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How Kijiji, a flop in the U.S., eclipsed Craigslist to rule online classifieds in Canada

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 05/18/2015 - 08:45

TORONTO • If Kijiji is remembered at all in the United States, it is probably as one of eBay’s unsuccessful attempts to challenge Craigslist in online classified ads. But in Canada, Kijiji is now practically synonymous with classifieds.

More than 12 million people visit Kijiji’s site in Canada every month, three times the amount drawn to Craigslist in the country. The service is used by 42 per cent of Canadians, according to comScore, making it one of the country’s 10 most popular sites. It has also eclipsed other companies’ online businesses, including Cox Automotive’s once dominant used-car site, AutoTrader.

That success is a striking counterexample to the globalization of the Web, in which services like Facebook and Google offer a single product worldwide. It also represents one of the few online brands that fizzled in the United States but found success elsewhere, as the social media pioneer Friendster has in the Philippines and Malaysia.

I couldn’t even read it with all the i’s and the j’s

How Kijiji achieved those feats is partly a story of good timing, arriving in Canada before Craigslist really took off in this country. The success is also the result of the company’s tailoring itself to the subtle distinctions of the market, catering in particular to the tendency of Canadians toward thriftiness.

“Canadians are traditionally penny pinchers, which manifests itself in consumer buying differences,” said Warren Shiau, consulting director of buyer behaviour research at the market analysis firm IDC Canada. “Kijiji has no fees for anything outside of a few specific big-ticket categories, which appeals to the penny pinchers in us.”

These days, Kijiji has 6.7 million listings on the site. The operation has expanded to the point that its offices sprawl through two 19th-century former factories in downtown Toronto. While eBay does not separately disclose Kijiji’s financial results or the results for eBay Canada, the classifieds site is eBay’s largest operation in Canada. Variations of Kijiji now run in 32 other countries. And eBay Classifieds succeeded Kijiji in the United States.

But Kijiji’s success in Canada was far from certain – and it arose less from any master plan by eBay than from the desire by an eBay official, Janet Bannister, and her husband to move back to their native Canada in 2004.

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Four years earlier, Bannister joined eBay in California and became director of category development, working to expand the online auction site beyond its original niche of collectible trinkets. When she returned to Canada, as director of product, she was put in charge of the features in the Canadian version of eBay.

She soon found that the operation had a significant problem.

“EBay Canada was doing a very good job of getting people in Canada to the website, but we were doing a terrible job actually getting them to transact on the website,” said Bannister, who is now a general partner at Real Ventures, a seed capital investment fund. “We did some things on the website to try to address it, but it didn’t really close the gap.”

A fundamental problem for eBay in Canada, Shiau said, is that Canadians generally do not like auction-based pricing. On top of that, Bannister found that because Canada’s vast geography and low population density make shipping costs high and delivery times long, buyers of secondhand goods preferred to make deals in person.

Screen grab/KijijiThese days, Kijiji has 6.7 million listings on the site.

To Bannister, the answer for eBay seemed to be online classified ads. At the head office, however, the idea did not appear to be quite so obvious. At the time, about 10 per cent of Canadians used Craigslist, a level many eBay executives thought meant that it was fully entrenched. Nevertheless, they gave Bannister some classifieds site software being developed for Europe along with a small amount of money to adapt the site and market the result.

The only thing the head office of eBay in California imposed was the name, Kijiji – pronounced Ka-jee-jee – which is Swahili for village. Bannister was horrified.

“I was in a conference room and I wrote it down,” Bannister said of taking the call from the head office about the name. “I couldn’t even read it with all the i’s and the j’s. I said, ‘I don’t care what it means. You’ve got to have a name people can pronounce and people can spell.’ ”

There was no budging from headquarters on the name, though, so Bannister moved forward. At first, she avoided challenging Craigslist directly.

Research showed that Craigslist was used in Canada mainly by young men looking for accommodations or to place personal ads, so Kijiji turned to young families and their quickly changing needs. Kijiji also was introduced in Montreal and Quebec City, largely French-speaking communities where Craigslist was then available only in English.

