NYC Tech Meetup mints some contenders

(excerpt from NYC Tech Meetup mints some contenders by: Oliver Ryan) If Picture Dots is Web 2.0 tech whimsy at its most satisfying, FlickrCash could prove a real business. Founder Dr. Augustine Fou set out to build a more powerful search engine for the vast photo-sharing site and soon had created an AJAX-powered, multi-parameter search capable of returning easily-scanned, screen filling mosaics of thumbnails. For those that would use Flickr — with its millions of photographs (more than Getty Images or Corbis) — as a commercial source for photos, this power searching was great.

But the bigger problem was the lack of a legit purchasing mechanism. So, on top of his search engine, Fou has built what amounts to a peer-to-peer shopping cart. We’ve seen content mashups before, but this may well be the first pure e-commerce mashup: FlickrCash doesn’t host the photos or own them, it simply facilitates their retrieval and purchase. Way meta. Several in the audience raised the legitimate concern that Fou was forging a highly symbiotic relationship with Flickr-owner Yahoo (YHOO) without some form of commercial agreement. (Please to recall MySpace slapping cease-and-desist orders on various would-be “affiliates,” not to mention the recent Alexaholic scuffle.) Fou acknowledged the risk, but seemed undeterred. It’ll be interesting to see how Yahoo responds.

video transcript available at http://augustinefou.blogspot.com/2007/04/ny-tech-meetup-april-3-2007-great-hall.html