With HOMEPAQ there is a new player in the media trading market which competes with Exsila, Hitflip et al. The media trading service is part of a software and web-service bundle called HOMEPAQ. The goal of HOMEPAQ is to help people organize stuff at home, such as recipes, books or dvds.
The value of HOMEPAQ is not straightforward. There are a gazillion of features and it’s very hard to get an overview of the value proposition. I needed a 30 min personal pitch of Paul Ryatt to “get it” all. There is definitely a lot of potential to make the whole thing easier to understand. The most interesting thing about HOMEPAQ is the integration of local software and internal and external web-services. Example: You use the local software to organize your book inventory at home (the software uses Amazon API, so you won’t have to put in all data manually). You find 10 books that you don’t want to keep anymore. So you export those books to the media trading service and get new ones (or dvds or cds) in return. The new items are automatically added to your local inventory, so you always have a complete overview.
The main question I asked myself is why to use local software at all (because I hate the unflexibility). My reasoning was: “We’re living in the web-service era, so local software doesn’t make sense anymore”. And I’m still not 100% convinced that local software is the way to go for HOMEPAQ. What made change my mind a little was the issue of security and privacy. What if I could organize my financial data with HOMEPAQ? Would I want to do that through a web-service? I don’t know. What I know is that with services like Wesabe people are apparently doing so already.
Good luck to Innosoft with HOMEPAQ!
Disclaimer:
Innosoft is a customer of trigami.