Canada is a bright spot… where customers have helped us build a fun, easy, safe place to buy, sell, trade, search and more through Kijiji

Listings swiftly grew. Making money, however, was a more gradual process. Among other things, the site did not even introduce banner advertising until it had become fully established.

Today, Kijiji has three revenue sources. In addition to banner ads, the site sells more prominent positions within results and more elaborate displays for ads like photo galleries.

Also, car dealers and housing rental companies pay subscription fees for their listings. Despite those fees, the autos section is hugely popular, with 4.6 million vehicles listed last year, said Scott Neil, managing director of Kijiji in Canada.

The growth, though, has come with criticism. The site’s pet listings led to protests from animal rights groups that it had become a haven for puppy mills, which led to policy changes. And there are the somewhat predictable schemes. This year, a 25-year-old man was arrested and charged with fraud for reportedly using Kijiji to rent and collect deposits on a summer cottage he did not own.

Neil said that the company had about 60 employees who searched listings for fraud.

Although Kijiji is now used by almost half of all Canadians, eBay continues to advertise it heavily, placing ads on buses and on television during the current hockey playoffs.

Johnna Hoff, a spokeswoman for eBay, said the classifieds site fit into the company’s broader mission of connecting people in their communities.

“Canada is a bright spot,” she said, “where customers have helped us build a fun, easy, safe place to buy, sell, trade, search and more through Kijiji.”

As use of the site becomes more widespread, it could risk losing the sense of community built during its early days. But Neil said there was just something innately Canadian about the service.

“I was a user of Kijiji before I came here,” Neil said. “The one thing that surprised me was really how much people loved the site. Maybe I sound like I’m overemphasizing that, but I couldn’t believe how much it really resonated with Canadians.”

The New York Times News Service

Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth – The Rising Tide will introduce naval play and an entirely new diplomacy system

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 05/18/2015 - 05:00

Last fall’s epic sci-fi strategy and simulation game Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth put players in the shoes of a colonial leader looking to establish a new home for humanity on a distant planet.

It was loads of fun, putting a sci-fi twist on some familiar Civilization mechanics while introducing fresh concepts, such as an orbital layer above the main map within which players could places helpful satellites, and multi-part quests that introduced a clever kind of narrative for the franchise’s tried-and-true civilization-building formula.

But there was room for some improvements. And Firaxis Games’ Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth – The Rising Tide, a major expansion due this fall, aims to deliver them.

Speaking via telephone from the studio’s Sparks, Maryland headquarters, Beyond Earth co-designers Will Miller and David McDonough laid out what fans can expect from their hit game’s first big add-on, comparing it not to the expansions of previous Civilization games but rather XCOM: Enemy Unknown‘s (another Firaxis game) acclaimed Enemy Within expansion.

“That expansion changed everything about the base game,” explained McDonough. “It fundamentally redefined what people experienced and how the game is played. And we think of our expansion as redefining how Beyond Earth plays, from top to bottom.”

But The Rising Tide isn’t just about major game-changing tweaks (which we’ll get to in a moment). There are also plenty of upgrades typical of past Civilization expansions, including lots of new content.

For example, there will be four new factions, like the Al Falah, a group of Middle-Eastern descent who survived a devastating ecological disaster on Earth and are latecomers to the colonial seeding process. They went into space to find a new home after the base game’s original eight factions, under different and more challenging circumstances.

“We wanted to introduce leaders and factions that are more radical,” said McDonough. “The Al Falah’s ships don’t have cryogenics. They don’t sleep. Instead, they’re generation ships. They house multiple generations of humanity before arriving in the new world. These people have never seen Earth, or really any planet. They’ve only lived in space. Their perspective on what having a planet means, and to have power, and to compete on a world is quite a bit different, and very radical compared to the other factions. All four of the new factions are designed to be extreme and exciting in their own way.”

