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BobAndJoeSuck.com: the New Anti-TechCrunch

Posted on February 5, 2007 ·

Announced by Mike “TechCrunch” Arrington himself, here’s the latest anti-TechCrunch site: arringtonsucks.com, also available as michaelarringtonsucks.com.

Criticism is good. Raising your profile by being the counter-point to the uber-geek-web2.0-startup blog is acceptable. But frankly, “Bob and Joe” are off to a bad start. Picking this name for the blog tells volumes about themselves. Seriously, wasn’t ShitCrunch or TechCrush better? At least those guys made the intellectual effort of coming up with a good name, which although clearly indicated a counter-point, did not sound like a personal attack. (Actually, TechCrush wasn’t so much the anti TechCrunch, but an attempt to follow up on the (success) / failure of companies profiled on TechCrunch – something that later Mike started himself in his Deadpool posts.)

But Arringtonsucks is just low. And here’s the best: of course the authors are anonymous. Here’s what their “About” posts says:

“Bob and Joe are not our real names…

…We are 2 software engineers working for a large corporation during the day and on our own ventures evenings and weekends”

Needless to say, comments are closed on this post.

C’mon guys, Valleywag doesn’t like Mike Arrington either, there’s clearly a spat going on, but we all know who’s behind the Wag. There really should be no room for anonymity in the Blogosphere (except for Mini).

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Filed Under: Blogging, Startups ·
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Box.net + Zoho: Another Step Towards Seamless On/Offline Computing

Posted on February 3, 2007 ·

Well, we did not have to wait long: barely two weeks after Omnidrive   announced their integration with the Zoho online applications, competitor Box.net   followed suite: they now support online editing via Zoho Writer.  The result of the edit process will be saved back to your Box as a .doc file.

Box CEO  Aaron Levie assures me this is just the start of many future integration projects, which is great.  After all, it should not matter where a document starts its life: I should be able to access and work on it online or offline. 

I fully expect other services to join the camp:  For example, the better business-class wikis all handle document attachments, but to edit those docs you still need to download, edit, save, upload back up again – way too cumbersome, why not enable online editing?   And if you read Tim Barker’s comments to my writeup on Koral, you can expect this amazingly easy content collaboration system to offer online editing soon.

smile_regular

P.S. Aaron, I’m still waiting for that sync 

smile_omg

Additional posts: /Message,  CenterNetworks, Web Worker Daily,

 

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Zoho Announces Multimedia Notebook at DEMO

Posted on January 30, 2007 ·

(Updated)

The Zoho folks will be announcing yet another product at DEMO – this time it’s a multimedia NoteBook. Since whenever they release a product, the Microsoft / Office analogy is quite unavoidable, let’s just get it out of the way: this is Zoho’s “OneNote” – and a lot more. (Bias alert: I am an Advisor to Zoho).

Notebook is an online application to create, aggregate, share, collaborate on just about any type of content easily – all in one place, without having to switch applications. You can create multiple books and within that multiple pages. There are a number of page-types to begin with, including Sheet, Writer, Calendar, Contacts, Planner, Task – these correspond to Zoho applications – or simply start with a blank page.

You can easily create any type of content within a page: text, image, drawings, audio, video – these could be embedded youtube videos or record from your own camera / microphone directly into Notebook. Place your content anywhere in the page by freely dragging it around, resizing, reshaping it. Aggregate content from multiple sources: embed Show, Sheet data, web pages, RSS feeds, file attachments. IE and FireFox plugins allow easy clipping of web-content.

If it’s Zoho, it has to be collaborative; but this time NoteBook brings real-time online collaboration to a new level: you can share book-level, page-level or individual object-level information. This means you can selectively collaborate with certain users on your text, while sharing the chart with yet another group, and hiding the rest. Updates to any of these objects are reflected in the NoteBook real-time. Integration with Skype allows Skype presence indicators in the individual shared object as well as direct IM-ing over Skype. Needless to say, version-control is taken care of at the object-level, too.

