Ross from Bezurk (who used to be an ex-Yahoo!, one of the pioneers in the Singapore online scene actually) gave a short talk and demo of Bezurk.com, a vertical travel search engine that was founded last year. Personally, I’m actually pretty familiar with Bezurk and the Bezurk guys so the introduction was nothing new to me - and I for one really like what they’re doing with the site in terms of AJAX-ifying it and it works like a charm (fairly similar to Yahoo! Farechase in the way you can change your options and your search gets re-populated on-the-fly). After Ross, Elliot the software architect took to the stage to talk about the technologies powering the site.

Bezurk seems to be on the right track in terms of offering a service - there isn’t a service quite like it in Asia (as Ross explained, it’s due to the fiendis complexity of the travel industry especially in Asia). However, I do notice that even though they are offering a unique service in the form of a vertical search engine, to a consumer there still isn’t a strong differentiation between travel sites like Zuji and Bezurk - after all they both offer flights right now right? That’s a marketing job though - but right now according to Ross, Bezurk is embarking on a white label distribution strategy instead - i.e. let other big sites like Yahoo! and MSN create a travel channel using their technology hosted on their servers. I think that’s a useful strategy for sure in the short term.

Overall - a very good demo and people were really impressed by the AJAX implementation on the site (it was surprisingly new to a lot of the audience - I was actually expecting a geekier audience). I did think that people did question on the uniqueness of the offering though - but in my mind this depends on quality of the product right now. Google wasn’t unique when it launched - put it that way.

Edit - Pictures from Bezurk’s presentation

Ross Veitch, Product Guru from Bezurk

Elliot Shepherd - Software Architect. This guy’s just 22 years old! I think I was still mucking around at that age…

The demo that Elliot was doing with Ross’ narration

Posted by pallid on Sunday, February 26th, 2006 at 4:44 am.