Crisis
Bridal Brokerage: Market-Maker for Unwanted Wedding Ceremonies
It’s a sad-but-true fact – every year, thousands of brides-to-be change or cancel wedding plans, many ending up out of pocket because they can’t recover money spent on advance bookings for the big day. “Not any more,” says Bridal Brokerage, an online start-up, featured in The New York Times, that finds buyers for unwanted wedding ceremonies, receptions and wedding parties.
Couples who need to tie the knot in a hurry, or those for whom cost is a big factor, are the target market. Bridal Brokerage identifies cancelled ceremonies that match the required date, location and number of guests, and acts as a go-between, negotiating a price acceptable to both parties.
Bridal Brokerage claims that anything from wedding photographers to catering services can be reassigned. Once the deal is done, it utilises an in-house graphic designer to produce invitations and orders of service for the new couple – all in double-quick time.
The new service helps disappointed couples to minimise the financial impact of changing their plans, while allowing lucky brides and bridegrooms to enjoy wedding days that might otherwise have been unaffordable.
If you’re involved with events or bookings, is this an idea that you could apply in your niche segment of the market?
Google Person Finder
In the midst of the Japanese Tsunami crisis there are still thousands unaccounted for. There is ground support, government crisis management and NGOs at work but unexpectedly – there is also Google. With the Japan Person Finder.Google Person Finder was launched in response to the Haiti earthquake last year. Looking to assist those affected, Google launched the online interface to help the public connect with the ones they’ve lost through a search engine geared specifically for this purpose.
A project from the Google Crisis Response division of Google.org. The division analyses the scale of impact of a disaster and then determines which of its tools would be the most useful for responding to the given situation.
An open source project, Google Person Finder loads as a simple landing page with two options ‘I am looking for someone’ or ‘I have information about someone’, Google is effectively creating a database of those lost and found in the midst of the disaster. Pooling multiple registries of missing and found persons to serve as a central search engine for missing persons.The tools crafted over the Google years now implemented in an initiative that does what Google does best, bringing it all together.
Using an open API Google Person Finder can also be embedded on third party websites and is available in multiple languages.
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