Now, for the bad part: NoteBook is currently in limited Alpha mode … so hang on for a while ..

fingerscrossed and in the meantime, enjoy this demo video:

NoteBook is unquestionably the sleekest of all Zoho apps, and a technological marvel. There are clearly specific target demographics, like students, where an All-In-One notetaker is the killer app. In a more typical business environment one might wonder where it fits in the range of products available, and what application to use when. Update (1/31): Dennis lists much better use-cases:

“I can see huge potential for this among those professionals who need to assemble audit and M&A resources for example. It makes the creation of a multi-disciplinary team very easy with the ongoing ability to collaborate as projects evolve while remaining in an organised, controllable environment.

I can see other use cases arising in forensic work, planning, budget management, time and expense management – the list goes on. In this sense, Zoho Notebook could become the de facto desktop for knowledge workers because you don’t need to leave the service to do pretty much all the tasks you’d expect a knowledge worker to undertake. I can also envisage some interesting mashups using accounting data from a saas player that gets pulled into Notebook on and ad hoc basis. Does this mean Notebook is a ’silver bullet’ application.

I’m going to stick my neck out and say a qualified ‘yes.”

About a month ago, while reviewing then new Zoho Wiki I expressed my hope to see tighter integration to the Zoho Suite – specifically Writer, Sheet and Show. Well, now it’s here, albeit in a separate application. Ideally I’d like to see the wiki equipped with Notebook’s powerful editing /collaboration options – or is it the other way around? If you take NoteBook, and allow linking between pages/books … well, that’s quite close to a wiki.

smile_wink. Update (1/31): In the same post I’ve just referred to, Dennis says: “Zoli Erdos has an interesting take on whether the collaboration features put Notebook in the same class as a wiki.”

Let me clarify my point: I’m not comparing NoteBook to Wiki as it stands now. What I do believe is that the feature sets of the two should be merged somehow. Combine the “digital dumping ground” as Dennis says, i.e. the absolute flexibility of creating/aggregating any type of info with the linking, back-linking, navigation, search in the wiki, and you have a truly killer business app.

Zoho has a tradition of initially developing products individually, but share the code-base early, and integrate them later. What do you think? Should Wiki and NoteBook be merged to create the super-product, or is there a need/ market for them to be independent in the long run?

Update (1/30): See related posts on TechCrunch, Read/Write Web , Zoho Blog , Scobleizer, /Message, CMS Wire, InformationWeek, PC World.

Update (2/1) : Robert Scoble’s summary: ““cool” has different meanings: 1) That it’ll change how you work. Zoho’s Notebook wins here.

Update (2/2): The video of Zoho Notebook’s launch at DEMO is now up here.

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Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME, Startups ·
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Koral – Collaborative Content Management without the Hassle of "Management"

Posted on January 29, 2007 ·

My regular readers know I’m a big fan of wikis. There is just no better way for collaborative group work. If I started a company today, we’d have a wiki from Day 1. Gartner predicts 50% penetration to business by the end of 2009 – that’s Gartner, that’s only 50% and that’s 3 years away. That leaves a large number of businesses unserved, and a huge opportunity to enable them to collaborate without changing the way they work.

Today the #1 productivity platform in business is still Microsoft Office. A typical “knowledge worker” creates documents, spreadsheets, presentations on her/his desktop, tries to maintain order by diligently filing them under an ever-growing directory-structure and shares the information by emailing the files around. When several co-workers need to contribute to a document, version chaos ensues. Document management systems are supposed to ease the pain, but they are big, expensive, and surprisingly (?) only 5% of office workers actually use them.

Koral, a content collaboration startup debuted a few months ago has a strong change to change it all. It pursues a very simple idea: allow users to share information, give them access to the most recent version of all documents, whether the latest update is on their desktop or someone elses, and guide them with several popularity/ usage indicators, i.e. most accessed documents, most active contributors, best rated experts ..etc – do it all without forcing users to change how they work today.

