June 30, 2006
Frucall part of "Best New Mashups: Amazon"
It is a pleasant surprise to see that John Musser of Programmable Web, one of the most respected Web 2.0 API sites, has featured Frucall under best new mashups utilizing Amazon AWS. John, thank you on behalf of the Frucall team, and we hope that our users find Frucall as useful, simple, and innovative as we have intended for it to be.
June 29, 2006
Thanks Ewan!
Ewan MacLeod of SMS Text News was kind enough to write a detailed article about Frucall on his site, and he being so detail oriented has not missed anything, including my honeymoon!
Here's Ewan's post on Frucall. I should get on Skype with him one of these days, he is based in England.
Ewan, you rock!
June 20, 2006
New look of the web site
We have received a lot of great feedback from our users and based on those we have significantly changed the look of the web site. Here's a screenshot as a sneak peek:
The new look will be rolled out to production along with our next release in which we will add another search provider. Stay tuned for more information!
June 16, 2006
Frucall and Yahoo! Shopping
The launch of the new integration with Yahoo! Shopping went smoothly, and the result is in fact very exciting. Users liked the wider range of pricing choices, and a number of blogs wrote about it and linked to the press release. Here's one from Marc Mezzacca of Next Generation Shopping.
Here's the frull press release.
June 14, 2006
Shopwiki's color search
Just saw this on comparisonengines.com and loved it: Shopwiki uses Web a Web 2. interface to let users search by color. Simple and innovative addition to the online shopping behavior.
June 06, 2006
Marketing and signing up users
It's a shame to see there's so much spamming is going on in blog comments, and I have not had a chance to add spam prevention measures here, so I have to turn the comments off. If you have something to share, please email it to me at 'nasser at frucall dot com' for the time being.
As you can imagine, now that the service is up and running and we have had market validation and positive feedback from the industry and bloggers, one of our key focuses is to market the product and sign up more users. One may think that it's a free service and signing up users will be a piece of cake. Well, not exactly.
Getting heard in such cluttered environment is not easy at all. At the same time, messaging is very important: The users do not necessarily read and interpret the web site content the way authors expect. One has to be very clear and crisp with the messaging, to make sure that a visitor - who may spend just a few seconds to glance over and move on - understands the value of the service. And all that is assuming that the quality of the product or service is acceptable to the user.
Our simulations show that an organic curve of getting more than a million users will take at 1.5 to 2 years - obviously longer than what we want it to be. That's why you see some sad stories such as fold.com being deactivated. So the big question for younger services such as Frucall is how to ramp up the number of users. We have been lucky because of the support that we have, the company being in business for more than three years, and the marketing people we work with. Still, it's a challenge. I will write more on the topic and our approach. I am interested in hearing what you think.