
Dec 23, 2007 Site updates (December 07)
I have been pretty silent on the blog during the past weeks. I was busy at Kelkoo, working on the ‘08 product roadmap (with really cool projects in it :) ). And I spent my spare time working on the photo section of the site, pushing new photos and cleaning / re-coding a few pages. New [...]
Dec 22, 2007 A day in Los Angeles - [11 photos]
I was in California to visit the Yahoo! office in Burbank; as I stayed over the weekend, I visited downtown Los Angeles and Beverly Hills on the Saturday afternoon
Dec 22, 2007 Nightly photographs of Trafalgar Square, London - [6 photos]
I often visit the Yahoo! office in London, but I usually do not take time to go visiting and taking photographs. That day was the exception :)
Dec 22, 2007 Around Grenoble - [11 photos]
A small collection of photographies taken in 2007 near Grenoble
Dec 02, 2007 Google pushing online shopping before Christmas
A few days ago, when I reported that Google pushed Product Search in its main navigation, I concluded by saying it was a pity Product Search has not evolved for a long time. Apparently, I have been heard ;) as eCommerceOptimization is reporting some big changes in Product Search: New “compare prices” buttons, including price ranges [...]
Dec 02, 2007 Site updates (November 07)
If you read this blog, I suppose you are either interested in my thoughts on comparative shopping / social shopping (the primary subject of this blog), or you are a friend of mine :) First option, you probably don’t care about posts not related to shopping ; second option, you only care about those (rare) [...]
Dec 02, 2007 Costa Rica - Manuel Antonio National Park - [41 photos]
We spent three days in the village of Manuel Antonio, near the Manuel Antonio National Park, on the Pacific coast. It is said to be one of the most crowded national parks in Costa Rica; [...]
Dec 02, 2007 Costa Rica - Walking in the cloud forests of Monteverde - [31 photos]
After a couple of days on the Pacific coast, we headed up towards Monteverde, up in the mountains covered by forests where clouds and rain is really common. We stayed at the little village of [...]
Dec 02, 2007 Costa Rica - Arenal Volcano - [49 photos]
From Monteverde, we went to La Fortuna, a small village near the Arenal Volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in the world. We spent three days in La Fortuna, to enjoy the views on [...]
Dec 02, 2007 Costa Rica - Cahuita and the Caribbean coast - [39 photos]
We spent three days in Cahuita, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. A very different experience from the rest of the country, a kind of Jamaican way of life with rastas, reggae music...
Dec 02, 2007 Costa Rica - Visiting the Central Valley - [55 photos]
We spent the last week of our trip visiting the Central Valley of the country - San Jose, Alajuela, Sarchi...
Dec 02, 2007 Costa Rica - Visiting La Paz waterfall garden - [65 photos]
We spent one entire day in La Paz waterfall garden, a private park near Virablanca. Amazing place to look at birds, hummingbirds, butterflies, and of course the waterfalls.
Nov 25, 2007 Google pushing Product Search in its top navigation (again)
On its US site, Google has pushed Product Search in its top navigation, replacing the Video link that now appears in the “more” drop-down. In 2006, the Froogle link – previous name of Product Search – was removed from the top tabs in favor of Video. It seems Google is still not really sure what [...]
Nov 19, 2007 Offline shopping to come to CSEs?
Search engine land has today an interesting article on local shopping, listing several companies that provide information on offline stores. The conclusion of the article is: It’s too soon to say whether inventory data will become a “commodity.” However very soon consumers will be able to do online product research and then learn, fairly quickly, where [...]
Nov 16, 2007 Kelkoo to launch its mobile version next week
Next week Kelkoo will launch a mobile version of its comparison engine. In this first phase of roll-out, Kelkoo Mobile (http://m.kelkoo.fr) will only be launched in France (other European markets to come later) and will be compatible with all mobile phones that support XHTML (including of course the Apple iPhone – see iPhone screenshots on [...]
