eBay acquire Svpply curated shopping site
eBay have acquired Svpply.com, a company that aims to recreate offline window shopping in an online experience. Svpply describe themselves as a curated collection of the world’s best products and stores.
Every product in Svpply’s Shop section has been selected by hand by one of their members, and brought to the site using Svpply’s bookmarklet. As well as a bookmarking site to keep track of products you like. Svvply will show you products you may like, based on your friends on Twitter and Facebook. They want to help you discover products you might want from other users, and allows users to display galleries of items they want or own.
eBay say the acquisition of Svpply “gains access to technology talent to further improve the shopping and selling experience for its customers” and that “Svpply.com assets – including a talented team of six designers and developers – are well-suited to help eBay advance more personalized experiences and merchandising options on eBay.com”.
I have two questions. Firstly can anyone please tell me how to pronounce “Svpply”?
More importantly is the curated approach good enough to add value to eBay? They tried with Stumbleupon, failed and sold the company back to the founders. eBay purchased Hunch, but we’ve yet to see much materialise from that acquisition although it’s still early days. Is Svpply the answer to get eBay showing me products I want to buy and more importantly stop showing Dan Moccasins and Mini Skirts, neither of which he will ever purchase?
board_surfer says
7:29 am on 07/09/2012
showing Dan Moccasins and Mini Skirts,
Ok there is a mental image that will haunt my day!!
Chris says
8:11 am on 07/09/2012
How to pronounce Svpply. Don’t I remember that in the Roman Alphabet there was just a “v” the “u” did not turn up until much later. So perhaps this was their thinking when they originally settled on the name “Svpply”. In other words it is said Supply but written as a Roman would have written it some 1600 odd years ago. Just a thought.
Chris Dawson says
8:36 am on September 7th, 2012
Could be, I can cope with a “u”, I’m just struggling with the “V”
Chris says
8:45 am on September 7th, 2012
Apart from not having a “u” the Romans did not have a “Zero”. and of course they had letters instead of numbers a “C” for example for 100. I have often though about trying to conduct modern business in such a way.
The Romans managed it,…somehow. But just imagine trying to do your accounts, put together an invoice for a transaction etc with no numbers only letters. And then think of trying to do simple arithmetic without numbers.
Yet the Roman Empire lasted for over a thousand years and if you take the Eastern Empire almost 2,000 years. So it had to be possible….somehow. All I know is that I am certainly not clever enough to do my business without numbers, and certainly not without a “Zero” after all how would I have written 2,000(OK I could have used Roman Letters as numerals) and written MM
Dan Wilson says
10:31 am on September 7th, 2012
I must take issue with your description of the duration of the Roman Empire. I was under the impression that it started with the end of the Punic Wars (although there is a quibble on that and it could be a bit longer) in BC 201 and most definitely ends with the death of Romulus Augustus in 476 AD.
Chris says
11:01 am on September 7th, 2012
I think that the differance is down to the view of the start date. Rome dates back to Romulus and Remus and the She Wolf that adopted them and of course Romulus and Remus fought and Romulus killed his brother and then over centuries Rome grew and developed and passed through various statuses including Kindgom, and on evdentually to an Empire. Many of the dates are well known.
If we take the Punic Wars when Rome was fighting Carthage(First and Second Punic Wars). Many will know about Hannibal taking his Army(complete with Elephants) over the Alps and almost defeating Rome.
But of course Rome existed before the Punic Wars. Was that the Empire or should it be considered as something else. I must admit that my view on the 1,000 years was partly because of a TV programme I watched this week that was looking at the Roman Heritage and it quoted 1,000 years for the Western Empire.
But of course that is only the Western Empire. After this fell the Eastern Empire continued for several centuries until it was finally destroyed with the fall of Constantinople so about 2,000 for the Eastern Empire.
johnC says
11:33 am on 07/09/2012
The “V” is a “U”, so it’s just pronounced as supply. In Latin lowercase there is a “u” but not in uppercase.
So you can only sensibly keep the V if you are writing their name in capitals; “svpply” just looks silly.
paddy says
10:47 am on 10/09/2012
Surely it was called “SVPPLY” as supply.com was too expensive?