Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: DEMO 2006 (Page 2 of 7)

Yet EVEN MORE Content-Sharing Plays at Demo

February 18, 2006 / / 0 Comments

TagWorld, said CEO Fred Krueger at breakfast during the Demo conference, is “a MySpace killer.” Big boast. [But with Fred’s background he can do that.] Nonetheless, we’re talking here about killing a business that sold for $580 million (to News Corp.,) and now has 36 million visitors a month. All that aside, TagWorld makes a strong case, will be reaching a million signups at its site soon (after just turning it on three months ago), and has some oh-so-smart money now behind it. See Draper Fisher Jurvetson Funds TagWorld — a deal that went right down to the wire the night before Demo. [What intrigue, huh? Maybe Tim didn’t want Fred getting too chummy with the other VCs hovering around all the hot companies in Phoenix? Tim wasn’t at the conference himself, though I met an associate, Emily Melton.]

Just what is TagWorld? Well, it isn’t just a site, folks. “It’s an online ecosystem,” said Krueger — one that absolutely oozes with tools to support and enable the social web, he told us in his pitch. The big thing it now brings to the game, announced at Demo, is social commerce. “A 14-year-old can build a store in two minutes or less,” he said.

Tagworld I conducted a little followup Q&A by email with TagWorld yesterday, and here’s what Fred told me when I asked why his site is better than MySpace: “Because we offer 1 gig of free space to load video, music, photos, blogs, and now we’ve enabled TagWorld members to conduct commerce … the only social network to offer an integrated e-commerce solution. And, unlike other social websites, we provide our users with the ability to create dynamic, multi-page websites without needing an in-depth understanding of html and other web tools. Our drag & drop and one-click features make the social web more accessible to a broader audience.”

Why did Tim Draper choose to invest in your firm? “Tim has made a career out of finding companies that not only want to change their industry but affect the way that people communicate and conduct business,” said Krueger. “Our goals extend far beyond our niche. We’re passionate about our product and truly believe TagWorld will significantly impact the world as a whole, not just the social web. DFJ shares that vision.”

Care to say anything about the revenue model? “We plan to focus on revenue in the summer and spend the majority of our time (now) on publishing tools and user experience,” said CEO Krueger. “Our revenue plan will include several different approaches and hopefully provide us with enough flexibility so we can offer an alternative to placing ads on consumer’s pages. We want to be the place you move all of your online content to, so we will work hard to preserve that relationship.”

How have you gotten the buzz to get 750,000 signed up so far? And what can we look forward to in your marketing bag of tricks? “By the time you publish, we’ll hopefully have grown to over 800,000. We’ve done some advertising, but most of the buzz is from word-of-mouth,” said Krueger. “We also just launched a national billboard promotion where new TagWorld members can go to www.tagworld.com/billboard to sign up and design a site for a chance to have their TagWorld URL featured on a billboard in their own hometown. Our first winner’s billboard went up this week in North Carolina, and another will go up next week in Pennsylvania. We’ll have five going up on March 15th in LA, and will continue to put up billboards anytime, anywhere throughout the promotion, which is ongoing. Some top TagWorld members will receive personalized t-shirts featuring their TagWorld URLs. We’re running banners for other top TagWorld members, too, which link directly to their site.” But that’s not all folks…Krueger continued: “We’re also concentrating heavily on building our music and video components. We have over 2000 artists using TagWorld to increase their fan base. It’s a great viral marketing tool for bands and other interest groups as members can go to a band or other site and add tunes and videos to their own players.”

Tagworldbooth Okay, so you see these guys are serious. But back to the idea of killing off the 800-pound-gorilla competition. Could MySpace really be so fat and happy as to be vulnerable? They sure have challenges going forward regarding parents and other, uh…older folks…getting worked up (rightfully) about safety issues for its mostly underaged users. (A major article in yesterday’s WSJ, page B1, was entitled “News Corp. Goal: Make MySpace Safer for Teens”.) But anyone thinking this web 2.0 behemoth is standing still would do well to read this Red Herring article just out about Helio partnering with MySpace. The gorilla, it seems, still thinks it knows how to grow its big, fat business.