They can continue individually working on their desktops, and all they have to do is drag the documents to be stored into Koral’s drop-box on their desktop. The document is instantly uploaded, fully indexed, auto-tagged based on content, and for certain document types (for now PPT) flash previews are generated. The user does not have to be logged on to the web-based system, although doing so allows for additional categorization, tagging, permissioning:

All this information becomes the foundation of easy document retrieval. Gone is the directory jungle where files are replicated and lost: it’s all about tagging and powerful search. Search, which can based on simple keywords, boolean expressions, or multi-step, clustered search where a friendly interface helps the user create further filters based on content, file formats, tags, categories, author ..etc until the number of matching documents comes down to a handful – at which point the online previews come handy.

Once you found what you’re looking for, you can download your document, or subscribe to it, giving you alerts any time the document is updated. The subscription mechanism goes beyond just notification: it’s the foundation of document synchronization. Koral places a tracker the local (desktop) document, so it will know who has what version at any time. When you access a local document – open it, or even attach it to an email – Koral will warn you if you don’t have the most recent version (i.e. someone else has updated it online) and of course offers to replace your old copy.

Sync goes a step further: how often do a few “core slides” get replicated in dozens of corporate presentations? Or a key spreadsheet embedded in various other documents and slides? Koral can refresh all these second-generation documents when the core slide/spreadsheet changes – i.e. your numbers are magically updated.

Stepping beyond traditional document management there are a number of social networking / bookmarking features: documents can be rated, commented on.

The document summary page above shows the average rating, number of users who rated the document, number of downloads and subscribers, and comments, on top of the standard document attributes like creation date, author, version number.

Koral is currently piloting a version with select customers where they can provide ranking statistics based on some of the above information: most frequently read, downloaded, subscribed document, most discussed document, most popular post or author, most popular tags ..etc. Needless to say you can subscribe to authors, tags, categories, not just individual documents. All this essentially supports better information discovery rather than just explicit search for information you already know exists.

Finally, some of the best applications are when you don’t even notice you’re working with Koral: users of Salesforce.com can discover related documents and attach them to the lead / opportunity record without ever leaving the salesforce.com environment.

Talk about mashups …Koral itself is a “bridge” product, enhancing the productivity of largely offline users (working in MS Office) by offering an online service. I would love to see them move further on the offline/online continuum by offering online tools to not only preview but actually edit documents online – the recent Zoho-Omnidrive mashup is a good precedent to follow.

For additional information, check out the demo video by Tim Barker, VP Products, and Robert Scoble’s interview with CEO Mark Suster.

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Filed Under: Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Startups ·
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Zoho and Omnidrive Bring Seamless On/Offline Computing a Step Closer

Posted on January 22, 2007 ·

Omnidrive and Zoho took us a step closer to seamless on-and-offline computing by announcing their partnership over the weekend. The typical approach to editing online files is to download > edit > upload again. Better online storage services streamline these steps by auto-synchronizing your files, but editing is still a local operation.

Not anymore on (Z)Omnidrive: double-clicking on any Microsoft Office document will open it in the corresponding Zoho application, in the example below Zoho Writer. Currently Word, HTML, txt and ODT formats are supported using Writer, but later this week spreadsheets and Powerpoint files will also be available, through Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show. (Remember, although I am talking about applications here, all you need is the browser.) Thanks to Omnidrive’s sync-power the changes you’ve just made online will be reflected in the offline version of your document, too.

Creating new documents within Omnidrive is as easy as clicking File > New > Document type: Zoho Writer pops up, saves your document to Omnidrive, and voila! The Word file is on your computer.

I suspect this is just a beginning, and we’ll be seeing similar integrated offerings soon. For example I’ve long been saying that the attachment management functions the better enterprise wikis offer are nice, but they solve the problem based on yesterday’s technology. Instead of the upload>download>re-upload nightmare wouldn’t it be easier to work with the attachments directly online?

