Weeks ago a friend of mine was visiting Hong Kong from Silicon Valley. She had no idea about Alibaba and what was it doing. So I explained the whole B2B market scene in the region and the business model to her, etc, etc, etc. Her response to my explanation was kinda… short and concise. She said, “that’s it?”

That’s it? Companies pay to be listed on a website and then wait to be found by buyers? Of course this is just a stripped version of online B2B model. But having said that, the technical core isn’t any rocket science neither.

If you have followed my blog, you know I have been talking in my previous posts about the online B2B portals have better competitive edge over the trade show organizers in terms of technical capacity. But if we look at the competition from the other side, how difficult would the traditional B2B players be sharpening up the technical strength? Well, what I am about to tell may give them some hints.

Cartoon by Dave Walker.
Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog
at We Blog Cartoons.

Want one more killer application? How about a vertical search engine which you can crawl and index million of web pages within a week? Try Nutch, an open source search engine that was once tested by Yahoo! Lab. You can quickly add a true search engine and get it up and running. I’ve test-drive it. Nutch is really a sexy piece of software.

So, now with the handy tech tools, trade show organizers can build private label B2B suites and start thinking along the service integration. The technical strength won’t give them the winning hand, but certainly will gear them up for the second round rematch.

And I am more than happy to see the B2B scene continues to play vibrantly.

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