Tigerbow Gifting Without Human Contact
You can send money to anyone in the world through PayPal without knowing anything more than their email address. Why not gifts too?
That’s the premise behind Tigerbow.com, a startup that hopes to capitalize on this idea and turn the anonymous gift-giving popular on sites like Facebook into an Internet-wide phenomenon.
Not a bad idea and one that will probably gain traction, although I doubt that Tigerbow will be the ones to spearhead it. I have two reasons for that assessment: their current tack operationally and their potential competition.
Currently, Tigerbow is offering products through their own site that you can purchase and send to the email address of anyone you wish to send items to. The person is then free to accept or deny the request. If they accept it, then they put their shipping address into Tigerbow and the item is shipped. The sender never sees the personal information and neither does the recipient, so the linkup is secure on both sides. Tigerbow acts as the intermediary.
The idea is sound, but the problem here is Tigerbow’s offering products themselves rather than linking through with large online retailers like Amazon.com (who, I believe, would jump on this idea in a heartbeat). The worry here is trust. I don’t know Tigerbow from Adam and their site gives no information on who they are, just email addresses for “contact.” The company is, to the casual user, anonymous and therefore questionable.
The second problem I’ve hinted at already. This idea is really good. Therefore, one of the current online retail giants like Amazon is likely to take it. Whether that is done by just building their own version into their site or buying out Tigerbow, I can’t say.
So my assessment is that this is a great idea that has some shaky execution so far. With more and more of us keeping only email or cell pone addresses in our contact books, though, it’s clear that this is an idea who’s time has come and will be capitalized upon.
