I got an email this morning from my old colleague and friend Philip Wilkinson, who founded Kelkoo UK, to see if I could help him recruit a VP of Marketing for his new startup Crowdstorm. I haven’t spoken to Phil for a while so Crowdstorm came out of the blue for me, so I popped over to the website to have a nosy around.
Crowdstorm looks quite interesting. It is designed to combat the fact that most price comparison sites expect shoppers to know what they already want. Price comparison sites are very useful tools when you want to find the cheapest prices and where to buy the product you actually want, but they are hopeless in helping you browse around.
On Crowdstorm’s blog, Phil states that:
“I often see bookshops as a really good example of how to try to help people find what to buy as it is not often someone enters these places knowing exactly what they want. As soon as you enter a bookshop, you see a large section dedicated to “bestsellers” to see what are popular with other people right now.
You will also see a “just released” area where you could find something new and exciting which no one has really discovered yet and thus be one of the first. “Editors Picks” are there to give you some encouragement that a known expert has rated those particular books and help justify your decision to purchase. After that, you can then choose to browse by topic or author in the rest of the shop.”
What Crowdstorm will try to achieve is to add these ‘social’ elements to price comparison shopping, by letting users see which items are “buzzing” based on user recommendations, views, comments, blogs etc.
I think Crowdstorm could be quite interesting. So far we have seen implementations of Web 2.0 for bookmarking, news readers, personal homepages, news sites etc but no pure ECommerce applications. Lets hope that Crowdstorm will be the first of many.
I’ll try and get more details on the service when Phil gets back to me.
More: Crowdstorm