Nov 13, 2007 Become adding social shopping features to its site
Become has recently launched a new version of their site, focused on social shopping improvements. A new registration process lets users define their favorites brands and stores among various personal information; then browsing the site, they can create some wish lists, and “stuff I own / stuff I recommend” lists. There is apparently no way [...]
Nov 12, 2007 Yahoo! Coupon Center has been launched
Yahoo! Shopping US launched the beta of their new Coupon Center last week. This release is quite appealing, very Web 2.0 yet simple to use. As long as you have a Yahoo! account, you can bookmark coupons you are interested in, vote for your favorites one, share them with your friends (using mail or Yahoo! [...]
Nov 12, 2007 Kelkoo and the hListing microformat
Remember what microformats are? In short, an easy way to build a semantic web with the current HTML / CSS standards. The hListing microformat – still a proposal at this point – is a very useful one for the shopping ecosystem. As explained on microformats.org: Individuals and professionals are increasingly publishing their offerings online: whether as [...]
Nov 11, 2007 Back from Costa Rica
I’m back from holidays, after 3 weeks in Costa Rica. Perhaps my best travel so far: from friendly people to wonderful landscapes and astonishing wildlife, this country is truly amazing. Photos to come in the following weeks; as a starter, here is a photo of Arenal volcano seen from the Arenal lake. Back to work [...]
Oct 17, 2007 In holidays for 3 weeks
It has been 10 crazy months. In January, I decided to move from engineering to product team. And since, I had the chance to work on very interesting and intensive projects. I spent the first 6 months of the year on a collaboration project between Kelkoo, Yahoo! Shopping US and Panama team (you know the [...]
Oct 09, 2007 Vercors National Park - Ballad to the "Pas de l'Essaure" - [12 photos]
A autumnal ballad to the "Pas de l'Essaure", an entrance to the Vercors National Park and the Vercors plateau. From there, you have a good panorama on the Mont Aiguille and the Grand Veymont (the [...]
Oct 08, 2007 The new Kelkoo
It has been a very long week (should I say a very long month? :) ). Indeed the launch of a revamped website that has the audience of Kelkoo is not an easy task. You have to take into account a multi-countries deployment on several data centers, you have to follow all the technical (CPUs, [...]
Oct 04, 2007 Green shopping by TheFind
TheFind has recently launched a new variation of their main site: after releasing the new Glimpse, they have put their focus on green products. In a move that is similar to ShopGreen by PriceGrabber, TheFindGreen is basically a view of the classic TheFind site with only green / eco-friendly / fair-trade products. As explained in [...]
Oct 03, 2007 Yahoo! to give more autonomy to Kelkoo
As a Kelkoo insider, I don’t want to comment this news. Still here are a few articles regarding the fact that Yahoo! wants to give more autonomy to Kelkoo: Yahoo ponders Kelkoo’s future (on FinancialTimes) Yahoo considers sale of shopping service Kelkoo, after bad performance (from VentureBeat) Yahoo may sell Kelkoo (on TechCrunch) Yahoo selling Kelkoo (or divesting as [...]
Oct 02, 2007 Live Search 2.0 provides shopping-oriented result pages
Live Search 2.0, the new search engine from Microsoft, have been announced a couple of days ago; but apparently the roll-out of the release has taken a few days as only today have I been able to put my hands on it… Beyond the improvements in search algorithms, what is interesting in this release is [...]
Oct 02, 2007 Kelkoo reloaded
Kelkoo has been relaunched today with a brand new design. Kelkoo Denmark is currently live; more countries to come in the next hours and days, more coverage later today or tomorrow :)
Sep 22, 2007 News…
I’m not blogging a lot these days. I’m pretty busy at work, in the last steps of a big project that will be released in a couple of weeks. I cannot tell you more, but you will understand when it is live :)
Sep 02, 2007 Glimpse acquired by TheFind: Glimpse has already been updated!
TheFind has recently acquired Glimpse, a fashion shopping site for women. The deal was announced only a few days ago (see coverage by TechCrunch), and the integration of the technology from TheFind into Glimpse is already live: the new Glimpse now looks like a white label declination of TheFind. According to Compete, the audience of Glimpse [...]
