Koester describes Zaarly as a “mobile marketplace for anything.” In other words, it provides a way to buy or sell locally. Koester said that it is focused on buyers at this point, since it would be cumbersome to search through all that people have to sell on a mobile device. Instead, the app essentially allows users to say, “I would pay X amount for _________.”

“In our world, we try to let the buyer start the conversation saying what they want, and then sellers come to the marketplace trying to connect right directly with them,” said Koester.

He went on to say that Zaarly divides its marketplace into three categories: goods, services, and experiences. He also told us that he believes that, just as consumers transitioned from offline marketplaces to online venues, they would make a similar shift to mobile platforms.

“Mobile commerce is really transitioning this world of buying and selling in a real-time basis,” said Koester.

According to him, consumers no longer want to sit at their desktops and search for items. Now, he believes people want to find what they’re looking for wherever they are, which will drive them back to local commerce.

Apparently, he’s right because the service took in over $8 million in transactions over its first five months of existence. The company has also received funding from Ashton Kutcher, added former eBay CEO Meg Whitman to its board, and been referred to as “the next eBay.” Furthermore, it recently brought in $14 million in additional funding.

Koester calls the company’s success “so fortunate” but said that the timing of the app was critical. As he explained, without the advanced technology that exists in smartphones, mobile payments, and social channels such as Facebook and Twitter, it would not have been as successful.

Going forward, Koester told us that users could expect a tighter integration between buyers and sellers as well as more tools for small businesses to utilize. He also said that privacy was very important to the company and that it would continue its efforts in this area.

Is mobile commerce the way of the future? If so, what does it mean for sites like eBay and Craigslist? Let us know your thoughts.

While at SXSW last month, we spoke with Wayne Sutton who spoke on a panel about real-time video blogging. In the first part of the video (this is the produced version of a video we did stream live at the time), Sutton discusses geo-location for business opportunities, which is a great subject in itself, but the video stuff begins around the 2:40 mark.

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Following are a combination of tips from Wayne in the above clip and some of our own.

8 Tips for Real-Time Video Blogging

1. It’s less about quality, and more about opportunity

Quality is good, and it’s certainly worth focusing on and improving upon when possible, but the fact of the matter is that live streaming gives you opportunities to break stories or get exclusive coverage you may otherwise not be able to get. At times this may be at the cost of other production elements. The on-the-fly approach doesn’t always give you time to include aspects you might otherwise include. That said, you can always go back and look at your coverage and analyze how it looks. Look for things you can do better and address them next time if possible. This leads us to the 2nd tip.

2. Improve Upon the quality of what you can control. 

Intros and outros are two things you have direct control over during a live stream. You’re running the show, and this is one area where you can clearly look at quality and improve upon it. You can see what works and what doesn’t, and keep that in mind for the next stream, as opposed to say a live interview that falls between the intro and outro, where you never know what somebody will do or say.

Other factors, such as the behind the scenes stuff are also in your control: what platform are you using to get your videos out? Is it providing a quality experience for viewers? Ease of use for you? Are you using the best equipment within your means? This brings us to the next one.

3. Be Prepared and Have the Right Equipment

While there does come a time when you if you’re going to do it, you just have to jump in, you should do some testing before hand, and evaluate whether you have the right equipment for the job to meet your requirements for the quality of video you’re looking to do. This may include things like cameras, mics, computers, phones, wireless access, etc.

Depending on what kind of things you are looking to cover with your videos, mobility may be a significant factor, and is worth giving careful consideration when going out to engage in said coverage. It may not be the most convenient thing to lug too much heavy equipment around.

4. Promote it Ahead of Time When Possible

This is common sense, but if you know you’re going to be doing live video of a particular event, let viewers know before hand. You can attract a lot more viewers for a live stream if they know about it before it happens. Otherwise, you’re going to have to rely on them just happening to be at the right place on the web at the right time. Give them some notice.

5. Pick a Topic and Be Consistent

This is really no different than blogging in general. Successful blogs stay (for the most part) on topic. Unless you just want people you know to read your blog or random visitors from scattered, but occasional traffic, it’s a good idea to have some basic theme, topic, or niche that makes your blog a destination site for information and/or opinions regarding that topic. The same goes for live video blogging. It’s going to be harder to maintain a steady audience if one day you have a good interview about search, but then you jump around to motorcycles, then to playing with your dog in the back yard, then to a clip about what you thought of the most recent episode of Wife Swap.

6. Take Advantage of the Real-Time Part

As the first point said, real-time video blogging is largely about opportunities. Doing video in real-time means you’re putting out something that’s happening right now. This is why it’s a good outlet to be first with news if you are able to take advantage of such opportunities. You can get your content on the web really fast (nearly instantly – though in some cases there may be a slight lag).

7. Keep it Short

Unless you have something so compelling that it requires a long-form live video stream, keep your live streams brief. This isn’t really different from non-live video. On the web, time is valuable, and the more information that is shared on the web, the less time people have to get through it all. If you can be brief, people won’t have to leave in the middle. This will also keep a positive experience in their mind, and may encourage future viewing.