Koral, the innovative content collaboration service could also benefit from the Zoho API: it handles desktop Office apps like a charm, synchronizing, indexing, tagging …etc. them, but currently only has flash-previews for presentation files. A lot of extra steps could be saved by displaying / editing the documents online.

What other “candidates” can you think of?

Related posts:

TechCrunch, Omnidrive, Zoho, New Web Order, GizBuzz, Solo Technology, Webware,

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Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Startups ·
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SVASE VC Breakfast in San Francisco

Posted on January 16, 2007 ·

I’ll be moderating another SVASE VC Breakfast Club meeting this Thursday, Jan 18th in San Francisco.  As usual, it’s an informal round-table where 10 entrepreneurs get to deliver a pitch, then answer questions and get critiqued by a VC Partner. We’ve had VC’s from Draper Fisher, Hummer Winblad, Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Mohr Davidow, Emergence Capital …etc.

These sessions are a valuable opportunity for Entrepreneurs, most of whom would probably have a hard time getting through the door to VC Partners. Since I’ve been through quite a few of these sessions, both as Entrepreneur and Moderator, let me share a few thoughts:

  • It’s a pressure-free environment, with no Powerpoint presentations, Business Plans…etc, just casual conversation; but it does not mean you should come unprepared!
  • Follow a structure, don’t just roam about what you would like to do, or even worse, spend all your time describing the problem, without addressing what your solution is.
  • Don’t forget “small things” like the Team, Product, Market..etc.
  • It would not hurt to mention how much you are looking for, and how you would use the funds…
  • Write down and practice your pitch, and prepare to deliver a compelling story in 3 minutes. You will have about 5, but believe me, whatever your practice time was, when you are on the spot, you will likely take twice as long to deliver your story. The second half of your time-slot is Q&A with the VC.
  • Bring an Executive Summary; some VC’s like it, others don’t.
  • Last, but not least, please be on time! I am not kidding… some of you know why I even have to bring this up. (Arriving an hour late to a one-and-a-half-hour meeting is NOT acceptable.)

Thursday’s featured VC is Steve Reale, Principal, Levensohn Venture Partners. For details and registration please see the SVASE site. 

Here’s a participating Entrepreneur’s feedback about a previous event.

 

See you in San Francisco!

 

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Social Networking, Startups, Technology ·
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Read/Write Intranet 2007

Posted on January 15, 2007 ·

Rod Boothby is running a Read/Write Intranet Idol – it’s a poll I invite you to participate in, so I am attaching it at the bottom. But first, it gives me a chance to share some of my (wiki)-thoughts.

The list is a mix of industry behemoths (Microsoft, IBM Lotus), emerging but established brands (Atlassian‘s Confluence, Socialtext, WordPress), relatively known startups and quite a few obscure names. The latter probably not by pure chance: both Rod and I are on the Selection Committee for the next Under the Radar Conference on Office 2.0, and scouting for candidates we have made quite a few new discoveries, including some of these “obscure” names, that likely won’t remain obscure for long.

Perhaps the biggest “discovery” for me was Brainkeeper, a user-friendly enterprise wiki startup that officially launches today. Totally out of left field, they aim to be like market-leader Confluence in functionality yet have a friendly UI like Wetpaint. Oh, and add niceties like Workflow (Itensil?) and an API. Like I said before sometimes it pays to *not* be first on the market …

It was really interesting to watch the poll dynamics change yesterday and this morning. First, with only a handful votes cast unknown little Brainkeeper was leading the chart. Another leader was Koral, a content collaboration startup I’ve been planning to write about way too long now (until I pull my act together, see two reviews by Ismael and John Wilson). What’s content collaboration? It’s content management without the pain of “management”. As much as I am a fan of wikis, not all companies will embrace them: Koral helps those who mostly work with desktop documents (MS Office) share, update, collaborate painlessly.

