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CourseCafe, the “Other FaceBook”

Posted on November 28, 2005 ·

(Updated)

Coursecafe_250x40 is for Students’ Academic life what the FaceBook has become for their Social Life.

One of the privileges of moderating the SVASE VC Breakfast Sessions is that I get to meet interesting startups before they “come out”. JustStudents, founded by CEO Puneet Gupta is definitely one of the most promising ones – so promising in fact, that I better hurry up writing this, before they become well known:-) No kidding: TechCrunch recently profiled their main offering, CourseCafe – within days an entrepreneurial senior from Pepperdine University contacted Puneet, and in a matter of two weeks set up a pilot launch at his campus.

A very simple way to define a new product / business is by way of comparison to an existing one: calling CourseCafe the del.icio.us for students does not do it justice, but is a good first attempt. We could also define it as a combination of vertical search, social tagging, networking, personal productivity and collaboration tools. The key tenet is to make every aspect of college students’ academic life – yes, that remaining small percentage they don’t already spend having fun on the Facebook – easier, more productive.

To begin with, CourseCafe uploads all departments and course information of the participating Universities, then helps students’ research on the Net, incorporating their tagged results in it’s knowledge base. Over years this builds up an immense knowledge base: students get the most relevant results by seeing what their peers taking the same courses at previous semesters tagged appropriately. They get better results in less time. Unlike the FaceBook, which is an online replica of real-life campuses, I tend to think it will make sense for CourseCafe to extend their reach outside individual campuses; after all students of the same discipline can enrich the knowledge base, even is their course syllabus isn’t exactly the same.

Puneet has a few other tricks up his sleeve: StudentVision is a personal productivity product that should be a must on every student’s laptop. It allows for more extensive course management (tracking syllabus, activites, instructors, assignments, deadlines, grades..etc), provides a self-updating calendar for both course-related and personal use that communicates to mobile devices, and has a powerful note-taker (drag&drop, import/export, pen support for tablet PC’s… etc), and facilities to organize one’s research data on-and offline. StudentVision will be fully valuable when it’s completely integrated with CourseCafe, but even then I see it as a powerful tool, somewhat of a Microsoft-killer that saves students a few hundred $ … who needs Office, OneNote, when you have this?

A third element of the “grand scheme” is FacultyVision, which … well, you guessed it right:-) Eventually all the three pieces will seamlessly work together, but for now, as every startup JustStudents needs a singular focus, and that is on rolling out CourseCafe to more campuses. SignUp for CourseCafe on their website. Those interested in using StudentVision can download it for free.

The individual productivity tool will be useful from day one, the network – knowledge-sharing effect obviously kicks in as more and more students use the system. This points me to another comparison: The only asset FaceBook has is their members – quite significant asset, over 5M users, 70% of which use the system every day – that said it’s still just members, and students being quite experimental, there’s not much to hold them back when another, sexier system comes along; just check out XuQa, claiming to be present on 7500 campuses. (Update: see Paul Kedrosky on lack of stickyness in Social Networks)
CourseCafe, on the other hand build intellectual property: the cumulative knowledge of generations of students will be an asset hard to leave behind, in case a “wannabe-site” arrives. No wonder this startup has already been approached by a major scientific / technical publisher as well as a leading portal/search engine.

Keep an eye on them …

Update (12/04): David Hornik writes about “Social Network 3.0” in Ventureblog.

Update (12/06): In the week since writing this post, CourseCafe went live on 6 more campuses. The list is now: Drexel, Pepperdine, Rose Hulman, RPI, SJSU, Stanford, UC Davis. Wow!

Update (1/22): Puneet started his blog. High time!

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Filed Under: Collaboration, SaaS, Social Networking, Startups ·
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Full Feeds or Nothing – but that’s just my vote

Posted on November 27, 2005 ·

(updated)

The partial vs. full feed debate is back.  Duncan at Blog Herald provides an overview of the debate. 

I’ve always made my preference for full feed clear, yet I am still reading your partial feeds, Duncan 🙂  Admittedly, it’s mostly scanning nowadays, I just don’t take the time to click and go to your site that often – in this respect I take Robert Scoble’s side.

Dave Winer adds his preference for full feeds, but notes that excerpts are OK, if they are intelligent summaries, not the first x words auto-truncated.  My sour point, exactly:  I don’t mind taking the extra step and edit the summary, but my blogging platform does not allow selective use of excerpts / summaries / full text the way I like:

  • Full post in the RSS feed
  • Auto-created excerpt (say, first 100 words) on the Blog Main Page, with manual override option
  • Hand-edited 2–3 line summary that other blogs can use in the trackback detail.

