I'm tapping this out from the gloriously sunny front patio of my uncle's home in Alicante. Just before we departed last week, a little birdie with the face of Ed Moore dropped me an email to let me know that Needz has gone live.

I've been following Needz for a little while, ever since seeing a demonstration of Agora, an early version of the product which they built in collaboration with Vodafone R&D. Needz is an interesting product, I think: Ed and his team have been looking at what a marketplace looks like when it's designed with mobile in mind, as opposed to being transplanted from the desktop web. I like the analogy of classifieds for this: location and convenience might be more important than getting the best price in some situations.

They're not the only people working on this problem, but they have an interesting take around building federated services which let providers run their own versions, which all appear to be the same service to end users.