2012: A Transformational Year for Deem

The birth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s led to a Cambrian explosion of innovation and a euphoric sense of transformational possibilities. From the beginning, there was a palpable sense that all aspects of our society would benefit from the democratization of information and the ability to collaborate in completely new ways. The reach of the Web’s transformational and disruptive attributes went beyond simply sharing information and establishing new forms of social connections. It was expected to fundamentally revolutionize commerce of all kinds – business-to-consumer, business-to-business, consumer-to-consumer.

Today, nearly 20 years later, while next-generation companies in most every web-based category (Social Networks, Software-as-a-Service, Collaboration, etc.) have begun to deliver on the promise of their predecessors, we’ve seen very little – with Amazon.com as an exception – in the way of true ecommerce innovation.

When I founded Rearden Commerce in 1999, the hype around Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer commerce was at its peak. Within the B2B market, hundreds of “Marketplace” vendors existed and industry leaders were valued in the tens of billions of dollars. Their promise was to bring buyers and sellers together in a way that removed friction, delivered transparency, optimized transactions for both parties, and allowed for whole new public and private ecosystems to emerge.

Today, it’s clear to see that those marketplaces failed to deliver, with many having been built more on hype than substance. The companies lacked robust and flexible technology platforms to enable merchants and buyers to quickly on-board and transact. Instead, each integration was a custom one-off implementation requiring a school bus full of newly-minted consultants and systems integrators to assist in this effort. Further, they had primitive matching and personalization capabilities so transactions lacked relevance and value, making the user experience pretty awful. For buyers, marketplaces did little more than automate the approval process for purchasing products. For sellers, they provided very little value, lacking distribution vehicles and forcing sellers to compete on price alone.

It’s clear now that the marketplace business models were deeply flawed — and once the artificially-induced demand (which was fueled by classic capital-market bubble hysteria) disappeared, virtually all marketplaces and vendors went away. The few that did survive retrenched to focus on solving simple purchasing and related problems with vertical applications like sourcing, procurement, travel and expense management — with varying levels of success.

In the Business-to-Consumer space, there were positive and sustainable developments in the mid-to-late 90s with companies automating vertical-specific transactions such as Travel, Dining, Events, Books, Electronics, Home Services and more. These companies built destination sites and consumer brands and helped fuel the keyword-based search model that has worked so well for Google. For consumers, there was tangible value relative to previous phone and paper-based search and purchasing. Today, web 1.0 seems so limited, but as compared to the traditional Yellow Pages, it was revolutionary.

I founded Rearden Commerce with a vision of a much smarter Web – one that understands the identity, location and circumstances of users and works on their behalf,  to manage their day-to-activities in the most personalized and relevant way possible.

Today, our Deem ecommerce platform is on the verge of delivering on this vision. Deem will correlate an individual’s preferences, location and circumstances with all the options and attributes of what products and services merchants can truly deliver, and will execute the perfect transaction for both.

We enter 2012 primed to take ecommerce to the next level. With the backing of $340 million in venture and corporate capital, and a decade of platform, application and ecosystem development, Rearden Commerce is ready to deliver on the ambitious and transformational mission of perfecting commerce through absolute relevance.  Join our revolution.