[London, ENGLAND] Always at the leading edge,
Internet visionary Nicholas Negroponte has given
“significant financial backing” to European swap site
Webswappers.com,
it was revealed Tuesday.
Negroponte, founder and a director of the MIT media lab,
is joining Webswappers as an independent advisor while
also bringing the backing of seed-stage investment fund
Protos LLC of which he is one of four partners.
Essentially, Negroponte is bullish on swapping — an
activity that has been largely neglected by the big
players in e-commerce.
“Swapping is ideal for the Net economy. It is the most
extreme form of dynamic pricing, in that each party
values their currency differently. Two apples you do
not want can be worth one orange you do,” said Negroponte.
He went on to comment that consumer-to-consumer Web sites
currently carry the stigma of online retail, which, he said,
completely misses the enormous opportunity of peer-to-peer
commerce.
Jonathan Attwood, chief executive of Webswappers, said
the support of Professor Negroponte and his colleagues
reinforced the strategy being followed — at a time when
many venture capitalists in the U.K. were avoiding
consumer-based businesses.
Webswappers lets users turn their unwanted items into the
goods and services they prefer, all without the need for
cash. It claims to be revolutionizing the concept of
swapping and bartering by bringing together a fragmented
user base.
The exact sum put into Webswappers by Negroponte and his
colleagues was not revealed, but it should ensure that the
concept becomes fully tested in Europe. Webswappers enables
swapping across categories ranging from books and CDs, to
cars and houses.
The other three Protos partners are Jeff Parker, creator
of First Call and currently chief executive of CCBN.com,
Thomas Grant, Boston-based venture capitalist, and Bill
Sahlman, the Harvard Business School professor.
