At the Christchurch Arts centre today I was stopped by a couple of guys driving around on a lime coloured motorised couch (!) They proceeded to give me a sticker and brochure and outline a new website they had started which was going to take on both TradeMe and the Yellow Pages – all in one go.

It seems there site – Limelight – is all about paying $99 to get a business listing on their directory and then being able to chose to donate some of that cost to your favourite charity. Limelight promises to provide (my snarky comments in brackets);

  • an “exciting new” business directory (but we’ve already got a few of those and I use google anyway)
  • a community directory showing current events (ditto the above)
  • the ability to donate to ones chose charity (last time I checked charities had no major problem taking money from donees directly)
  • great exposure for ones business (check out the website – there is squat there, I don’t call that exposure – great or otherwise)
  • 100% NZ owned and operated (don’t even go there)

I’m hereby more than willing to go on record saying that limelight, in attempting to recreate Craigslist – but for New Zealand, for a fee and about a decade too late – is on a quick journey to the deadpool.

I mean why would you do it? And the best they could find to front the debacle are Alison Mau and Stacey Jones? Ask yourself…

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

6 Comments
  • Their homepage doesn’t explain what it is, how and where. And their logo doesn’t click to the home page. Bounced.

  • It will not succeed. For reasons I’m too tired to explain here… But basically, both the ‘Directory’ and ‘auction’ markets are ONE KEY PLAYER markets. The only way to succeed would be to spend more money and time that you would ever recoup from the revenue earned.

    I’m not synical here, but realistic and have talked to many companies in these spaces.

  • Falafulu Fisi |

    Julian said…
    But basically, both the ‘Directory’ and ‘auction’ markets are ONE KEY PLAYER markets.

    Yes, I agree here, since TradeMe & YellowPages were first comers in their respective domains.

    The only way to succeed would be to spend more money and time that you would ever recoup from the revenue earned.

    I believe that is possible to unseat both TradeMe & YellowPages by any new emerging competitors, purely on superior technology implementations. I know many things related to online auctions that both TradeMe & YellowPages current technologies don’t implement yet mainly in realtime online analytics, such as sentiment & opinion analysis using realtime text-mining. There are more different types and not just text-mining. I am no online auction expert, however I had read more than 20 computing peer review papers in the last few months regarding those technologies.

    The difficult part in competing with TradeMe & YellowPages is the branding , which both had already established themselves really well, but we have seen in the past that a dominant player could still be unseated with a new emerging competitor implementing a state-of-the-art new shock-and-awe technology. The example here was Google when it emerged in the late 1990s to unseat both Yahoo & Microsoft. Google wasn’t introducing just another new online search service, it introduced their state-of-the-art PageRank algorithm which shook the world of online search.

  • Hello Diversity.net…
    ( from Ant, one of the Limelight team…)
    ….this is not a defensive stance, ..rather explanatory…
    1)firstly, the “couch trip” we undertook was 2-fold,..on the one hand, yes promoting the site, but also a dedicated fund-raiser for Child Cancer & Vatiety,..to which end,extremely demanding, & there was no small amount of team “hype” involved,& exuberance was often the name of the day, ..taking on trademe is NOT our agenda, even though it would appear that comment was made..
    2)Directories, ..yes there are others, but our goal is to create a comprehensive NZ resource for ALL community groups, ..but even more importantly, ..a vehicle for them TO RECEIVE FUNDING,…our KEY motivation..
    & while I cannot disagree that the site does not initially present that well, ..the site itself ( esp. home-page,)& public profile, is still very much a work in progress, ..to which end…
    3) any postive comments or advice on how to present ourselves are most welcome,:) 🙂
    ( p.s..4)..yes, we are proudly NZ !!…Yellow pages take their $$ out of nz to Canada, …we want to put them back into nz community )

  • @Ant – thanks for your email and great to have you join in the conversation. If you want to discuss further just flick me an email…..

  • Thankyou, Ben
    … appreciate the invitation,..may well take you up on that.
    Regards, Ant.

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