Just a little Cooqy

I started to code Cooqy the week of Christmas 2005. OpenLaszlo proved to be unusually productive…a little code went a long, long way. I initially had difficulty communicating with eBay’s web services. I never could get OpenLaszlo’s built-in SOAP to work against eBay, so I abandoned that and used Java XML-RPC from the Tomcat server.

Cooqy was very much built in a race for time, due to the Jan. 31 deadline for submissions to the eBay Developer Contest. The only other major problem I remember was with the way OpenLaszlo didn’t seem to use the browser cache for images, causing slower performance than I wanted. It continued to ping the server (where images were transcoded into SWF), even though the image was already available in the browser cache. OpenLaszlo’s chief architect gave me some pointers, but in the end I discovered the solution on my own by switching the client to an “unproxied” mode, even though it continued to make proxied Java-RPC calls to the server. According to the OpenLaszlo documentation this shouldn’t even work (by definition, an unproxied app should not be able to communicate with the server), but it solved the problem I had with no side effects.

Cooqy was originally hosted on my home PC w/ DSL. I would code at night and test during lunch from the office. Four part-time weeks later, Cooqy’s core search functionality was working well enough to be considered ready for eBay’s Developer Challenge. Unfortunately, when the eBay judges were evaluating Cooqy my home PC was having a bad hair day…I am sure their experience was piss poor. I was patching code at the same time they were actually doing the evaluation! Ugh.

eBay ended up selecting Unwired Buyer as their overall winner, which to me seemed kind of lame b/c they were a company (albeit small < 15 people) who took an existing product (their technology was originally used for singles to connect with each other via cell phones) and simply tweaked it a bit to work with eBay's API for placing bids (which at the time was undocumented by eBay and remains accessible by invitation only to this day). It was as if a secret handshake was done under the table. The spirit of the Developer Challenge was to invoke Pierre Omidyar's holiday weekend when he built and launched what was to become eBay. Another prickly point: after years of doing everything possible to shut down snipe services, eBay suddenly does a 180 and gets behind what is effectively a snipe service...encouraging last-second bids via cell phones.

Unwired Buyer has gone on to receive over $7.6MM in funding this year. Prior to their first round of $1.5MM, I read a post somewhere by their founder that the service at that point had made something like $150 in revenue from eBay commissions. Their business model is pretty much the same as Cooqy's: provide the service free to consumers and get revenue from eBay's Affiliate Commissions. But they are going about it like an old-school dot-com flameout. They even had a $20 promotion: win an item via their service and they would send you $20 via PayPal. Of course, lots of people placed bids on penny auctions and kept most of the $20 as pure fun money. I’ll write a lot more later about why starting a Web 2.0 company today only requires one smart/experienced person and virtually zero money.