Classifieds

Bill Burnham, formerly an analyst at DMG and CSFB, and then a VC, continues his interesting analysis of the online classifieds market with his take on where Google Base is headed. He has some good predictions, and Vast is mentioned in the piece. More

Vast.com has launched a new category, Credit Cards! Why waste your time doing comparison shopping, when you can get what you really want, free stuff! Our “deep” crawler now recognizes and extracts credit card numbers accidentally posted all across the web, and enables you to shop with them. What’s the business model, indeed! More

The Vast.com (developer) Preview is finally available! If you’ve been wondering what we’ve been up to, here it is, in a nutshell – we are building a search service that extracts classified ads from across the web, structures them, and then makes them available via an open REST API for commercial and non-commercial uses. More

Rich Skrenta dissects why Craigslist is so effective, in a must-read piece. Now it’s time to consider exactly effective it is. If the Genie of the Market were to offer you all of the future earnings from EBay or Craigslist, which would you take? I’d take Craigslist. Note that I’m talking about the strengths of the business models here. More