(Inset photo: Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, left, and his assistant get the pitch from TagWorld’s Evan Rifkin, while CEO Fred Krueger looks on at right.)

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[Written early Saturday morning in Bloomington, MN…where I’m staying inside as temps outside hover around minus 15.]

Yet MORE Content-Sharing Plays at Demo

February 16, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Couldn’t fit everything I wanted to into that last post. So, here we go with even more from Demo on the big theme of sharing consumer-generated content.

Let’s start with the naming-challenged GarageBand.com. Everyone knows their name, but for the wrong reasons. No, they don’t have anything to do with Apple — except they wouldn’t sell their name to them when the latter wanted to launch its very popular software; they’d only license it. (But that must have been a nice chunk of financing for the smaller firm, or ongoing financing.) Now, however, GB.com is doomed to be perpetually confused with their much bigger namesake, while Apple, with their runaway sales and monster brand awareness, I’m sure couldn’t care less. Gargagebandcomlogo Anyway, GarageBand.com is a going concern on its own, “privately financed” (wink, wink), and wants to be your “free iTunes companion.” And CEO Ali Partovi boasted from stage that his software combined with the iPod “will replace FM radio.” His company’s Gpal software, now available for public beta testing (but Windows only — boo), is designed to work with iTunes and help you build and manage a music library. It creates and maintains play lists, discovers new music (caveat: only emerging/unsigned artists on their own service), and — coming soon (apparently the coders couldn’t quite get this part ready) — share your music tastes online. This last feature will create a self-updating, personalized list of your favorite tunes that can be shared online in blogs, on MySpace, etc. GarageBand.com also runs a service called Gcast, which lets you quickly publish your own podcast for free, from your cell phone(!). Partovi shoved his phone in front of me, let me talk, then went to his web site and played back my very first podcast. I was so proud of my new baby. [Actually not — I sounded like I didn’t have a fricking thing to say worth listening to.] So now people who can’t write, or don’t want to, can say screw blogging, and just can fill up their site with talk — all day long. [I can hardly wait.]

Switching gears back to photo-sharing, let’s talk about perhaps the most impressive presentation, visually and otherwise, at Demo 2006: Smilebox. I have to say as a marketer that, for a consumer service (and there were lots of them presenting), this outfit seems to really have it together. They get it — the branding is flat-out brilliant. Having just announced another $5 million round, on top of an earlier $1 million, I’d say Smilebox is coming out of the blocks with one heck of a flourish. The company says it’s inventing a new category it calls “creative messaging,” which combines features of related categories like photo services, scrapbooking, and greeting cards. It claims that its service will be “unparalleled in its ability to convey mood, thought and emotion.” Not familiar with scrapbooking? It’s a $1 billion-a-year business, friends. And when you roll it in with photos and greetings, the market is $15 annually, said Andy Wright, Smilebox founder. [Shown getting prepped for his Demo pitch. Photo: Seattle Times.] Smileboxseattletimes So, here’s how it works: a consumer wants to send a birthday card. She chooses, say, a three-page card design, then decides which of her digital photos goes on each page and chooses some music to play in the background. The recipient gets the card by e-mail and is able to view it without having to register or download any software. (It runs on Flash, already installed on most PCs.) How many designs will Smilbox have? (And note: these really are designs — they’re too good to call “templates.”) Wright said the company will have 200 online by March and upwards of a thousand by yearend. Granted, many firms are crowding into this photo-sharing business. (Forrester says photo sharing over e-mail is the fourth most popular online activity, after sending text e-mails, researching stuff to buy, and then online purchasing itself.) Yahoo is no doubt the gorilla, especially after its purchase of Flickr last year. See my earlier post about Yahoo’s presentation at Demo. (And Will Aldrich was one of the best, most high-energy pitchers on stage.) But there are a slew of other companies trying to find a place in the space — including a bunch of pitchers at Demo. Smilebox CEO Wright previously headed RealNetworks’ game service, which gave independent game developers a cut of revenue from their games sales. Now Smilebox will have the same model, wherein Flash developers get a cut from the designs they sell through the service. Hmmmm….shades of what Multiverse Network is doing with their gaming platform, per my earlier post on them. And another outfit I mentioned previously, Gravee, too — their whole existence is about sharing the wealth. It seems we have a Demo sub-theme going on here: revenue sharing. Is it finally time for the little guys to get theirs? (As Google stock continues to tank….)

