I just found out that all the stuff I had at my Boston basement is gone... :-(

[gusl]

I just found out that all the stuff I had at my Boston basement is gone... :-(

...among which an A/C (worth $200 when I bought it), an almost-new quality mattress (also about $200 when I got it), 2 Staples desks (worth about $100 each), and many many clothes that couldn't fit in my move to Brazil. Such a waste...

One of the main ideas behind ohmycollege.com (my joint startup that never started up) was local auctions (especially when transportation costs are important, e.g. selling a used couch).

Comments

[inhortte.livejournal.com]

At least you know for sure that it is 'gone'. I still have mounds of stuff in Muenchen which (supposedly) is being kept by someone I have not talked to in 3 1/2 years. I don't know where she is, what she is doing, or how to get in touch with her. Fun.

[ehintz.livejournal.com]

Bugger. I hate it when that happens...

[jmmorton.livejournal.com]

What would have been the difference between your startup and craigslist?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

hm... I don't know craigslist very well, but we had a lot of ideas, from selling to social.

Everyone and everything would be indexed by their coordinates. We would calculate scores based on proximity and match, in order to match up two people, whether they are searching for something to buy, someone to date, or whatever. I even had ideas about improvisin. social events, a protocol for friends to communicate which allows them to change their minds. i.e. better than a completely spontaneous (Brazil) or a completely planned (Germany) way of planning your social time.
For instance, whether one wants to go play soccer is something that depends on the weather, but also on whether other people (and which people) want to go. But it's also good if you can plan ahead, counting on people to be there. So there's some game theory there: how can people signal the right degree of commitment, and how can we hold them accountable without being too rigid?

It was going to be a sort of eBay + Yahoo, and for some reason we wanted to focus on colleges... for some reason, we thought that colleges were special (e.g. 100% use the Internet). I actually implemented a meal plan calculator / decision-making tool, which is something that would be useful in a lot of colleges.

We wanted an ICQ kind of interface, that was *always*on*, so that the user wouldn't need to open a browser and type in the URL in order to be with us.

My ideas were far beyond what it takes to start something. Maybe too far.

[frauhedgehog.livejournal.com]

Were you renting a storage space?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

no. That would have cost me at least ~$300 a year, and I had no idea when I'd go back. Ideally, I would have sold the sellable items back then.