News

We are happy to announce our book a day contest which will start on August 1st, 2008 and will go until the end of the month. Every day for the month of August we will be giving away one book to one of our members. In order to qualify you have to follow these simple rules:

1. Be a member of Commuto (pretty obvious)
2. Post some books you want in your Wish List

That’s it. Doesn’t get much easier than that. At the end of every day a member will be chosen randomly to receive one of the books listed in his/her Wish List. The book will be purchased by us through Amazon and sent directly to whatever address you provide us.

This contest is open to everyone, no matter where you live, seeing as Amazon can ship pretty much anywhere. The earlier you sign on and post items the more chances you will have to win, so start posting. The only condition is that Amazon must carry your book so don’t start posting first editions of Oliver Twist. That’s a little out of our budget.

Thanks and trade friendly,

Stephen

Thanks to our friends at Contest Alley for mentioning the contest.

Cool Contests,
Great Prizes at
Contest Alley

Hi…

It’s been a hellish few weeks. We had a surge of new users that, thankfully, made us aware of many bugs and issues that went unrealized. We have rewritten our trade generator logic which was, ummmm…fun. We have also added new features based on user recommendations to make your Commuto experience much more interactive and exciting. The following features and changes have now been implemented:

Security Settings: We have added a new link in your profile page called “Security Settings”. In there you will find the options to control the type of emails you will be receiving from Commuto. You now have the option to control the following emails:

• Promotional Emails
• Updates and Changes Emails
• Emails notifying you when Commuto members send you messages

You can also control who can send you messages (anyone in Commuto or just members in your communities).

Suspend Account: You can now suspend your own account when you will be unavailable for an extended amount of time. Suspending your account will make your profile and all your items invisible to other members until you have decided to reinstate your account. So now when you go on vacation or are sent to jail you don’t have to worry about trade proposals. Actually, jails could make for wonderful trading communities.

We have also added the following countries with their states/provinces/regions and cities:

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• Israel
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Poland
• Portugal
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Ukraine
• United Kingdom

If you registered from any one of the countries above please go into your profile page and edit your location to add your state/province/region and city. Also, if you have any friends from these countries now is the time to invite them to Commuto. We will continue adding more countries as quickly as we can, and we look forward to providing you with new features as we continue to develop Commuto into the most interactive and popular social bartering site online.

Thanks and trade friendly,

Stephen

Congratulations to Laura J from Los Angeles, California.  Laura is the winner of a $250 gift card for Amazon.com in our random draw held today for all our members who gave us a chance so early on.

Thank you to everyone else who joined Commuto and trade friendly.

Stephen

Early this morning Daily Candy wrote a wonderful mention of Commuto.com in their Los Angeles edition. This was the epitome of a good day gone wrong. We started off flying, with everyone here very excited about the prospects of what’s about to happen today. We knew there was a chance of some technical difficulties, but we managed to allocate all the servers resources to Commuto and were hoping that any issues that occur would be minor and short lived. Boy were we wrong. Daily Candy is a monster. They brought so much traffic that we managed to crash our severs several times throughout the day, and whenever we were operating we were doing so very slowly.

We will be upgrading our servers on Thursday night and will be able to deal with all future traffic. I just wanted to apologize to all the users and visitors who had to deal with the crashes and slow loading today. Its been a fantastically stressful day and I feel terrible for all those who ever affected. I hope you give us another chance, and I promise that your experience from here on will be much improved.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned. My sister has a site which had gotten a mention on Daily Candy in February and her site had crashed the same day as well. So yes, I knew what was about to happen, and yes, I under estimated it. My mistake. It won’t happen again.

Thanks again and trade friendly.

Stephen

As you are aware, Commuto has only launched recently and while still in beta has had a few development bugs.  We have been working on fixing them as quickly as possible and hopefully you haven’t been affected by any.  As a thank you for giving us your time and patience we would like to announce our first promotion.

Commuto will be giving away a USD $250.00 gift card from Amazon.com to one of our members.  This is a random draw, but only those who are active will be included in our draw.  So please participate in your communities, add items to trade and see what’s out there for you to get.  Oh, and please invite your friends, neighbours and colleagues.  The more members we have the better the trade options are for everyone.

We’ll announce the winner on May 2^nd in our News Page.

As well, we are working on adding more options to our site that will make your experience much more interactive and enjoyable.  Stay tuned for updates.

Thanks and Trade Friendly,
Stephen

It finally happened. We got our first piece, or pieces, of publicity. I was checking our user count last night and saw a massive spike (for us its massive) of 76 new users. I immediately went to Google Analytics, one of my all time favourite website tools, to see where the traffic came from. Its incredible how useful Analytics is. Some days I spend hours just seeing where the traffic is coming from, looking at graphs, figures, stats and links. For a visual person like myself, this is heaven-sent.

The first mentions are below. They are from Trendcentral and FashionClub. I was actually very familiar with Trendcentral as is on my regular rotation of sites I read every morning, and I’m now familiar with FashionClub as well, which my sister would love. Thanks to both for mentioning such a young start-up.