Back to the poll: as more voters came in, predictably the “brand names” strengthened their position and the “obscure” ones fell somewhat behind. Still with 117 votes cast, I believe it’s mostly InnovationCreators’s primary reader-base, where Microsoft Sharepoint or Lotus Notes Blogsphere are not exactly popular. Like it or not those products will make a killing on the corporate market. So “brand name” here means the likes of Confluence by Atlassian, Socialtext, WordPress, Movable Type…etc.

Confluence’s #1 position on the list reflects it’s real-life market position: absolute leader in market share, revenue, functionality. Of course to maintain that position they can’t just sit on their laurels and they know that. At a really productive meeting with the San Francisco team recently we discussed their development plans, most of which I cannot share for now. However, I am happy to share that in the not-so-distant future Confluence will offer a hosted version – something I’ve repeatedly asked for:-).

As for competitor Socialtext, they revamped the product a few months ago: while I was fairly critical of some of the functional misses, the single biggest improvement was the UI: they went from an outright ugly product to a pleasant-looking, clean, friendly one. In fact this, along with other players (JotSpot, Wetpaint, Zoho, Brainkeeper) has turned the table: formerly good-looking Confluence now feels a bit … well, 2005-ish (?) Still the best, but somewhat boring. They are keenly aware of this and improving the UI is one of Atlassian’s key priorities.

JotSpot is in hibernation in the meantime, although TechCrunch speculates it may open up soon. Zoho is a newcomer to the wiki space, but not one to underestimate: they may just leapfrog all other players when they tightly integrate their full Suite (Write, Show, Sheet, Create) thus creating a truly powerful read/write/collaborate platform online.

Last, but not least two smaller wiki-players from the list: Itensil combines workflow with a wiki (now, religious wiki-fans deny the need for any structure or workflow, which is probably OK for a small group, but workflow is the way large corporations work), and System One combines a wiki with relevant enterprise search.

Without further ado (wasn’t this enough?) here’s the poll, please cast your vote:

You can click “view results” after you cast your vote, then “Complete results” to se more stats on the Zoho Polls site. Once there, click the “Rating” header to sort the list in ranking order – right now, with 117 votes cast Confluence is #1 with an average of 3.54, closely followed by Brainkeeper’s 3.50.

Filed Under: Collaboration, SaaS, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Let’s Not Spam MyBlogLog

Posted on January 9, 2007 ·

It  certainly  feels  like  every  single  blog  is  talking  about  MyBlogBlog’s  acquisition  by  Yahoo.  I think TechCrunch gets the “Best Title” award: Yahoo Buys MyBlogLog. No, They Didn’t. Wait, Yes.

Well, I am the exception, I am NOT writing about the deal

smile_speedy

When I first installed it on my blog, I thought this was all about providing useful outbound stats (who clicked what..etc).  Then the faceroll showed up, and before we noticed, MyBlogLog transformed itself into a social networking tool for bloggers.   That’s all fine, I like it and use it. 

But recently I am starting to get spammed.  Probably not “bad” spam, just a network’s growing pains – contact notifications from people I’ve never before heard about.  I went through this with LinkedIn, until I established my own “less is more” ground rules.   Now, let’s recognize that LinkedIn is primarily for business, and by definition is more restrictive  – online contacts there should really reflect one’s real-live network.  I feel MyBlogLog is more open, there is room for creating new “friendships” online – yet I think it would be helpful to establish some protocol before contact-hunting escalates to far. 

Making someone a contact is not the only way to network, and if we don’t already know each other, it’s certainly not the right initial step.   That’s what joining each other’s blog communities and sending messages are for.  But frankly, “interesting read!” is not a message – if this was a blog-comment, it would be borderline spam.  Which brings up the other point – if you join someone’s blog community, supposedly you’re interested in actually reading the blog itself, will likely engage in a conversation through comments or trackbacks, and soon you will really know each other – that’s the right time to add them as a contact.

By following this simple protocol, we can keep MyBlogLog spam-free.  What to you think?

 

Filed Under: Blogging, Social Networking, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Wetpaint Attracts More Funding

Posted on January 9, 2007 ·

(Updated)

Wetpaint, the “wiki-less wiki” received a $9.5 million Series B round in addition to its $5.25 million Series A in October 2005.