John Roberts votes for excerpts, since he likes to scan fast, and only occasionally read full posts.  Well, yes, but that’s what RSS Readers are for:  as James Robertson explains,  use one that shows summaries in one pane, full downloaded text in another – Tom Raftery joins in, and so do I.

At the end of the day it comes down to why we are blogging.  Those of us who want to share our views, want to be heard on certain subjects and look at blogging simply as a way to carry out a conversation, will likely prefer full feeds.  I am in that club and simply think that in this world of infoglut either you make reading your blog convenient, or expect to lose readers who will just move on to others serving up similar content in a more convenient way.   That said, I fully understand bloggers whose primary reason to blog is revenue-generation; content is secondary, just a means to attrack readers and get the click the ads.  Of course they will always want readers to come to their site, thus only providing a partial feed.   For them, it’s a business after all.

Update (12/8):  Excerpted Feeds are Evil

Update (12/30):  Post full feeds. Please. (WeBreakStuff)

Update ( 2/21): 

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Software ·
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Communication a Two-way Street? Not (quite yet) on the Blogosphere.

Posted on October 31, 2005 ·

There is an abundance of tagging / tracking / linking / stat’s tools to enhance the Blogosphere, but they are all one-directional, missing a major part of the “Conversation”.

Steve Rubel talks about RSS being a  passive “receive medium”, and how RSS is one-way, feeding info to those who passively consume it – but there is no “active” feedback channel where a business / organization could subscribe to the feed of all those interested in their product, service, or simply those that expressed a particular interest.  

I’ve been thinking about a similar problem, but specifically limited to why blogging is still an incomplete conversation.   “ You’re linked to me, I’m linked to you. That’s a conversation.” – says Ethan at OnoTech. Well, almost.  There is just the small issue of manageability. 

If you’re a Technorati top 100 or even 500 blogger, most of the conversation happens around your own blog, in the form of comments and trackbacks from other blogs.  However, for the the rest of us, the other 20 million bloggers, chances are the conversation really takes place outside our own blog, and I for one certainly can’t keep track of all comments I left on other blogs.  An occasional Google search on my name reveals lots of these “half-conversations” where I left a comment, the blog owner or other readers responded, but I’ve never seen the response, since I forgot to go back and-re-read all those blog-post.

Jeff Clavier points out that Blogware, one of the lesser known platforms (which I happen to use)  can send emails when comments are made on a post you have commented on but that is email, and that’s not great… what about the other platforms?  The current crop of tracking / linking services all have a top-down publisher-centric view, everything revolves around a blog and related posts, totally missing this other, “bottom-up” half of the conversation.  Don’t we all  need something that shows an integrated view of all conversations where we are participating per subject matter (blog title), whether we started it or someone else?

 Jeff in his post quoted above invites creative minds to come up with a solution, and so does Steve Rubel:  “boy is that a business for someone”.   At the recent TechCrunch BBQ  I heard Dave Winer complain that he hasn’t seen a major breakthrough innovation around blogs for quite a while – I bet half the crowd at the event (200 techno-crazy minds) could create what we need here.   C’mon guys, what are you waiting for?

Update (11/7) :  Here’s a somewhat manual workaround.   Still not quite the real thing 🙁

Update (11/9) Jeremy Zawodny discusses comment tracking – some of the comments on his post are also worth reading.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, Social Networking, Software, Startups ·
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The LoN(in)g Tail of Software

Posted on October 4, 2005 ·

As always when something significant happens, my RSS reader is choke full of writeups on  Ning , the uncloaked version of Marc Andreessen’s 24 Hour Laundry.  (not to be confused with the French Laundry)

I don’t know how to say it without actually saying it, so I might as well blurt it out: this is The LoN(in)g Tail of Software, using Joe Kraus’s classic definition – just like JotSpot.

references:  John Batelle,  BlogSpotting, Om Malik, Jeff Clavier, TechCrunch, Corante and the rest of the world…

Update (9/5): Chris Anderson, the “Father of the Long Tail” writes about Ning: The Long Tail of social software.

Update (9/6) :  ZDNet joins me in drawing the parallel to JotSpot.

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Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Humor, Software, Startups ·
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The Long Tail Stolen…

Posted on September 11, 2005 ·

Tomorrow Marc Benioff will unveil Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, or “eBay for Enterprise Software”.  A Marketplace where customers can try and buy on-demand applications.  

“The power of that is you can reach this long tail of applications. SAP and Oracle may deliver 10% of the applications you need to run your business, but there’s this large percentage of your business that won’t be managed by Oracle or SAP. This is the long tail of applications.”  says Benioff. 

