I just came across Virshi (labeling themself “The ultimate Shopping Experience” - quite a mouthful, eh?). Virshi is the latest project from Glaxstar, the company behind the Glubble kids browser (I wrote about this market a little while ago) and is build as a Firefox add-on. This in itself is quite exciting as I am a firm believer in creating products on top of browsers - using the browser as a platform (also something I wrote about a few weeks ago). But that’s not all - Virshi sets out to create a new form of shopping experience by putting some rather useful functions into a Firefox sidebar:

Virshi allows you to store products you found on the web in the sidebar, organize them by a multitude of criteria, share and discuss these results with your friends and find the best price on the web. If that all sounds a bit complicated I suggest you hop over to the Virshi website and watch the short demo video - it’s really nicely done and explains the concept in a few seconds.

What’s really interesting about Virshi is the fact that this is one of the next wave of applications which will greatly benefit from Web 3.0 / semantic web technologies (see also my blog post from a few days ago). What Virshi sets out to do (at least in my opinion) is to treat products as data, combine this data with lots of other, relevant information and create a new, website independent view on your shopping experience. It’s not hard to imagine that this can really take off once we have more and more data available in a portable format - price comparison data, consumer and professional reviews, stock information, geo-information about stores who carry the product, etc.

This might be early days for products like Virshi - but if you want to see (one possible) future for eCommerce I suggest you check it out!

Posted in Analysis, E-Commerce