Yepic: Buying and Selling Content Seemlessly
I want to write this story. The story of a great company being formed right here in Utah. I predict it will contribute most to the changing of how information is bought and sold. It challenges old school media and power.
In the past many of the tools that do this have been for geeks. Geeks that get mad when someone ruins their fun by getting money involved. Geeks that want to protect their fortresses by making the barrier to entry too high for the average person to scale.
This takes geek concepts and makes them elegant and invites rather than eschews making money for doing it. I love the Craigslists, the Wikipedias, the Diggs. But how do you fit making money in that’s not supported by advertising? Most rely on that.
Information is the perfect product to sell because it has a high initial intellectual cost (for practical, useful, well-presented content). And it can be sold again and again.
eBay boasts over 100K content listings a month! The delivery of that purchase is clunky. You pay and at some point someone sends you a document, usually by email. But you want you it now, and you want quality. Who’s going to facilitate that? What companies are forming or going to form by doing content fulfilment? How can you more seemlessly get the content you bought off eBay? (or any other marketplace where content is sold).
If you can deliver it to the right person at the right time you will make money. Yepic allows this. It’s a true web 2.0 company.
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5 Responses to “Yepic: Buying and Selling Content Seemlessly”
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December 28th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
What is your definition of a Web 2.0 company?
December 28th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
When do they come out of beta?
December 28th, 2006 at 8:11 pm
And how are they different than Mochilla or Blish?
December 29th, 2006 at 10:28 am
Matthew
Thanks for the comments. I will blog about what I think web 2.0 is. I also have a reponse from Richard about how Yepic is different from Mochilla or Blish.
They told me they’ll be out of beta in a few months.
Janet
December 29th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
matt, we’re aiming for Feb to emerge from our private beta . . . we’ll see how that goes. lots of stuff going on due to things we learned from our early user-base.
i wanted to chime in on the question of web 2.0.
i was first taught the term by tim o’reilly at an intuit conference he attended and spoke at. afterwards i talked with him for a few minutes to dig deeper . . . he’s always been a huge inspiration to me, primarily as a thought-leader. his write-up is terrific: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
wikipedia’s entry on web 2.0 is also a great read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2
i’m not sure how janet wants to define it, but for me, web 2.0–as far as information goes–represents a set of characteristics that are more common with digital info (data’s probably the more accurate term) today than they were 5 years ago in the web 1.0 days.
i think the most significant changes gravitate around 3 really key themes: access, openness, and richness.
web 2.0 data is instantly accessible; open to collaboration, contribution, feedback, review, updates; and super rich with all kinds of media: video, image, audio, text, graphics, animation, etc.
web 1.0 data is pretty much the opposite in each area: instead of one-click instant access, you have to download, email, burn to disk and distribute, and/or print to experience the content; and lots of people are still doing all of these activities over 56K connections; instead content that’s fundamentally open, web 1.0 content is essentially closed, and, for that matter, dead. once the content’s created, it’s done. collaboration, contribution, review, updates, etc. cause a unique type of versioning hell, one that leaves everyone dealing with different documents and fighting to get sync’d up. more often, once the content’s finished, it’s nearly impossible for the author to (a) get good content from a broad swath of the audience that consumed it, and (b) update the content in a way that’s consumable by that audience once the updates have taken place. for that reason, the content usually just freezes, or, as we say, dies. and it quickly goes stale. in terms of richness, most web 1.0 info is in proprietary formats (.pdf, .doc, ebook, or other media files) that don’t integrate with other media types. hence you can have simple text and graphics, but no video or audio. or you can have video and audio, but no text and graphics, etc.
a true web 2.0 content app should give users instant access to content that is rich and totally open. that’s precisely what yepic is, with the added benefit of marketplace dynamics. i’d be happy to dig in on that too, but i already feel like i’ve done too much thread-jacking here.
thanks for the post, janet.