Aug 25, 2007 New shopping shortcuts in Yahoo! Search
Yahoo! has recently released new shopping shortcuts in their US web search. Read on Yahoo! Search Blog: If you happen to be contemplating your next electronics purchase, I can tell you first-hand that it can be a research-intensive exercise. I was recently tasked with helping select a laptop for my sister who’s starting college in the [...]
Aug 21, 2007 New photos online: Groenland and La Meije
I put online two new photo galleries: The first gallery shows photos of Groenland, taken on a Paris to San Francisco flight. I was lucky enough to see south east coast of Groenland, with a clear sky. The second one shows photos of “La Meije” moutain in the Ecrins National Park. All the photos are here.
Aug 21, 2007 Over the Groenland - [5 photos]
South Groenland through the window of a Paris to San Francisco Air France flight. A lot of photo retouching was required to remove the dust from the window and to tweak saturation.
Aug 20, 2007 Personal Shopper by StyleFeeder
Read on Mashable: StyleFeeder, the social shopping site, is launching a Personal Shopper tool today for you to shop online with your friends. [...] This downloadable tool shows as a sidebar, and lets you quickly access certain aspects of your StyleFeeder account while you browse the net. There’s a built-in chat tool for discussing items online, [...]
Aug 19, 2007 Hiking in the Ecrins national park, with view on La Meije - [15 photos]
An easy hiking in the Ecrins national park, with a wonderful view on La Meije, the ridge of the Ecrins. From the village of La Grave, we took the lift to go to the 1st [...]
Aug 18, 2007 New social shopping app for Facebook, by Yahoo! Shopping
A lot of developers have started to put their hands on the Facebook Platform, the development kit to create embedded apps into Facebook social network. The guys from Yahoo! Shopping US have launched their own Facebook app, named “My Favorite Thing“. This application makes good usage of Yahoo! Shopping APIs, to let Facebook users search products, [...]
Jul 29, 2007 eSwarm is a new Group Buying application
Read on TechCrunch today, eSwarm is a recently launched application for group buying. As I mentioned in an earlier post, group buying was hype in web 1.0 era (with sites like Mobshop in US or Clust in FR) but not really successful (the bubble burst came in). In web 2.0 era, internet users are more [...]
Jul 26, 2007 Web accessibility: Summize has options for color-deficient people
Indirectly related to the Shopping sphere: I recently browsed Summize, an aggregator of product reviews that I covered in March, to see latest features. Unfortunately, they didn’t really improve their search engine since my last visit (that was my main critic at this time); but they added a feature that I found really innovative for [...]
Jul 25, 2007 Photos from Switzerland
At last, I found time to upload photos from our recent holidays in Switzerland. You can find them here and there. Here is another one, took the first day in the little village of Egga (1649m) near Blatten. This was the only good photo from that day, that’s why it’s here in this post, and [...]
Jul 24, 2007 Switzerland - Ballad in the snow from Riederalp to Hohfluh - [13 photos]
The only day with blue sky during our week of holidays in Switzerland. It's end of May, but winter is back : snow has fallen the day before, and we have up to 60cm of [...]
Jul 24, 2007 Switzerland - The Lötschental valley - [24 photos]
Cloudy day to visit the Lötschental valley. Unfortunately, we didn't have the opportunity to do hiking: weather was not good enough. But we still really enjoyed this valley, surely one of the most "authentic" ones [...]
Jul 09, 2007 Zlio Secures $4 million In Series A Funding
Big announcement from Zlio tonight: Mangrove Capital Partners has decided to invest $4M in Zlio. The news is already covered on TechCrunch; and for french readers, there is a really interesting post from Jeremie Berrebi, Zlio CEO, on his blog. The future of Zlio looks promising with a good trend in the number of shops [...]
Jul 09, 2007 News
More than a month without posting on the blog… Well, June was a busy month for me: a new extra project, one week in Paris to be up-to-speed on it, followed by two weeks in California for the other project I’m working on… And strangely enough, I don’t find time to blog when I am [...]
