New Mashups: Stuck in a Rut?

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.