| Website | exhibia.com |
| Category | eCommerce |
| Employees | 10 |
| Founded | 4/11 |
| Description | Social Shopping Network ® |
| DEBT TOTAL | $1M |
| Debt, 3/12 Miko Tapio | $1M |
Exhibia Social Shopping Network ® was invented in the minds of entrepreneur Miko Tapio and computer scientist Victor Salazar. Victor and Miko started developing Exhibia in April of 2011 in a hostal style setting in Medellin, Colombia. The goal and mission of Exhibia was clear: to develop a penny auction style shopping environment, where all bids are by verified users, and items are to be fully paid to eliminate any financial loss for the company.
The combined experience of Victor and Miko in the field of online shopping and auctions surpasses 7 years. The team had worked together on a similar project and both agreed on the weaknesses of the current penny auction model, mainly the lack of transparency.
The major breakthrough in the developement of Exhibia came when Victor presented a concept previously familiar to him, called “crowd funding”. In crowd funding a group of poeple pool their money together to support efforts initiated by the parent company.
The idea of a transparent penny auction was born. The term “auction” has been used and abused by multiple internet startups so much, that the term “auction” has a bad reputation or brings out negative mental images on many. The new concept would need to be defined without the word auction. By doing some keyword and search term research, Mike came up with the term Social Shopping Network ® which successfully describes the new concept.
An international patent application for group shopping was soon filed by Miko. This revolutionary new way to shop has not yet been tested with live bidders, but based out of his previous experience Miko realized that the concept will bring many copycats if it was to work.
Exhibia Group Shopping is expected to be launched early 2013.
