One of the risks of trying to find a niche to build a startup is that the big guys can land on your face at any time. That’s why all of these startups are going to be in serious trouble when Adobe releases a free, ad supported online version of Photoshop in six months.
This announcement comes at a time when developers are lavishing attention on Adobe’s Flex platform, particularly in the video editing and sharing space. I think it’s reasonable for startups to question if Adobe will plan on competing with them in areas beyond photo editing. If that’s the case, these startups may not want to spend their time and venture dollars testing out various products, only to have Adobe jump in the middle after all the dirty work is done.
Adobe is both a platform company and an application company. Conflicts are not avoidable.
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A new site called Spotplex launched today that arguably sorts news in a better way than Digg does. I’ve been testing the service for the last couple of weeks and like what I’ve seen.
News stories are not submitted by users, as with Digg. Instead, sites that want to participate include some javascript code on their site, which monitors what stories/posts are read. The more times a story is read, the higher it appears in Spotplex. Very popular stories will make it to the Spotplex home page.
The resulting home page on Spotplex looks a lot like Digg, showing very popular content. Popular stories are ranked under the “popular” tag. Upcoming stories (the default view) are under the “latest” tab. Readers can also view stories based on popular current tags being used by publishers, and can view a ranked list of top publishers here.
The service is still very much in beta. For now only a handful of blogs have been included. The site itself is open for anyone to read stories, but only a few blogs are included so far. The company will be bleeding in new blogs over time to avoid strain on their servers. To kick things off they’ve agreed to allow up to 1,000 blogs in to SpotPlex. If you want to be included, just email “signup@spotplex.com.” The first thousand requests will get in right away.
Can Spotplex become as popular as Digg, or more so? I think it can if it evolves properly. Unlike Digg, Spotplex won’t have to deal with voting fraud. Spotplex will have their own unique fraud issues to manage, though. Another problem with Spotplex is the fact that large blogs and publications will dominate it to start just because they have large readerships already. To avoid this “the rich become richer” problem, I’ve suggested to Spotplex that the rankings be based on a publication competing with itself - so only very popular stories on TechCrunch (compared to average TechCrunch traffic) would get to the Spotplex home page. The Spotplex team has said that they’ll be tweaking their algorithm constantly after launch based on real data they get from the beta.
Spotplex is a spinoff of another startup, Opinity. The founding team includes Doyon Kim and Young Jun Pack.
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Berkeley, California based Wesabe will announce a $700,000 round of financing tomorrow from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (as well as a couple of individual investors), and Tim O’Reilly will join the company’s board of directors. A good overview video of the service, which launched in December, is below.
Wesabe is best described as a web version of Quicken, but with some fundamental differences that make all the difference in the world. Transactions can be tagged, for example. Also, as individual merchants are renamed by multiple users to make it more definitive (think about the crazy merchant names that appear on credit card statements), this better merchant data is automatically distributed to all other users as well.
One key difference between Wesabe and Quicken is a maniacal obsession with security and privacy. You can download data from up to twelve credit card, bank and other financial accounts. Your account credentials are never stored on Wesabe’s servers, though. You either download the data to your personal computer and then upload to Wesabe, or store your account credentials in an encrypted format on a small piece of Wesabe software on your computer. The result is that hackers can’t access your account credentials by breaking into Wesabe’s servers.
Wesabe has also spent a lot of time making it as easy as possible to leave the service. You can easily export your data and, more importantly, delete it directly from the Wesabe servers.
The service has been live for three months: $300 million in transactions have been recorded from 130,000 distinct merchants, and 1 million tags have been applied.
The company has eight employees.
This is OATV’s third investment (they also put money into Instructables and Chumby).
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Seriosity has a solution for over-crowded email inboxes. If you want someone’s attention, you’ll be paying for it.
The company’s hook is that they’ve studied World of Warcraft and other multi-player games and believe they’ve found the right way to get people’s attention - virtual currency. You attach a payment to an email, called a Serio, which is transferred to the recipient. The recipient is able to determine how important an email is based on the size of the payment. When an inbox is overcrowded, presumably the reader will sort through to the higher paying emails.
This strongly reminds me of beenz, a Web 1.0 currency that would be handed out for doing various things, like visiting web sites, that users otherwise wouldn’t be bothered to do. The company fell apart just after the Nasdaq tanked earlier this millennium.
What isn’t clear is what people can do with the currency other than send emails. Let me convert this into cash or frequent flyer miles or something else, and I’m in (beenz did this). Otherwise, what’s the point, other than to amass a stunningly large number of Serio and then spend it on…sending emails.
The company, founded in 2004, is based in Palo Alto and is using $6 million in venture capital to feed 27 hungry employees. See CNET for more.
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There were a bunch of product demos today at Adobe’s Engage event, but there were a few that stood out and should have a big impact on the startup world. They also happened to be some of the best demos of the day.
Virtual Ubiquity - Rick Treitman demoed their word processor application, BuzzWord, which was built entirely in Flex 2 and looks like it could be a direct competitor to Google Docs. The team focused heavily on making sure pagination and typeography were first class, something Flash has been bad at. They’ve created a great UI around the document workflow and have features like ruler tooltips when embedding assets that help people work with their documents. They are focusing on the collaborative document space so that users can be designated as reviewers, read-only, or actual authors and discuss the document. They are aiming for a public beta later this summer.
Scrybe - Faizan Budar presented Scrybe and showed the features that were in the video that generated so much buzz. He demoed all three major features live and made a point of saying that everything in the video is now working in the application. He showed off the calendar portion of the application, which has a great UI, the “PaperVision” which allows you to print your information into special pocket size chunks, and the option to save content to your Scrybe account from any website. The user interface is clean, useful, and it all works offline. They’ve opened up the beta to a limited number of people and hope to open it up to the general public after their next round of features are complete.
yourminis - Alex Bard, the CEO of Goowy Media , demoed what yourminis is working on. A lot of it has been covered by TechCrunch, but they really dug into Apollo and the API that they plan to release next week. With Apollo, they are building out a widget platform that will touch the web, embeddable properties, and the desktop. Alex took a yourmini widget and dragged it to the desktop straight from the browser which made for a poweful demo. Their API is going to enable developers to create their own widgets on the yourminis platform. They built a Twitter widget using the API that is great, so I think content providers are going to be excited about the freedom that the API allows.
Intelisea - One application that didn’t fall into the category of web startup but demonstrated how far the Flash application has come was an app from Intelisea. The application, built in Flex 2, is the front end for controlling a yacht. It runs on a touch screen interface and allows the user to look at engine stats, fuel levels, weather and GPS coordinates. There’s also a security feature that uses RFID tags to track the people on the boat and sounds an alarm when someone falls overboard. It displays a red dot on a schematic of the ship to indicate where the person fell off. It’s something that will never be seen on Web 2.0, but makes for a fun story when it comes to the Flash Platform.
Engage did a good job of showing how diverse the Flash platform is. There were a lot of great questions about the role Adobe needs to play in the design community and what makes web apps better (it’s not gratuitous animation or UI). And there are a lot of interesting startups using the Flash platform. Luckily we got a look at some of those today.
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