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Sagar Bhadra
Adith Charlie

Mumbai, Nov. 14 Netizens with entrepreneurial instincts are capitalising on the hype surrounding Google’s new online collaboration tool — Google Wave.

Invites for Google Wave are being auctioned at online markets such as eBay. The highest bid price is $50 per invite. In India, the highest bidder paid Rs 403.

With Google Wave, multiple users can communicate and work with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, etc on a real-time basis. In other words, it is e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking all rolled into one.

Like most Google products, Google Wave too is given free of cost. However, to join, a newcomer needs to be invited either by an existing user or request for an invitation from Google directly. On an average, a Google Wave user gets six to seven invites to share. With a shortage of existing invitations and growing hype of the ‘coolness’ of the new Google product, techies are even willing to pay for the ‘Wave’.

“I wanted to try out ‘Google Wave’ and ultimately settled on buying it from eBay,” said Mr George Varghese.

A quick search on eBay shows that 2,118 postings have been made since Google Wave made its debut.

“What is happening on eBay is a perfect example of the entrepreneurial wisdom of sellers where they are looking at scarcity of products and are coming up with innovative plans,” an eBay spokesperson said. On eBay India itself, there have been eight listings last week of which seven got sold.

However, Google has a different view.

“Google Wave’s policies prohibit users from selling, trading, reselling or otherwise exploiting the service for any unauthorised commercial purpose. Google does not endorse and encourage these activities,” said a spokesperson.

The sale of ‘invites’ is not new to Google as a similar trend was seen when it launched Gmail, an email service and Orkut, a social networking Web site.

More Stories on : Internet | Entrepreneurship

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