Ready, Fire, Aim! - Mihail's Public Blog: eBay Classifieds coming to a country near you

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Tuesday, March 8, 2005

eBay Classifieds coming to a country near you

Hot on the heels of its acquisition of Rent.com and the Netherlands's largest classifieds site, Marketplaats, and its minority stake in San Francisco-based Craigslist, now comes Kijiji -- the eBay new venture that launched last week in Japan, China, Germany, France, Italy and Canada. The Kijiji website explains:

Kijiji helps you connect with your community. It's easy to use. You can find everything you need from housing to furniture, from jobs to new friends and more.

And, according to this BusinessWeek blog, the site:

"went live Feb. 28, [and] is the first project to come out of a six-month-old New Ventures Group inside eBay. Spokesman Hani Durzy says Kijiji focused on the six countries--specifically 50 cities in Japan, Germany, Canada, Italy, China, and France--because eBay thought Craiglist has pretty much nailed the U.S. market. The special sauce that eBay hopes to bring, he says, is a sense of community that may be lacking in other local classifieds sites. (Kijiji means "village" in Swahili.)

And here's an official eBay press release on the launch that showed up on the Wall Street Journal site about an hour ago.

Updated 2:28 PM

posted by Mihail at 2:03 PM | add or view comments (0) | leave calling card | link to this | view only this entry

About this Blog

Mihail helped co-found Blogit -- the first subscription-based, blog-for-pay venue -- but is no longer involved except as a user. He is an entrepreneur and published author who has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, San Jose Mercury News, and on Salon.com and CNN etc. Mihail started this blog on July 15, 2002, and blogs about business models, technology and life in the global technology world. All views in this blog are his personal views.

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