Waiting to get some answers back from the Zingee guys in Australia — so more soon on them. (Let’s hear it for P2P.) I’ll also be taking another look in my next post at user-generated content plays TagWorld, with some comments from their CEO, and the very interesting LocaModa.

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[Written at Bloomington, MN.]

More Content-Sharing Plays from Demo

February 14, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Another presenter in the photo-sharing business that got some buzz at Demo 2006 was Tiny Pictures, though you won’t learn much at their web site. They’ve received Series A venture funding from Mohr Davidow (maybe now they can afford to buy a real .com domain?), but they’re one of the companies for which the date of Demo appears to have fallen a tad bit early: they’re only taking “signups” at their site. The pitch was sure good, though! Their planned service is called “Radar,” and it’s for Java phones, said the company’s CEO and founder, John Poisson. Later, however, he said the service is “for regular people with regular phones.” (Is Java regular?) But then, at the end, he said the service will also come in a version that will work with “any phone and any carrier that supports the mobile browser.” So, you guess, friends. The company bills the service as “a dramatic shift in the way consumers use photography.” How does it work? How do you get your cell phone pix on their site? “One click and it goes directly to your account,” said Poisson. Or will … when it’s available … maybe. You invite people to see your “channel,” and you can look at all your friends’ channels. “A simple and addicting way to stay in touch anywhere and everywhere,” says the company.

A company that led with photo-sharing but really appears to be about much more than that is Sharpcast. They got $3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, so they can’t be all bad. But again, folks, this is futures: I heard later their product is months out, and the on-stage demo didn’t work from what I could see. Sharpcastlogo So take this all on faith, would ya? They call it a “connected applications platform,” which lets you synchronize your digital content on multiple PCs, mobile devices, and the web. So you can get at all your stuff with whatever device you’re using at the moment. But it’s not just about accessing and sharing — this looks essentially like a backup company, if you ask me, directed at consumers. It’s focusing now on media files like photos (who isn’t?), but it has its eye on a lot more than that, I suspect. Think synchronization. Maybe a Plaxo or GoToMyPC killer. Please wake me when it’s over…I mean available.

All this writing about what might be is making my brain ache, friends. And I was gonna write about GarageBand.com, SmileBox, TagWorld, Zingee, and LocaModa, too — oufits that all have stuff now! Oh well, that’ll have to wait. Watch for my next post, “Yet More Content-Sharing,” I guess. I still have a few more Demo nuggets to share with y’all….

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[Written at breakfast in Bloomington, MN, just a few miles west
of the Mall of America. And it’s freaking cold here, people.]

Vizrea Makes Photo-Sharing Automatic

February 13, 2006 / / 7 Comments

To me, the biggest underlying theme at the recent Demo 2006 conference was the sharing of user-generated content — especially photos, and especially cell phone photos. Why? Because camera phones outsell digital still cameras at least four to one, with about 300 million of them to be sold this year. All told, one billion camera phones are now estimated to be in circulation. That’s a lot of freaking fotos, friends. And the market continues to grow impressively.

The stat I heard at Demo that really made me sit up straight, however, was the estimated percentage of those one billion people that now share their photos: less than one-third. That’s why several companies at Demo see the sharing of photos as one big market opportunity (though that’s not the only type of content they can help you share).