The links to the articles:

http://trendcentral.com/Webapps/App/SnapShots/Article.aspx?ArticleId=7335

http://blogs.fashionclub.com/my_weblog/ecofriendly/index.html

Thanks again,

Stephen

I suppose the most often asked question by online businesses is how to advertise online for free or for very cheap and have it be effective. This is something I’m still trying to figure out. Our service is free, and I do believe it has great value to our users so of course I hope it grows by the oldest and cheapest form of advertising, word of mouth. Word of mouth is actually the most important method of advertising for us not because it’s the cheapest, but because the whole concept of Commuto is building communities and the only way to build them is by inviting your friends, neighbours and co-workers.

For Commuto, our advertising has to be contained and focused. City by city, school by school, office by office. If we scatter out too much we may get the users, but it will seem bare to those that do join, and I suppose that ends up being the most serious issue, how do we keep it interesting while not providing users any content. We have had users join from Arizona, Fairbanks, Alaska, Toronto and many other cities, but more often than not they are the only people in their city who have joined so far. I suppose all social sites have this issue initially so we’ll just have to wait for the site to populate and hope that those who joined in the beginning will be there later on as well.

One effective means of advertising I found yesterday was in the classified section on forums. I spend $1 to advertise for 2 weeks and we got 10 new users on the first day. I can’t be certain that all the users came due to this ad, but seeing as I haven’t advertised anywhere else yet, I am quite certain that at least 6-8 of those users are due to this ad. That’s a remarkably effective use of money but I doubt the return on investment would always be that high otherwise I would take a loan today for a mass classified advertising campaign.

Link exchange programs seem like a thing of the past. Google won’t allow them and that’s the kiss of death right there. So I’m left with personally finding sites to exchange traffic with, but currently we don’t have much traffic to offer. There is always a catch somewhere.

We are working on some big ad campaigns and partnerships with some larger companies which I can’t really discuss until its done, but for now I need to find other ways to get the word out. “If you build it they will come”…not if they’ve never heard of it. It’s time to get the word out.

If you have any ideas to share, please feel free to email me at sarbib@commuto.com.

Thanks and trade friendly.

Stephen

Hi everyone,

This is the first time I’ve ever written a blog, but since its seems like today everyone has one, I thought I would join the crowd and start documenting the development and, hopefully, growth of Commuto.

Commuto was a concept I had a few years ago but it took my wife to give me a kick in the behind to get me going. I always thought that as a student, I would love to have a place where I can trade my unused items with other students. I know there are bulletin boards in schools, and craigs list online, but I thought something like this would make it much easier for students to find other students in their own school.

When I went to school I had a lot of books and video games that I had already read or played through which I had nothing to do with. The stores would give me 10 cents on the dollar, if I was lucky, and I always felt like I was getting ripped off. I hope that through Commuto, students will now have another option where they can finally get the full value of their items back through exchange. The idea of having no barriers to exchange, and being able to decide with another person what the true value of your items are, is what I love. Who is to say that my bike isn’t as worth as much as your microwave, except for maybe you, I guess.

The other reason I really wanted to start this is for the social aspect. I love Facebook, and many other online social sites as well, but I wanted to combine the online social aspect with real life social interactions. This will allow students to meet other students, with common interests, face-to-face. It will hopefully make a school of 20,000 students feel a little smaller.

But the idea really expanded after that. From schools we created communities. Any type of community really. A book club, a weekly poker game, a basketball league, anything really. I realized that I have no idea what my friends own, and they don’t know what I own. This will allow us to post everything we own online for each other to see. When we meet every week to play basketball we can bring our video games, book, movies or whatever else for exchange. Its worked great so far, and I hope its not an isolated incident.

I guess that’s it for a first blog. It’s not really funny, or smart, or even that interesting. I’ll need to get better at this blogging thing if I want it to be as entertaining as Gilbert Arenas’ blog, but then again, my life is no where near as interesting as his.

I will continue to update this blog as we go on with updates, news, and a few rants. In the spirit of the Oscars, I want to thank my developers who have done some great work here, my partner and my wife for believing in the idea. Oh and my parents of course.

Thanks,

Stephen Arbib

p.s. I can’t seem to get the spacing working.  Like everyone else, I blame this on Microsoft.

Commuto is a social community that aims to help college and university students trade their unwanted goods for desired goods with other students in their schools. This service is free and is available to all students worldwide. If you don’t see your school listed on our school search page, please contact our support team at support@commuto.com and we will add your school to the list.

Commuto is an online service that allows people to trade with another group of people, whether that’s in a school, college, work place or any other community, without ever having to wait for shipping or incur any costs.

As a member you can create a profile, post all the items you are looking to trade and add any items you are interested in and Commuto will automatically match your wants to other people’s needs. Commuto is the most powerful, user friendly online trading community out there and it’s completely free.

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