Jul 09, 2007 Near the "Lac de l'Ane" in Belledonne mountain range - [11 photos]
A little hiking near the "Lac de l'Ane" in Belledonne mountain range (French Alps). We had the (half-)surprise to see some bouquetins (mountain goats) at the top. Half, as they are quite often in this [...]
Jun 04, 2007 New green shopping site by PriceGrabber
PriceGrabber has launched a new green section – at shopgreen.pricegrabber.com – where you can find and shop eco-friendly products, from organic clothes to Energy-Star compliant electronic devices. PriceGrabber considers a product as green if it follows one of the following rules: “Energy Star-compliant products” “Products made from organic or recycled materials” “Products made from environmentally-friendly materials including hemp, [...]
Jun 03, 2007 Group buying to re-surface as part of Social Shopping trend ?
TwistImage is a canadian marketing agency. Read on its blog: Currently, the slew of Social Shopping sites are places to rate, evaluate and discuss products – without the direct interference of the brand. The future of Social Shopping is much more exciting. [...] If I were Amazon, I would be interested in selling several thousand books [...]
Jun 02, 2007 Digg to launch product reviews in 6 to 12 months ?
ReadWriteWeb covered TheNextWeb conference that has been held today in Amsterdam, and reported that Digg could launch a product review service as part of a more generic Digg in the following months: “[Kevin Rose] said that Digg are currently working on a big project and in the next 6 to 12 months there will be [...]
Jun 02, 2007 Back from Switzerland…
… after 5 days spent near Brig, in the canton of Valais. We planned to go hiking every day, but the weather said something different: 20+ cm of snow fell at 1300m the first two days… Luckily, we had a clear blue sky on the third day, allowing us to walk and see [...]
May 21, 2007 The Zlio-Amazon imbroglio: what a press!
Today, Zlio announced on their US blog – and via an email to their users – that “one week ago Amazon informed [Zlio] that they no longer wished to have Zlio promote Amazon products in the United States“. It’s indeed a strange move from Amazon that likely rely on their affiliate network. More interesting is [...]
May 21, 2007 DPreview has been acquired by Amazon
Breaking news last week for digital photography passionates: DPreview, the leading independant website dedicated on digital photography, has been acquired by Amazon. Firstly, I didn’t really understand the logic behind this acquisition. Then, I remembered there are already a lot of different shopping placements on the current DPreview site. On reviews (like on the Nikon Coolpix [...]
May 11, 2007 Greenify the shopping experience: Real Costs
RealCosts is “is a Firefox plug-in that inserts emissions data into travel related e-commerce websites. The first version adds CO2 emissions information to airfare websites such as Orbitz.com, United.com, Delta.com, etc. Following versions will work with car directions, car rental, and shipping websites. Think of it like the nutritional information labeling [...]
May 08, 2007 Photography – A single shot in Dublin
Two weeks ago, I visited the Yahoo! offices in Dublin. It was a short stay, and I didn’t really find time to visit the city. I still managed to take a couple of photos in a hurry, but I was only pleased by a single shot taken in the early evening. One of my colleagues [...]
May 04, 2007 Google as shopping engine: another test layout gives some hints
A few days ago, I talked about a new layout Google is testing for its search results, and the emphasis this layout could give to shopping results, potentially results from Google’s own shopping vertical: Product Search. Today, Google Blogoscoped reports Google is testing another Search layout – less radical than Google Categories – but again [...]
Apr 28, 2007 USA - A week-end in San Francisco and Napa Valley - [11 photos]
A week-end in San Francisco and the bay, up to Napa Valley.
Apr 23, 2007 Google Categories – if released – could become a threat for comparison engines / shopping engines
Some sites have reported Google is currently testing a new clustered result page in their main Search: Google Categories Prototype, published April 16th. Google Categories, published April 18th. The published screen shots on those two sites suggest the clustering is “intelligent”, as the clusters can change depending of the query. From a shopping perspective, the results are quite [...]