2K Games

 

There will also be a couple of new biomes, only one of which – a primordial environment – has been revealed.

“It’s a young world, a new planet; think Cretaceous Period Earth,” said McDonough. “Expect lots of volcanoes, seismic activity, and heat. It’s a hot world, very active, very different to play in than any of the original biomes.”

What’s more, the quests that proved so popular in the original are set to grow in number and complexity.

“We wanted to expand quests significantly,” said Miller. “There are new variations on existing quests and new rewards. We’ve actually doubled the quest catalogue compared to the original.”

But it’s the alterations to core systems that look set to really shake things up. To start, Firaxis is scrapping Beyond Earth‘s existing diplomacy system, which was essentially ported whole from Sid Meier’s Civilization V.

“The Civ V diplomacy system relies on the player’s assumed knowledge of historical figures,” said Miller. “You understand intuitively how Gandhi or Montezuma might behave, and build strategies around that. But our characters in Beyond Earth are invented from whole cloth, without the same backgrounds for players to take advantage of.”

In contrast, the new diplomacy system is trait-based. You’ll be able to go to a faction menu screen and see the leader’s traits and their special abilities, which will provide clues as to how they might act and which bonuses are applied to their actions. You can then apply this information in your play style and diplomatic dealings.

“We wanted to make a system out of the concept of a personality and how it changes over the game,” said Miller. “As a player you’ll invest in crafting a personality, and the AI players will be doing the same thing.”

2K Games

 

This apparently opens the path for more wheeling and dealing and allows players to flex their leader’s political muscle. Negotiations will span a broad scope rather than simply serving as a means to trade resources, declare war, or set the status of your civilization’s borders. A military focused civilization, for example, can use the new diplomacy system in clever, strategic ways to boost other elements of their society, such as science.

“We’ve built diplomacy to be a way for players to solve problems and strengthen themselves,” said Miller. “It overlaps with other systems, and plays a very important role from moment you first meet another civilization.”

Another major change is expanded naval play. Players will now be allowed to settle cities on the water, potentially opening huge new swaths of the map for strategic exploitation.

“You’ll be able to explore the oceans like never before,” said Miller. “That comes with a whole slew of new units, new resource types, and new ways to play on the oceans.”

The enhancements to naval play also gave Firaxis’ artists a chance to redesign the game’s water tiles, making them much more realistic and diverse.

“There are some completely new rendering and shader combinations so that you can see through the sea surface to the sea floor below, whether shallow, deep, or ocean abyss,” said McDonough. “You’ll see the resources, terrain, the creatures that live down there. It’s really come to life. Now the whole planet surface is a living and vibrant place.”

2K Games

 

The final big game changer is the concept of hybrid affinities. Affinities in Beyond Earth resulted from the way you guided your civilization’s development and how you chose to adapt to alien life forms. They were part of a non-linear technology progression system, and each affinity catered to a different kind of play style. There were three affinities in the base game, and now Firaxis has added three more, all hybrids of the originals.

“Once Beyond Earth went live, we found that there were ways players could play exploratively and kind of screw themselves in the late game,” said Miller, laughing a little. “They weren’t able to compete with AI or other players who had found paths that would get them affinity points quickly.

“The new hybrid affinities allow you to explore the tech web in ways you haven’t been able to before. You can go in two directions, acquiring affinity as you go, and unlock specialized unique units that complement play styles of both of the affinities you’re splitting. We’re adding a ton of new units to make hybrid builds more militarily viable for specific play styles. It fills out and balances our vision for the tech tree.”

Both Miller and McDonough expressed that while they had a clear picture of how they wanted to evolve the game post-release, everything in the expansion is fresh. Nothing was held back when the base game released. All features and content were developed specifically for The Rising Tide, and much of it is the result of lessons learned after launch and constructive criticism from some of the game’s most dedicated fans.

“A lot of what you’re seeing in this expansion is our response to what we’ve received in fan feedback,” said McDonough. “We’re elaborating on previous systems we’d introduced and integrating feedback we received from our fans.

