It's a new year and with it come announcements of new mashups hoping to grab more eyeballs. I ran into the
press release from the cleverly named ZoomaRooma.com. It's a mashup of hotels. What's different?
The site focuses on the three things that consumers are typically most interested in: location, image of hotel, and price....ZoomaRooma.com is a more visual and less cumbersome way of searching than manually filling in fields and sorting through lists.[little keyboard use]... One very interesting feature of ZoomaRooma.com is the way it loads hotels dynamically as users drag the map to a new location.
So, what's new is not the data, but the slightly different process for searching. Is that enough to matter in these times? Doubtful. Do searches want to search by location before noting if rooms are available for the time of stay? I don't. Business model? Unknown.
I also wonder how they get their pricing data. Maybe they are scraping from another site. Here's an interesting article in Wired about startups scraping big sites for data: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-01/ff_scraping
What user wants to know what zoom level you have to be at?
When I'm searching for a hotel, why do I want to know that you're loading hotels as I pan around?
Where is the option to start with an address or city search?
How awkward an interface for finding out a hotel price...
In this day and age, this looks like nothing more than someone's hobby project. And I shudder to think that it'll probably get purchased for $20M as 'promising startup technology.'
My wife will be impressed when she can 'stand' on a virtual balcony in GE or MVE and 'look' out at the view from the hotel, then turn around to look at the room to see if there's space for a crib.