I like the design, neat and tidy.

They screw up, because they have no idea what they are copying.

Yes­ter­day night one of my pri­mary school­mate told me about his busi­ness plan, a web project, more pre­cisely. After a few bas­ket­ball death­matches, we were sit­ting on a bench, get­ting rest, pump­ing in as much cold drinks as we can. We were exhausted, but Mr M, the entre­pre­neur wanna-be seemed to have saved up some energy for his genuis pre­sen­ta­tion of the plan.

One day not long ago, he read a news about ohmyking.com, a web startup that pro­vides infor­ma­tion about food deliv­ery. The oper­a­tion is sim­ple: they gather menu and leaflets from small food shops (a few chain shops too, like Yeh Lam Kwok Restau­rant), scan them, do some cat­e­go­riza­tion and put them online, so lazy­bones can stick at home and make deliv­ery orders by a few clicks(Two clicks, they claimed. But it is wrong, the first click, pick a tar­get dis­trict, the sec­ond click, pick a desired food shop, the story is not going to end here, because you still have to pick up a phone and make orders). I tried it, what a great thing!

The web­site draws over ten thou­sands clicks every day, which would be mon­e­tized in the future, prob­a­bly by offer­ing adver­tise­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties. Some­how, after read­ing the news, Mr M got a delu­sion that the busi­ness  model could be copied to some­where else eas­ily. Travel agents, he suggested.

How? The same oper­a­tion: gather leaflets from travel agents, scan them,  cat­e­go­rize them and put them online. He argued that peo­ple are lazy enough to go to travel agents in per­son to learn about pack­age infor­ma­tion. OMFG.

If ohmyking.com have cre­ated any value, it is by help­ing users browse and search data(leaflets) which are pre­vi­ously pretty dif­fi­cult to get. By dif­fi­cult, I mean

1. the data is scat­tered (there are so many food shops in every districts),
2. the data would update fre­quently (unlike KFC, Piz­za­Hut and so on, small food shops are unlikely to spam your mail­box intro­duc­ing you some weird new prod­ucts like Chi­nese New Year Pizza(雞鮑翅賀年必勝批)) .

Yet, travel infor­ma­tion is far from being scat­tered. A few big travel agents already eat up the major­ity of the mar­ket share. And even if some­one is too lazy to visit a travel agent’s phys­i­cal shop, they can find most of the infor­ma­tion on travel agent’s web­site. Travel agents have high incen­tive to make infor­ma­tion update.

Mr M argued that

1. peo­ple want to com­pare travel pack­ages pro­vided from var­i­ous travel agents, no sin­gle web­site can do that,
2. travel agents may want to keep some of their pack­age infor­ma­tion offline to pre­vent com­peti­tors from spy­ing on their pric­ing strategy.

But,

1. as I said, there are only a few travel agents (while there are over one thou­sand food shops on ohmyking.com), so infor­ma­tion are not that dif­fi­cult to gather and make com­par­i­son, a web­site maybe help­ful to do the job, but the value cre­ated is trivial;
2. Not to men­tion those online travel agents like Zuji and Price­line, I think infor­ma­tion are rather trans­par­ent in the indus­try, as I see a flock of travel agents always stick together, just look at those located in Mong Kok, if the afraid-of-spy the­ory is true they will prob­a­bly mask up their shops with black cur­tains. OMG, I think of some adult shops. Anyway, I think travel agents have enough rea­sons to put every­thing on the web them­selves, look at Hong Tai’s site.

I feel a suc­cess­ful web2.0 project must be able to help peo­ple bet­ter under­stand and use data. Sorry Mr M, I let you down, let’s think about some­thing else.

More on the ohmyking.com, I think they can do much bet­ter on the search engine, for instance, sud­denly I want to eat Yeung Chow Fried Rice, can I search for the key­word and see all food shops avail­able in a dis­trict so that I can pick one from? Even the renowed openice.com can’t do this for me, I won­der why.

I got an idea on web project too, try­ing to work it out. But I need help from pro­gram­mers. Wish me good luck.

Tags: web2.0

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