Welcome to the Jellyfish Blog! Since our humble beginning in January of this year, the Jellyfish.com shopping search engine is rapidly taking shape, and we are excited to start the Jellyfish conversation.

“I know half of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” John Wanamaker.

Internet search advertising—particularly with the rise of comparison shopping engines—is changing the rules of customer engagement that made this quote so famous. For the first time in advertising history, companies can: 1) precisely connect with large groups of consumers that are actively raising their hands to request information related to their product or service, and 2) accurately record and assess the impact of these advertisements at the individual level.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

So you are probably asking, if Internet search advertising is so great, why are we here? Or better yet, why does the world need another comparison shopping engine? Yes, we know Google is doing quite nicely, thank you, and that comparison shopping engines aren’t doing too badly either. But in our humble opinion, the current advertising model is in need of some fixing. Problems like search arbitrage, click fraud and an inherent misalignment of incentives among the stakeholders have created an opportunity for a better way.

At Jellyfish, we are working hard to create a completely new kind of comparison shopping engine. Our mission is to partner with retailers to drive sales in a transparent, online marketplace that more efficiently allocates value among buyers, sellers, and the intermediary that connects them (that’s us!).

We can’t completely disclose our “secret-sauce” prior to our launching in June. But we can tell you Jellyfish will include:

1. An innovative, patent pending, auction based advertising model
2. A unique and stronger value proposition for end-consumers
3. A fresh look and feel that leverages the latest web development technologies (Ruby on Rails, AJAX, etc.) and moves us away from the incredibly standardized interfaces of the major comparison engines
4. A system that promotes the “de-commoditization” of merchant offerings by allowing comparison on many important facets other than solely price

Hopefully you are intrigued enough to stay tuned, and maybe even join the conversation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.