Apr 23, 2007 Windows Live Product Search: a few improvements (and a note regarding Google Product Search)
A few days after Google’s announcement regarding their new Product Search, the team behind Windows Live Product Search has posted some news regarding their product, mentioning improvements on image coverage, and relevancy. The Windows Live Product Search team rarely posts on their blog, and it’s quite surprising they posted a comment on such “small” and [...]
Apr 19, 2007 Google Product Search, replacing Froogle, is not really innovative
Google just announced Product Search, their new shopping vertical replacing Froogle. The news is important, as it’s Google… But the new product is not that impressive, nor completely different from what Froogle was. Basically, it’s very close from Live Product Search: Same name (“Product Search”) Same concept: search on listings (no product aggregation to compare prices for [...]
Apr 17, 2007 Portfolio – a PHP application to manage photos
In 2003, I started the development of a PHP application, named Portfolio, to easily manage photo albums and photos. Similar PHP scripts existed, but I had lost my previous job, was looking for a new one… So doing some development at home was a good way to spend free time and try to do a [...]
Mar 31, 2007 Miscellaneous news on social shopping and shopping engines (2007-03-31)
(I’m in San Francisco till the end of next week, don’t have much time to blog, but here are a few links) On DmNews: Online shopping is something to talk about. Larger brands have also benefited from the social shopping sites. “When the iPhone was launched in real time we saw more than 100 people add iPhone [...]
Mar 26, 2007 Miscellaneous news on social shopping and shopping engines (2007-03-26)
Big news on the blogosphere this week: Google is testing CPA – cost-per-action - (also called PPA – pay per action) on AdWords. In case of you didn’t read anything about it yet, here is the official announcement on Google blog, and an analysis of this move by TechCrunch. To follow up the discussion on CPA, [...]
Mar 18, 2007 Summize, an innovative aggregator of products reviews
ReadWriteWeb has a really good review of Summize, an innovative aggregator of products reviews. Summize claims to aggregate 4 millions user reviews on 1 million products… Their coverage seems pretty good, but that’s not the big thing. The big thing is the UI !!! Forget the 5-stars pattern to know if a product is good or [...]
Mar 18, 2007 Using Google Base to store photos
A few months ago, I migrated my site from a subdomain (under my provider’s domain) to my own domain (www.nicolasleroy.fr). I tried to do a smooth transition – using 302 redirections – in order to keep my PageRank in Google. All I can say a few months later is that it didn’t work very well [...]
Mar 14, 2007 Comparison shopping in India
Thanks to my RSS feeds, I read an article, entitled “Comparison Shopping in India: current state and what’s in future“, that shows how India presents huge opportunities for new comers in the comparison engine world, and – why not? – for EU and US big players (eBay seems to be very strong in India, providing [...]
Mar 14, 2007 New product comparison UIs are emerging
In the previous months, a few innovative sites – supporting new user interfaces to shop products – have been launched: ShoppingPath (reviewed by ReadWriteWeb, ComparisonEngines) relies on a chart view, to show distribution of products according a criterion of the product family (for instance, browsing digital cameras with “megapixels” on X-axis, and price on Y-axis). The [...]
Mar 04, 2007 “Enhanced preview” on shopping engines: who’s next?
Web 2.0, through AJAX technology, has brought a lot of new patterns for the user interface, some useful, some just fancy and hype. “Enhanced preview” is one of those useful patterns that allows user to get the details of a product without having to click to a detail page. In the world of shopping engines, [...]
Feb 28, 2007 Wikio Shopping: a shopping-oriented digg-like on steroids
Wikio has just launched a new Shopping section on its french site. Currently focused on electronics / computing stuff, it has all the basics of a comparison shopping engine, with a few interesting improvements: Ratings brought by Wikio users for each product transform the category browsing into a powerful shopping-oriented Digg-like The product page (for instance the [...]
Jan 29, 2007 USA - Joshua Tree National Park - [34 photos]
Une visite rapide (4 heures environ) à Joshua Tree National Park, en Californie. Le temps n'était pas aussi clément qu'il y paraît: un vent violent rafraîchissaient considérablement l'ambiance.