“It’s a huge expansion. Lots of new content and gameplay concepts,” adds Miller. “It’s all for our fans.”

Apple Inc’s HomeKit devices to hit stores in June

National Post Tech Desk - Fri, 05/15/2015 - 08:33

The first batch of home automation accessories, such as thermostats and garage door openers, compatible with Apple Inc’s software platform will go on sale in June, the tech company said Thursday.

HomeKit is a set of tools in Apple’s iOS 8 software designed to work with smart home devices. The company announced the home automation platform at its conference for developers last year, but devices compatible with the software have yet to appear in stores.

“HomeKit has been available for just a few months and we already have dozens of partners who have committed to bringing HomeKit accessories to market and we’re looking forward to the first ones coming next month,” Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said in a statement.

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Apple did not specify where the accessories would be sold.

Apple’s statement followed a report from Fortune that the first HomeKit enabled devices would not be available until August or September.

IDevices has said it will begin selling in the fourth quarter a HomeKit-compatible switch to control doors, lights and other products.

“We’re testing the software, and it works very well,” Chris Allen, chief executive officer of Avon, Connecticut-based iDevices, said Thursday.

© Thomson Reuters 2015, with files from Bloomberg

Netflix Inc eyes piece of massive Chinese market with a little help from billionaire Jack Ma

National Post Tech Desk - Fri, 05/15/2015 - 05:53

Netflix Inc. is in talks with a Chinese media company backed by Jack Ma and other possible partners as it seeks entry into the country’s US$5.9 billion online video market, according to people familiar with the matter.

Netflix has held discussions with companies including Wasu Media Holding Co. about forming a partnership, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. Netflix plans “to be nearly global by the end of 2016,” a spokeswoman, Anne Marie Squeo, said in response to questions about a possible China partnership.

China is too big to have an asterisk next to it

Entering China would allow the broadcaster of “House of Cards” and “Orange Is the New Black” to take advantage of what’s forecast to be explosive growth in online television in the nation of 1.4 billion people. The market is expected to almost triple to 90 billion yuan by 2018, according to Shanghai- based Internet consultant IResearch.

Wasu’s Shenzhen-traded shares, which had been down as much as 10 per cent in the morning, reversed declines and briefly rose to a record. They closed little changed at 56.59 yuan.

A local partnership would be essential given the Chinese government’s strict controls over licensing for online content. Netflix wants a partner that has licenses for content on all devices — including mobile phones, computers and set-top boxes, according to the people. China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television has given Internet TV licenses to seven companies, including Wasu.

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Wasu didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking comment. Two phone calls to Wasu’s general line weren’t answered.

Netflix, based in Los Gatos, California, is investing heavily in original programming to keep the U.S. business growing and support international expansion.

“China is too big to have an asterisk next to it,” Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said in Cannes, France, on Friday. “There are a lot of operating constraints in China that are different to anywhere else. We don’t have any operating partners anywhere else in the world, so that would be a new skill for us too.”

Sarandos, speaking to film buyers, executives and producers, did not comment on specific companies. The Cannes Film Festival is for the first time hosting a three-day China Summit to help film professionals in the country’s market.

Netflix would need to sort out content censorship regulations with Chinese authorities. Starting this April, new episodes of foreign programs — including “Mad Men” and “The Simpsons” — can’t be shown until after the shows’ seasons have ended, according to a government notice.

Episodes need to handed in to censors for approval, and content deemed violent, sexual or offensive to the ruling Communist Party can be cut, according to notices.

Wasu, one of the first in China to receive an Internet TV license from the government, has been working with Ma’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to produce set-top boxes since 2013. Wasu operates cable TV and broadband networks in Hangzhou, where Alibaba is based.

Wasu said in April last year it would sell a 20 per cent stake to Alibaba Chairman Ma and fellow billionaire Shi Yuzhu.

–With assistance from Anousha Sakoui in Cannes, France.

Bloomberg.com

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