TechCrunch compares it to other wikis, especially key competitor Wikia:

“Wetpaint has a much more newbie-friendly user interface than Wikia, and is targeting a different audience. Frankly, it’s just a lot more pleasant to look at a typical Wetpaint site than a Wikia one, although the content on Wikia is often much deeper than the equivalent on Wetpaint.”

I’d take this one step further: Wetpaint isn’t really just a wiki, it’s a wiki – blog – forum hybrid. Even novice users can just happily type away and create attractive pages with photos, videos, tagging …etc. without the usual learning curve. These pages can be shared, other users can contribute, entire communities can grow and thrive – in fact that’s what it’s all about: online community creation.

Last August I issued a challenge to find another wiki just as easy to use with a comparably rich feature-set – the challenge still stands.

My only concern is that they appear to burn money faster than the other wiki-companies – but I guess if the investors are not worried, it’s really not my business

smile_wink (And in fairness they have a different business model)

Update (1/9): VentureBeat comments:

“With Jotspot gone for now (presumably, Google will relaunch it in some fashion), and players like Socialtext increasingly focused on selling its wiki software to company users, Wetpaint is among the more convenient Wiki softwares for individual projects.”

As much as I like Wetpaint, I have to disagree. I’ve never considered it a project-oriented collaboration tool. It’s clearly geared towards community creation, and like I’ve hinted above, for that purpose it’s the friendliest platform avaialable today. Business -even small projects – requires a few additional features like document handling (attachments, version control..etc), email integration ..etc.

JotSpot was quite good for that, too bad it’s gone. Socialtext used to be quite ugly, but the new UI is quite nice – it misses a few features though. The new kid on the block is Zoho’s Wiki , (bias alert: I’m and advisor to Zoho) with quite a few features for an initial beta release. It already supports embedding documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos..etc, and with improved integration to the full Zoho suite later this year it will be a killer combination.

Update (5/13/08):  TechCrunch article on Wetpaint’s traction.

Related articles
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TechCrunch Did Not Build it; It Can’t Knock it Down Either

Posted on January 7, 2007 ·

(Updated)

Fred Wilson doesn’t like Mike Arrington’s deadpool:

“So I have to shake my head at the resurrection of the dead pool, which was made popular last time around by Fucked Company. Do we really need to celebrate when companies fail?”

No, we don’t, and I don’t think TechCrunch does.  Let’s be realistic: TechCrunch did not build this boom. Yes, a well-timed review helps a startup gain initial traction, but Mike does not make those companies successful: whether they make it or not, they do so on their own. And when they fail, they fail own their own merits, too.  Failures are part of business reality, and reporting on them only makes TechCrunch balanced. Without it Mike would be just a biased cheerleader (something he was accused of in the past).

In fact Arrington’s latest post, Bubble, Bubble, Bubble is optimistic, despite the title:

“But this doesn’t mean we’re in a bubble. In fact, I think the exact opposite. I think a few failures are direct evidence that we are not in a bubble and that the private venture markets are actually in the process of letting off a little steam to keep things rational…

…I also disagree that too much money is chasing too few good ideas … Remember that VC’s business models are designed to fail most of the time – the majority of their investments are expected to go belly up, and they hope that just one or two out of ten have a big return…

…So every time a startup dies, I don’t think it’s evidence of a bubble about to burst. I think it’s evidence of a market that is working exactly as it should. Most companies fail, but enough win to keep the whole ecosystem healthy.”

This does not sound like deadpool celebration to me. Au contraire, it sounds like realistic, but still positive market assessment. 

Most companies in the “deadpool” are/were way overfunded for what they do. They, and their investors did not follow the model outlined in Fred Wilson’s excellent article, Web 2.0 Is A Gift, Not A Threat, To VCs. A must-read, IMHO.

Update (1/8):  Our little discussion made it to The New York Times.  

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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