What's been happening

First, my apologies for those who may be subcribing to this. As you could tell I don't blog much. Partly, it is that I am not that great of a writer. Partly, it is that I have been pretty busy with my work and family.

I just returned from Shop.org conference in Las Vegas which was very productive and interesting. One of the highlights of the conference was a fireside chat with Barry Diller of IAC. He has a good dose of skepticism and critical judgement that I think explains his success in entertainment, retail and Internet industry. His view on comparison shopping was pretty interesting but understandable because he is a retailer (hsn.com) and owns a search engine (ask.com). Brian Smith of comparisonengines.com, who was also at the Shop.org conference, does a good job of capturing what Barry had to say about comparison shopping sites here:
http://www.comparisonengines.com/

Oh, by the way, Become.com was featured in the Wall Street Journal article titled The Next Generation Price Comparison Shopping yesterday. It was the first time that we were mentioned in WSJ so it was pretty exciting. The traffic at our site spiked as a result of this good article.

Become.com's mention in the story reads, "One hassle for online shoppers is that researching and buying products often requires calling up multiple windows on their Web browsers, making it easy to get lost. Become.com, a Mountain View, Calif., start-up founded by the people who launched the MySimon shopping engine, Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun, attempts to address this.

Users type a word like "camcorder" and hit one of two buttons, one labeled "shop" and the other labeled "research." They call up either links to Web pages offering information about camcorders or comparative listings to buy them. Users can save the items they're considering so they are displayed on the same page as they research those items. The research includes recent news; parents shopping for strollers, for instance, may learn of a product recall."

And in the print edition, Become.com gets top billings in graph listing some comparison shopping sites.

It was pretty exciting day for all of us.

I just finished reading "The Search" by John Battelle which I will review in my next posting.

Thanks for reading all the way to here!

Michael Yang