Startups, Remember: Transparency, Transparency, Transparency
Marketing / PR, Startups January 17th, 2009
- How can people even think of launching a service without revealing the price upfront?
- How can they expect users to go through the hassle of signing up, installing software, only to find the price info after all this?
- Why do people still fall for this?
I’m discussing the above and more using Zumodrive’s launch as case study over @ CloudAve – read the details here.
Tags: box.net, dropbox, live mesh, online storage, pricing, Startups, storage, sync, synchronization, syncplicity, transparency, zumodrive
TechCrunch in the Toilet
Humor, Startups March 7th, 2008
No, I am not implying that TechCrunch is bankrupt, or heading into their own Deadpool. TC has all the signs of doing just fine, with 700K subscribers and loads of advertisers. But they are in the toilet, nevertheless – at least in a certain toilet.
Online file-sharing and collaboration startup Box.net is changing the ancient habit of reading your newspaper in the toilet. (Frankly I never understood this habit, personally I prefer getting out of there as soon as possible, but for many people it’s a true ritual.) The company, which just a year ago was 4 guys cramped together in a two-bedroom live-and-work apartment has grown to 20 employees and picked up two rounds of funding. Flush with VC money, they equipped their restroom with a flat screen that shows an auto-refreshing display of technology news from TechCrunch. No more newspaper in the bathroom!
I can’t help but wonder about the screen position though. For all I know, this is only for the guys’ entertainment, gals usually face the other way – is Box.net still an all-male team? And, without getting into the very material details, even we boys only perform one “operation” facing that way.., and that’s normally the quicker one. (?)
Aaron, care to clarify? 
Tags: box.net, Collaboration, Humor, online storage, techcrunch, web office, web storage
Windows Live Photo Gallery: Poor Design or Shrewd Business Move?
Business, Personal Productivity, SaaS September 10th, 2007
I had Windows Live Photo Gallery installed on my computer – for about 15 minutes. Although I despise the aggressive, sneaky nature of Live Installer, which pollutes my PC with Windows Desktop Search without authorization, I still wanted to give it a try, primarily because my favorite Picasa is hopelessly single PC-minded. Surprisingly for Google, the champion of Web-based computing, Picasa is a major pain to use on multiple computers – so I thought I’d give the Microsoft product a try.
I am surprised at the mostly positive initial feedback about this feature-less product. Yes, it’s fast, yes, tagging is easy – but has anyone given any thought to why we’re tagging in the first place? Other than becoming data-input clerks, what can you do with Photo Gallery?
Picasa treats tags/labels as albums, and as any decent photo album would do, allows re-arranging the display order of individual photos by simple drag & drop. It also allows playing slideshows along with music, creating movies and a myriad of other options. Windows Live Photo Gallery allows you to play a slideshow in the pre-determined order – that’s all.
Well, almost. If you publish your photos to Live Spaces, you can create a basic slideshow rearranging the display order of your pictures. (I could not find this option, but let’s believe the Help text.) Now I’m really confused: as much as I am a Web-computing fan, photos (and video) are the one area I still prefer to use a local machine for, after all we’re manipulating fairly large files. So why would Microsoft create desktop photo manipulation software that allows extensive data input yet requires users to go online to enjoy their pictures?
Is this another case of thoughtless, poor design? Frankly, I doubt it. Perhaps Microsoft just showed their hands regarding the future Live business model. Charging for extra storage is nothing new, but I suspect we’ll see bandwidth-based pricing sooner or later. The PC-components of Live are just the hook to get us online, and pay for accessing our own data – and believe me, the bandwidth usage of a 20-minute slideshow will be quite significant. 
Tags: bandwidth, microsoft, online storage, photo management, picasa, SaaS, web business model, web services, windows live, windows live photo gallery
Sign-On, Sign-In, Cyn.in
Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology September 6th, 2006
Atlassian,the Sydney- and San Francisco-based software company, maker of enterprise wiki Confluence (and more) has just acquired a single sign-on solution company, Minneapolis-based Authentisoft. Single sign-on is something we all need whether behind a corporate firewall or on the Web. Without it, there are only bad and worse solutions:
- try to remember the myriad userid /password combinations we have for different systems – bad
- have some “algorithm” built in our passwords – bad
- write down all login info – really bad
- use the same userid / pw combo across all systems – really, really baaaad
I could go on… we need single sign-on. It’s that simple. I believe this make Atlassian the first “wiki-company” to offer 3 products in their portfolio. See Mike’s post on further plans.
Now, for the “sign-in” part: in an amazing coincidence, I was just reading the above announcement when I received the email from Cynapse, revealing their “flagship product”, cyn.in (pronounced “sign-in”). Yes, as in sign-in. In the very second I read the sign-on announcement. Isn’t this scary? 
Anyway, cyn.in promises to be a web based service that enables the enterprise to build, collaborate, manage and publish: knowledge, documents, media and files, all within hosted sub-systems. It intends to apply the effectivity of Web 2.0 and the SaaS model, to deliver an information management, publishing and collaboration platform. Applications of cyn.in include Knowledge Management, Content Broadcast and Publishing, Collaborative Workspaces, Secure Online File Storage & Versioning, etc.
As I am reading it I can’t help but think those are the things I also do on a wiki … but I don’t think it’s a wiki… I don’t know what it really is though, at this point all you can do on the site is register for notifications and watch a a short tour.
Tags: acquisition, atlassian, authentisoft, Collaboration, confluence, cyn.in, cynapse, Knowledge Management, online storage, single sign-in, single sign-on, wiki, wikis
Zoli Erdos
