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ToonDooSpaces: Comics-based Social Network for School Kids

Posted on September 16, 2009 ·

Zoho is mostly known for their Web-based productivity and business software, but sometimes they venture into … hmm… unproductivity.   In the past year or so close to a million cartoons were created @ ToonDoo, and that number grows by 3-4 thousand every day.  (Hey, even I contributed onesmile_wink)

Today they have announced  ToonDooSpaces, private comics-based collaborative space for classrooms, be it school or kindergarten level.  (Remember when FaceBook – actually TheFacebook at the time – was strictly limit to the confines of actual colleges?)   What can you do @ ToonDooSpaces?  Here’s how the kids at one of the pilot schools explain:

toondoo

Even before this launch, ToonDoo has been used at hundreds of schools including Auburn High School, US, Totino-Grace High School, US, Leawood Middle School, US, Korea International School, Korea, Mount Scopus Memorial College, Australia, Lake Superior College, US and many others -  apparently all the way to college level.  That said I think ToonDooSpaces will be most favored by the younger ones.  Here’s a detailed review by Kevin Hodgson who has been using ToonDooSpaces in his class for months:

All spring, my sixth graders (11 and 12 year olds) were fully engaged in the use of our ToonDoo Spaces site. They would walk in the door and immediately ask: Are we going to make comics today, Mr. H? And they give a little shout of “Yeah!” with a fist pump when I say “yes” (after we do whatever other work we have planned).

Here’s an interactive video showing off more of ToonDoo’s features:

 

But hey, I’m writing a business / technology blog, so let’s get serious here. smile_wink   I often talk about Freemium (more here), and I think this is a perfect showcase.

toondoomatrix

Remember, Freemium takes patience – in this case ToonDoo has been available for over a year, attracting hundreds of thousands of users before the launch of the “premium” version, Spaces.

And here’s something else: I guess the inner child must have died in me a long time ago, how else do I have the most fun on the Pricing Page?  The fact is, we often talk about the need for transparency, and how SaaS should be easy not only to learn, use, but to buy, which includes price information, without having to endure lousy sales calls.  Well, it doesn’t get any easier:

 

Move the cursor along the users / months axis, click anywhere, and voila! – there’s your price quote.   SaaS companies, take notice: you can get rid of the kiddie appearance, but should offer a pricing tool this easy.

Now I am off to create a cartoon(doo). smile_shades

(Disclaimer:  I am Editor of CloudAve, a Zoho-sponsored group blog.)

Filed Under: Collaboration, SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Glue – Get Sticky Now

Posted on February 24, 2009 ·

What is Glue?

Definition from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
1  a: any of various strong adhesive substances ; especially : a hard protein chiefly gelatinous substance that absorbs water to form a viscous solution with strong adhesive properties and that is obtained by cooking down collagenous materials (as hides or bones) b: a solution of glue used for sticking things together
Hm – not what I am looking for, if you need it, you can  buy it here – end of story.
2 something that binds together <enough social glue…to satisfy the human desire for community — E. D. Hirsch, Jr.>

Social Glue … now we’re getting closer.  So again, what is Glue?  There are several companies in the software business with goo-y glue-y products:

 

Glue is Companies and Products

AdaptiveBlue has a browser extension called Glue.  (Blue Glue?smile_shades)  VC and Blogger Fred Wilson aptly calls it  A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser.  

Then there is  Yahoo Glue.   And of course there are a bunch of companies that don’t call themselves or their products Glue – they just do it.  

Gnip’s mission is elegantly “Making data portability suck less”.  Here’s an easy (?) chart explaining what they do:

 

Boomi is another Glue company, providing integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS – ah, starting 5-letter acronymssmile_sarcastic).  Read their thought-provoking post on Why APIs Don’t Solve the SaaS Integration Challenge.

MindTouch started their life as a wiki company, and grew into “an open source enterprise collaboration and community platform that enables users to connect and remix enterprise systems, social tools and web services.”.  Ouch, that sounds so official – here’s another version from the Chief Conductor who just returned from a major Product Launch:

We do orchestration for a myriad of systems, databases and any web service, all with a easy to use wiki-like interface.