8. Consider Letting People Know You’re Going Live

If you’re out in the world looking for stuff to stream live, keep in mind that not everyone is comfortable with being on live video, and if you’re going to stick a camera in their face, it’s polite to let them know they’re on live.

In the end, it’s about balancing convenience, quality, opportunities and expectations. If you have other tips for real-time video blogging, we’d love to hear them. Please share them in the comments.

To me, while this is an interesting way of searching Twitter (in fact, I called it what Twtiter search should be), it gets even more interesting if you consider that Google is developing a system for sites to push content to Google in real-time, via PubSubHubbub (or PuSH). Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about potential PuSH integration recently (read about it more here):

Will Google make it an option to browse entire archives of sites in a similar fashion to what it is doing with Twitter? This could be a quite useful feature, and it would certainly fall along the lines of "organizing the world’s information." Let’s say I remember reading a New York Times article several months back that I’d like to reference in one of my own articles, but I can’t remember what it was called exactly, and I have a hard time finding it through a traditional web search. Being able to drill down into the archives in this way could make the search process much more helpful – a better user experience.

Of course most content sites have their own search features (sometimes even provided by Google), and you could try using that, but quite frankly these site search features aren’t always that great. In fact, they’re very often terrible. Google knows search, and it is still the most dominant search destination. It would make a ton of sense for such an option to be available.

I reached out to Google to see if this was a potential option. "The scenario described is indeed possible but we don’t have anything to announce today," a Google spokesperson tells me. To be clear, when he says "possible," he’s referring to the technology making such a scenario possible. As he said, there’s no announcement, and this may not even be on Google’s list of things to do. But, you never know. 

Google Labs already has a timeline feature for news.

Would you like to see Google offer timeline-like archives of site updates? Tell us what you think.

"Developers have built some amazing applications using data from Twitter’s network," says Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell. "Collecta’s API allows developers to extend their tools far beyond Twitter, to the rest of the real-time web."

Collecta’s Twitter-compatible API delivers real-time web results, in a format the company says is simple to integrate into any desktop app, mobile app or web app. This means third-party developers can now integrate fresh streaming results from Collecta’s base of social media, established news, and unique content sources directly into their applications.

Sites like CNET and MySpace, and apparently thousands of others are already using Collecta, and today’s announcement will allow many more to join them.

"We want to support the explosion of creativity in the real-time space," says Campbell. "We love seeing new, clever ways to take advantage of Collecta’s real-time data. We’ve done a lot of the hard work to create the real-time stream so that app companies can focus on their specific ideas."

More information about how to implement the Collecta API can be found here.

Do you want your content indexed instantly? Share your thoughts.

In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about this, among other things:

"Maybe some small site, you might only find a chance to crawl its pages once a week, but if that site is blogging like every 20 minutes, boom , you hit the submit button, and the search engines can find out about it," explained Cutts.

"Now the tension is that more spammers would use this as well, so you can’t just say, ‘I’m gonna index everything that everybody pushes to me.’ So finding the right balance there is tricky, but the potential is really, really exciting," he said.

"You can definitely imagine the reputable blogs getting very fast updates – the ones that we think are trustworthy, and then over time, maybe ramping that up, so that more and more people have the ability to do…just like, instant indexing," he says.

And here we see another way Google may end up looking at the trust factor, with regards to ranking.

Can We Learn from How Google Does Real-Time Search?

Liz Gannes at GigaOm recapped a few things Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said at SMX last month:

Casey said perhaps the most complex project in real time is to determine when to trigger the appearance of real-time results in search results. "We have huge internal debates on: Is this a good answer to this question, or are we just creating a tool for low-quality content?" he said.

Casey spent some effort justifying Google paying to include Twitter’s real-time firehose of tweets, saying it was an intensive technical integration on both sides, and that tweets are a fundamentally different form of communication due to the restrictions of their form. For example, Google has developed a ‘complex system’ for removing users’ public tweets that are later deleted or marked private.

Earlier this year, Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at Google talked about how Google ranks tweets. According to him, Google ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that same kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation," Singhal says. "As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well."

Now Google’s current real-time search product is separate from the whole PubSubHubbub-based system that isn’t in place yet, but Matt’s comments about blogs being trustworthy, indicates to me that trust is going to be key in being able to push content to Google’s index in real-time. So, I wonder if a similar strategy to how Google ranks its current real-time and Twitter results will be employed in determining this kind of trust.

Does This Mean If You’re Not Trusted You Won’t Get Indexed?

"PuSH wouldn’t likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google’s existing index," says Marshall Kirkpatrick, who spoke in a session on the real-time web at SXSW, which also included Google’s Brett Slatkin, one of the guys responsible for PuSH (he’s in the following video explaining the technology in simple terms).

Lots of sites out there already have PuSH technology in place. For example, WordPress and Typepad blogs have the ability to "PuSH" their content. That’s a lot of content itself. A lot of user-generated content, and that means the potential for spam is huge, which is why the trust factor is so important.

If PuSh is to be heavily utilized by the search engines, and you want your content indexed as quickly as possible, you’re going to want to do what you can to build community trust and a solid reputation. One more reason to engage in meticulous online reputation management, put out great content, and engage with the community.

Do you want to see Google index the web in real-time? Discuss here.