.gif)
Lastminute duo explore virtual interior design
Leading lights of the 1990s dotcom boom Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman are back on the innovation trail, making interior design from the comfort of your armchair a virtual reality. Ed Waller takes a look.
Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox are at it again. The duo who in 1998 launched (and later sold for millions) one of the highest profile 1990s dotcoms, Lastminute.com, and revolutionised the online sales of holidays, flights and hotel rooms in the process, have reunited to launch a new service targeting the £14billion-a-year interior design industry.
MyDeco.com is still in beta-testing phase but promises to "transform the way we design and shop for our homes, just as Lastminute.com transformed the travel industry," according to the two web entrepreneurs. The site offers plenty in the way of home furnishings, boasting more than one million products from over 500 retailers, including Heal's, Argos, John Lewis, The Conran Shop, Furniture Village, Graham and Green, OKA, Alessi, M&S, Andrew Martin and Lombok.
The site has two ways for homeware suppliers to join the party, assuming the party takes off, that is. By becoming a retailer partner, your products get extra prominence in searches and can be used in the 3D room planner; or if you're a small boutique and MyDeco likes your wares you can reach the site's users via its DesignBoutique.
But the site's unique selling point is its three-dimensional room-planning tool, which helps you to see how real products will look in your room. The thing allows you to see the effects of changing colour schemes, wallpaper, flooring and fabrics within photos of your own interiors - without having to raise a paint brush. It will soon also allow you to "test-drive" furniture by digitally adding it to a photo of your empty room. Once rooms have been given a virtual makeover, they can be viewed online from different angles and perspectives.
To finance the site's launch, Hoberman and Lane Fox have pulled together some £5 million in funding, a quarter of which has come from private equity firm Spark Ventures, one of the largest internet seed rounds in Europe. Spark also happens to be chaired by Tom Teichman, who was one of the early investors in Lastminute.com and is now a non-executive director of MyDeco, alongside Marks & Spencer board member Lane Fox. Hoberman is executive chairman but in the CEO position is David Kelly, another Lastminute alumni who has also seen a stint as chief operating officer at eBay Europe.
MyDeco's management also includes another Lastminute exec, chief technology officer Paul Chudleigh. In short, MyDeco seems to be in safe hands, given that Lastminute was one of the few original dotcoms to survive the late-1990s internet crash and rather than folding or selling for a pound like many other dotcoms, the site was sold to US travel giant and Travelocity parent Sabre Holdings in 2005 for a healthy £577 million.
Not only does the management team have a good pedigree but the investors behind MyDeco are equally illustrious. They include top designer Philippe Starck's company Yoo Ltd; Lord Rothschild's family interests; WGSN founder Marc Worth; web video firm Arts Alliance; Edward Atkin, founder of Cannon Avent; and internet gurus Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.
The latter two Dutchmen might not be household names but they're the guys who set up (and later sold for billions) the internet telephony company Skype and have since launched web video service Joost. They also have a internet fund, via which they've put money into MyDeco.
This collection of investors is keen to exploit the fact that while the UK home interiors and furniture market is worth about £14billion, it is very fragmented and only 2.5% of the sales are through the web. By contrast, around 10% of the market in the US goes via the internet. MyDeco will make its money through a commission on sales generated via a MyDeco link, and by ad banner sales.
However, unlike with Lastminute, MyDeco isn't moving into virgin territory. There are already several sites out there that allow you to plan your home makeover and even offer some degree of visualisation before you embark on your expensive project and start knocking down walls. House to Home (www.housetohome.co.uk) is from IPC Media and offers similar but different virtual makeover applications, as does Dulux.com, to a lesser extent.
But the people behind MyDeco have certainly learned the lesson of Facebook, and this might be the deciding factor. There are plenty of community applications on the new site, and users are able to check out other DIY enthusiasts' ideas and compare designs and colour schemes, and even make suggestions. DIY as a way to find new friends - oldest trick in the book.