Let’s not forget about Mashery, plumbers of the Web, or more elegantly, a “leading provider of API management services enabling companies to easily leverage web services as a distribution channel.” 

The list can go on and on, and even in the current downturn we will see more Glue companies.  In fact Glue has become investment theme for some really smart VCs:

Glue is our term for the web infrastructure layer that facilitates the connections between web services and content companies

Glue is a Concept – actually, several concepts

  • Enterprise Glue: A "web oriented architecture" and beyond SOA
  • Data Glue: Mash-ups, mash-ups and more mash-ups
  • Social Network Glue: The movement toward cross-network interoperability and data sharing
  • Interface Glue: Cross-platform, cross-browser technologies like Silverlight and Adobe Air
  • Messaging Glue: Tools that are evolving for meta-messaging
  • Identity Glue: Reputation, user-centric identity and web sso
  • OS Glue: Cross-operating system runtimes
  • Marketing Glue: The abstraction of the management of ad platforms into a common interface
  • Infrastructure Glue: Cloud and Utility computing that binds back-end services

Oh, boy.  This is big, way over my head. I better leave this discussion to smarter people who actually understand the technology behind all this. smile_wink   But I’ll share a secret: they will all come together in Denver, on May 12-13 of this year.  Will you be there?

 

Glue is a Great Conference – Get Sticky Now

I’ve discussed earlier how Defrag was the best Conference I attended for quite a while.  The conference Theme, sessions, very active participants, the venue, the infrastructure (working wi-fi, no small feat!) – you name it, it all came together perfectly.  So when Defrag’s organizer, Eric Norlin sets out to launch another conference discussing all of the above and more, it’s bound to be a success.  Here’s Eric’s summary:

Glue is the only conference devoted solely to solving the web application integration problem-set. People that should attend Glue include the architects, developers, administrators and integrators that have moved past the initial step of seeing the web as a platform, and are facing the real-world challenges of what "stove-piped" web applications mean for their overall strategy. Glue is about all of bits and pieces, APIs and meta-data, standards and connectors that will help us to glue together the varying applications of the new platform.

The Agenda is shaping up, Sponsors are in, and reservations are coming through nicely, recession or not. Like I’ve said, Some Conferences Are Worth Attending Even in Bad Times.smile_nerd

Of course getting a bargain helps in bad times: where else do you get an intense top-notch conference for $395?  That is if you catch early bird reservation, so hurry, get sticky now.

By the way, participation does not start in May – you can share ideas right now, I’ll help with resources.  CloudAve, my main blogging gig is pleased to be the Media Sponsor for Glue, and you will see a stream of related posts over there as we approach the Conference dates (this may be the right time to grab the CloudAve Feed).  We invite everyone interested to participate: please submit your post, we’ll be happy to publish it.  And if you prefer to post in your own blog, wiki, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook…whatever – just make sure to use the tag gluecon (since glue might find – you know, this).   We’ll find your post and pull it under the Glue Tab, which will soon turn into a resource list of all-things-glue.

On a personal level I am stoked to be able to serve on the Glue Conference‘s Advisory Board along with great thinkers like  Amy Wohl, Phil Wainewright, Chris Shipley, Mike West, and Albert Wenger.  I’m really excited about this Conference, and am looking forward to meeting many of you.

What are you waiting for?  Get Sticky Now! smile_shades

(Cross-posted from CloudAve)

Filed Under: Business, Software, Startups, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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LinkedIn: One Billion Dream Dollars

Posted on June 17, 2008 ·

Yes, I like LinkedIN, and am one of the very early users, from the early days before social networks become trendy. Simply because, unlike some of the more fashionable networks, I actually found it useful for business.

But is it worth One Billion Dollars?  Apparently it is – if you ask Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures, who just invested a whopping $53M  with the even more whopping $1B valuation.  $53 million is a decent exit for some startups – but LinkedIN has about $100M in annual revenues.  Still, I really wonder what kind of stratospheric exit (IPO) valuation the current investors expect.

Or perhaps Kara Swisher is right:

Why go public when you can just pretend?

Exactly. smile_omg

Update (6/18):  In celebration of entering the Billion-Dollar Club, LinkedIn is down.