Demovizreaceo_1 One company at Demo, Vizrea, was founded specifically to address the difficulty of sharing cell phone photos. Mike Toutonghi, CEO and founder, told me at breakfast on Wednesday that, after taking some time off from Microsoft, he decided there had to be a better way, and then set out with some colleagues to develop a solution. Mike was GM for Microsoft’s .NET platform, and was VP of the Windows e-Home Division, which developed Windows XP Media Center Edition. The thing that’s really cool about Mike, though, is that he was skateboarder in his earlier life, and even tried a bit of surfing, too — so I like him despite his being a Microsoftie. 🙂

The company says its Vizrea Snap™ service is a complete photo service for camera phone users. Steve Toutonghi, VP product development, put it this way: “It takes the work out of shooting and sharing, the whole end-to-end process.” It’s actually three apps: one for your PC, one for your cell phone, and one for the web. What’s very cool is that, when you shoot a phone photo, it’s automatically moved to your PC (wherever it is) or the web, or both. And soon file types will include movies, audio notes, blog posts, even podcasts you do from your phone — all getting shared via the web and/or organized on your PC, all automatically. How cool is that? [I’ve told my friend Steve Borsch, who does really great, professional podcasts on technology, that I just couldn’t see my self doing podcasts — too much trouble. This may change my mind, beause it’ll be as easy as leaving somebody a voice mail. Are you kidding me?]

Vizrea got a huge boost when Walt Mossberg ran a column on them in the WSJ the day after Demo wrapped up, causing online signups to surge. The company had announced a free trial at the conference. And Mike told me later in an email from Europe that “we’re already learning a lot from the trial, which was exactly our intent.” He promised more good stuff is on the way: “In the next month or two, when we release our full service, it will be much better as a result.”

Biggest drawback to me so far? It doesn’t work on the Mac, or with my Moto RAZR. The initial release only supports phones that use the Nokia Series 60 operating system (which aren’t very many here in the U.S.) But Mike also told me Vizrea had “a lot of business development related interest” at Demo, so one could only wonder if, for example, Steve Jobs will come calling. This appears to be one area where Apple lags, even though its iPhoto software was certainly an early innovation (and I love it). Mossberg, who’s always quick to point out when any Windows software products are not as good as good or easy to use as things Steve Jobs has brought us, strangely didn’t even mention the word Apple in his column.

Watch for more on the other cool stuff from photo-sharing and content-sharing companies that presented at Demo: GarageBand.com, SharpCast, SmileBox, TagWorld, Tiny Pictures, and peer-to-peer company Zingee.

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[Written from Minneapolis, MN.]

What’s So Kewl About Krugle

February 10, 2006 / / 0 Comments

It should be no surprise to you by now that Krugle Inc. launched its source-code search engine on Tuesday at the Demo 2006 conference. The company’s gotten much fanfare, including being named one of the “Demo God” winners at Wednesday evening’s closing press panel dinner, which you’ll see more about here.

I spoke with Chief Architect John Mitchell and CEO Steve Larsen earlier that day to find out more about this new tool, which they say will change the way developers work. Steve said their job in today’s open-source world is “more about finding and assembling code than it is about writing it.” Krugle’s research has found developers spend upwards of a quarter of their time searching. That’s a ton of lost productivity. With the Krugle service, you can find content about the code you’re looking for, or find the code itself. In the search results, the Krugle interface has a Project View at the right, which shows you where a specific piece of code fits in, with “lots of meta info.” And it also has a World View, which shows the relationship of that code to all the source code in the world. What’s also cool is you can email colleagues to show them right where you are in your search.

Chief architect John Mitchell explained to me how their engine goes well beyond a Google search. “They just do text. This goes in and understands the code, using semantic analysis,” the latter referring to proprietary technology of the company’s. Search results also include all necessary licensing info. John told me Krugle is currently bringing ten new servers online, and has a private, 800-user test coming. He said the company’s search data base is being built as it crawls all the code repositories, currently including “Java, C, Python, etc, and more coming — Linux, Eclipse, and so forth.” What about scaling? How big does their infrastructure need to be? “The scale is nowhere near Google’s, as far as numbers of users,” Mitchell explained. “Our focus makes it work. There are only so many source code repositories, and only 20 million or so developers out there.” That means, he said, the number of concurrent users might be only hundreds of thousands at any given time. The key in comparing to Google is “we have to go deeper.”

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