Mapping The Web

Today, Edgeio announced a $5 million Series A round of financing headed by Intel Capital. Subsequent investments came from Transcosmos Investments and Business Developments Inc. The basic premise behind the company is to aggregate classified listing from around the web and bring them together on a single site. Edgeio launched in March of this year amid a huge amount of hype and anticipation (as it was co-founded by famous TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington) - only to receive a mild/lackluster welcome to say the least. But since then it has really started to gain momentum and recent developments look promising for the company.

When the company launched, their highly touted blog listing feature flopped. So recently, they’ve been downplaying this feature. Essentially, it allowed you to post listings from within your blog by tagging your post(s) with the term ‘listing’. You could also tag the post with other terms to further increase results. Nonetheless, Edgeio is now more focused on the aggregation strategy itself.

With companies like eBay, Cafepress, and Amazon now onboard, the company looks well-positioned to take the lead in the category moving forward. Add to that the fact that they just launched a Chinese version of the site (mulu100.com) and filed several patents pertaining to distributed marketplaces, and I think the company is taking the right steps to succeed.

As for the future of Edgeio, I see huge potential for a site like this. It reminds me of other aggregation and comparison business models including shopping (i.e. Froogle, Shopzilla, Pricegrabber) and travel (i.e. Travelocity, Orbitz, Kayak). There is obviously a strong business model at hand - now strong execution and implementation is necessary. Moving beyond the web 2.0 fluff to a sustainable business model will be the real challenge, but I’m confident Edgeio has what it takes.