We covered Berkeley-based Hotswap last month during its pre-launch stage. Next week they launch officially and open up the site with full functionality. Hotswap is targeting the $370 billion/year U.S. used car market with a free, video-focused classifieds site. Listings are optimized to allow users to quickly upload video of the car with a camera phone or other low end video equipment. Both normal users and car dealers can upload listings. The company has inked a deal with Red McCombs Automotive, which will upload all of their used cars to the site. Other business development deals are being negotiated now. The company says sellers were very happy during the beta testing period and reported very high sell-through rates. They’ve raised around $1 million in capital from Kinsey Hills Group, the investors behine Scribd and others. Hotswap competes with Vast, eBay, Edgeio (a company that I co-founded) and many others. → Read More
Vast is a search service that crawls the entire web and structures the data that it finds so that it can be categorized fully and indexed. The team launched a developer preview of the service tonight with three initial verticals available – Cars, Jobs and Profiles. Vast does an extremely impressive job of finding and categorizing data in the long tail – making it very simple for others to find listings from anywhere on the web. The first thing that amazed me was how big Vast was. They crawl over 3 billion web pages and their intelligent algorithms have indexed 4.4 million cars for sale, 4.7 million job listings and 8.6 million user profiles – and this is just the beginning. This already makes Vast the largest car sale database on the web, the 2nd or 3rd largest job listing site, and in the top 5 for number of personal listings (profiles from social networks, blogs etc.). The key to Vast is that they have done an excellent job of aggregating the long tail, as well as the top sites, and they want developers to now ‘steal this site’ (as it says on their homepage). Vast is making all this information available through an API which developers and site owners can use to integrate with other services or to build their own services with. The licensing terms for the API are as liberal as they can get – they just ask that you don’t do anything illegal and that you attribute Vast as the source of your data. Developers can now build their own implementation of the world largest auto search site in a matter of days and do what they like with it (place ads on it, etc.). In fact, the Vast.com site itself is an implementation of this API that took only a couple of weeks to write. There are a few secrets to Vast that makes them very good at aggregating listings and organizing them. The first is that they are very good at crawling the whole web, not just the pages that every crawler can see but also beyond authentication screens and into what is known as the ‘deep web’. Vast is very good at extracting information out of all types of web pages, those with complex markup, Javascript, Flash , different document types etc. so the index is very comprehensive. The second is the artificial → Read More
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