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Your Digital Friends: Less is More

Posted on January 11, 2008 ·

It’s almost two years ago that I “cleaned house” at LinkedIn, dropping from 500+ connections to about 300.

I had no clue about Dunbar’s number ( the maximum number of people one can maintain active, stable social relationships with, estimated at 150 by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar), I simply felt I had been to open accepting invitations from unknown people, and as a result, I barely recognized names on my LinkedIn contact list. I thought the very idea of LinkedIn was that it should be an online reflection of my real-life relationships.

Fast-forward two years, now we have FaceBook, Plaxo Pulse, Twitter, and a zillion of other places, and get inundated by friends request from new and new “social networks” never heard of before. Perhaps the rules changed a bit – people do “befriend” each other in cyberspace, without having met first. I can accept that to a certain extent, but I still think Dunbar’s number has merit, even in today’s world. Of course it’s not fixed at 150, for some it may be 80, for the uber-social ones 3-4-500? JP Rangaswami, blogging at Confused of Calcutta, (also pioneering adopter of social software as former CIO at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein) thinks his digital Dunbar number is higher than 150:

I’ve sensed that I have a Dunbar number of around 300 in the digital world, and I’ve been delighted to find I know most of the steady ones. Over the years I’ve actually met most of the community of readers, usually at conferences. The face-to-face contact, in turn, leads to a deepening of the relationship, and we land up creating and developing links in FaceBook and Twitter.

JP is wondering if there’s a trend here, and asks his readers:

How many FaceBook friends do you have, how many regular readers of your blog, how many followers in Twitter, do you see a correlation between the three, if not why not, and so on. Do you tend to meet a core of this number on a face-to-face basis, if not why not?

I’m not a regular reader of JP’s blog – discovered this post via Anne Zelenka at Web Worker Daily, but even if I was a subscriber, I would not consider myself a “friend”. I might want to follow his ideas on Twitter (if I was twittering at all) but that’s still passive mode. I think this commenter to Anne is right:

I don’t think that “following” people on Twitter would be considered “stable social relationships”. A social relationship implies a two-way street, and in my book, one that I value with some significance. That’s not to say that online social tools can’t be part of real relationships, but you can’t just add up all the numbers and think it means anything.

Now, if I commented on JP’s blog several times, and he responded, we’d establish a form of conversation, which, over time would allow us to get an insight into each other’s mind – i.e. getting to know each other to some extent. Perhaps at that point it would be appropriate to “befriend” each other on FaceBook. (Not that I actively use FaceBook, which is increasingly becoming an advertising platform, and even before that I had found it somewhat of a time-waster.)

I still don’t think we’d be ready to become LinkedIn contacts, because that network is all about trust, and recommending / referencing “friends” in a business context. Call me old-fashioned, anti-social, but I think that level of trust requires more of a real-life relationship, so my LinkedIn numbers would be close to my Dunbar-number, the number of active social contacts I am able and willing to maintain.

Before they cracked down on them, LinkedIn got polluted by contact-hunters, so-called superconnectors who amassed thousands, in a famous case 16,000 contact records. Note the emphasis on records. It’s just that. Data records, not real relationships. FaceBook (possibly learning from LinkedIn) limits the number of contacts to 5,000, which some users, including Robert Scoble find inadequate:

I think it sucks because it isn’t scalable and falls apart at 5,000 contacts. It pisses me off more and more every day because of that scaling wall.

Robert is a celebrity, and the 5000 or so are in his fan-club. Just like the Twitter example above, he has followers, not active friends. Hyper-social or not, he also has a Dunbar-number. It may be in the higher hundreds, but not in the thousands. For the rest of us, non-celeb types, I still believe less is more, and our online networks should reflect our real-life one, instead of being an inflated collection of data records. (This line became Doc Searls’ Quote du joursmile_teeth).

Finally, somewhat off-topic, here’s an observation from JP’s post: he’s using to ClustrMaps to monitor and illustrate where his readers come from. I understand the concentration in Europe, and also in the US, but what I am amazed at is the picture inside the US: what is this magical East / West divide? How come his readership drops so significantly in the Western half of the US?

Update (5/29/08):  How Many Friends is Too Many? asks Josh Catone @ ReadWriteWeb .

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