Thursday, December 14, 2006

Passive Purchasing: Are You For Sale?

From the world of Media Economics comes a very interesting concept: "When is something for sale?" Perhaps it's not when you decide to sell, perhaps its when the market places a certain value on your asset and you feel that you have to now consider this option? Over at Virtual Ecomomics a good example being looked at is the housing market. Basically, can there be a mechanism by which you don't say your house is for sale, but that you are "persistently open to offers" or perhaps "valuations". By extending the concept into Web 2.0, and Semantic Web type reasoning, if an extended network of individuals put a value on an asset, and you own this asset, this might "trigger" your interest in initiating a sales process. Surely this represents a massive "information aggregation and arbitrage opportunity" for someone who understands the power of social networks. This kind of thinking, coupled with ideas of social search, and persistent search, may yet have legs. Given how much money is involved in each property transaction, maybe mortgages, and UK and Ireland real estate agents will be the first to pursue it? (www.zillow.com). On this blog we have spoken before about how VoiceSage see a whole range of triggers that could be initiated from the web, appliances and devices, it might be fun to post a few ideas before Christmas on this theme.

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