This is his way of fighting the All-In-One players, including NetSuite, which is more in his league, but also SAP, Oracle.  “It looks great on PowerPoint, but on planet Earth, it won’t fly,” predicts Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite.  Who is right remains to be seen, but clearly a key factor is the ease of integration between the additional app’s and salesforce.com, or even between the other app’s themselves.

Salesforce.com may be the first one to bring us the AppExchange, but for all I know, credit for applying the Long Tail theory to Software goes to Joe Kraus of JotSpot (and previously Excite).   And it’s clearly not just theory.  

JotSpot is clearly not just about wikis, the intent is to become a widely used platform upon which the long tail of software applications is served up easily and affordably.   So does that make JotSpot an Application developer?  I seriously doubt it, although they developed sample app’s they can’t be the jack-of-all-trades.  Although  Joe never talked about the business model associated with being “the platform”, I’ve always thought they will one day introduce a Marketplace, where third party developers and the user community find each other.   But first they need critical mass – something Salesforce already has. 

I’m eager to see JotSpot’s next move… 

 

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Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software ·
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Getting Plaxoed?

Posted on June 6, 2005 ·

Plaxo is great, it made contact management so much easier.

Not that it’s a new idea; several years ago I used GoodContacts, but they were “the little guys” from Canada, and their service never took off. Same features, but without critical mass in the network, it’s worth nothing. Plaxo got the brand names behind it, so it took off like wildfire.

I wish they were a bit less pushy though. As Adam puts it in Consumption Junction:
“The last thing on my mind regarding Plaxo is the annoying amount of information update request emails they send out. These emails are ruining their brand. Plaxo allows their users to send email notifications to their contacts requesting that they update their address book entry. This is something I would never do, personally. If I want someone’s updated contact information, I will personally email them or even pick up the phone, ask them how they’ve been and how their family is doing, and let them know that I need their address to send them something by mail. Anyone who’s like me in this way also probably finds it incredibly obnoxious to be on the receiving end of a stock message that reads “Hi from Plaxo!!! We need your contact info!!! This isn’t spam and it shouldn’t annoy you because you can opt out if you don’t like these emails!!” It doesn’t matter if my friend Bob is the one who is actually clicking the link to send me the email. It has Plaxo, not Bob, written all over it, and as such, represents Plaxo as much or more so than it does Bob. And this isn’t just a personal pet peeve. When widely-read bloggers like Russell Beattie begin noting they’ve permanently opted out of Plaxo, perhaps it’s time to re-think your strategy.”

Well, there is a “decent”, spam-free yet efficient way of using Plaxo: sign up for the service, download the app to Outlook, then kill the email-generating feature. You will still get the auto-update of your Outlook contacts, if they already are Plaxo members, without annoying hundreds of others. I have a fairly large contacts folder, and about 10% are Plaxo members – among the techie/entrepereneurial types I guess the penetration is even higher.

In fact if we all followed this more subtle approach to Plaxo-ing, chanches are Russel et al would not leave, so with increasing membership the auto-update would be more and more valuable.

That is until the day LinkedIn comes up with Plaxo-like updates 🙂

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Filed Under: Collaboration, Customer Service, Personal Productivity, Social Networking, Software ·
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CNET says Social Networking doesn’t work ????

Posted on June 5, 2005 ·

The Buzz Report: Five reasons social networking doesn’t work – CNET.com:

By Molly Wood, section editor, CNET.com
Thursday, June 2, 2005

The word on the street lately is that social networking is in trouble…” etc…etc..

Then she goes on saying how Friendster is in trouble, which is probably true, but I beg to differ as to her general conclusion. The more focused, targeted sites do and will work.

LinkedIn has a business focus, the invitation-only approach actually enhances the value of the network for business use. I received several calls from headhunters who found me there, and who all claim they no longer go to Monster and the likes, they use LinkedIn as the primary source to find candidates. LinkedIn is clearly for the business crowd, and I think it makes sense to keep your business and social life separate…not doing so is what hurt Ryze, the early player in this game.

As for “finding the money” they started to charge for job postings, and plan several other premimum services. I am not worried about LinkedIn’s survival as the primary business networking site. Hm … what did I just say? Perhaps that’s a differentiator, i.e. “business networking”vs. “social networking” (?)

Then again, there is the phenomenal success of Thefacebookwith a completely different business model: they are a classic media company, reveneue comes solely from advertising, all functions are free. Why are they successful? Very focused on a segment of the population (college students), and they basically map communities that already exist in individual campuses.

Bottom line: the CNET article is probably right, generalist sites without a particular focus will die; after the initial spike in signups users realize there’s not much to do there –  but focused, targeted sites that offer added value are here to stay.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Marketing / PR, Personal Productivity, Social Networking, Software, Startups ·
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