I met the founders of OZtion.com.au, a local Australian Online Auction startup last week. They’ve been running since January 2005 and already have 70,000 items online (eBay has on the order of two million items). It will be exciting to see if they “can do a Trade Me” in Australia, but they’ve got a big job on their hands with the 800lb gorilla in the room.
…I wonder what their Purple Cow is.
I’ve finally gotten around to reading Purple Cow by Seth Godin. Apart from having an absolutely fantastic given name, Seth is a marketing genius. In Purple Cow, he describes how most companies, especially in crowded marketplaces (aren’t they all?) are boring. His premise: “How do you stand out and be listened to in a crowded, time-poor marketplace?” Be remarkable. Don’t just be great, don’t follow the leader. Do something different, something that the big, established players are unable to do because of their vested interests.
Its a great read. Seth Godin has a great writing style, and this book should be required reading for anybody starting up a business or competing in an entrenched market segment.
Apress have released a free downloadable PDF eBook on REST Web Services: Google, Amazon, and Beyond: Creating and Consuming Web Services. Its an interesting read if you’re into RESTful Web Services. The only downside (for me atleast) is that the book has a very heavy Java bend. Would have been nice to see a bit more of a balanced view.
Scott Guthrie writes about some cool new IIS7 features and APIs:
#5 especially is great. Finally, we can build some rich programs to administer IIS and web applications without having to resort to ADSI or WMI..yuck!).
#1 will also be interesting in relation to url rewriting. This would mean that you wouldn’t have to use wildcard mapping to send every request to ASP.NET.
A few new features added to the open source url rewriter, including:
Download UrlRewriter.NET 1.6 here.
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