TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

2pad: Anti-social Photo-sharing Innovation

2pad is an Israeli photo & video-sharing startup that offers a somewhat unique take on the traditional features that define online photo sites. See their guided tour here.

The primary difference is that 2pad assumes that you don’t want to share your photos or videos with anyone - they are private until you explicitly invite someone (from your 2pad contacts or via email) to see specific media or galleries that you give them permission to view. Its directly contrary to what one expects from a photo-sharing service in this day of social everything; to those used to Flickr’s freewheeling sharing/searching/licensing, it may seem retrograde, but I’m willing to bet that there’s a decent-sized group of Hartwellian photographers and social neophytes out there that would find 2pad’s privacy defaults comforting.

While the site itself offers the gamut of ordinary photo tools (sign up, galleries, uploads, etc.), most basic transactions are funneled through email. For example, adding a photo to your account is as simple as emailing 2pad@2pad.com. Your attached image is added to your account, the subject is taken to be a gallery designation, and the any body text in your email is taken to be a description of the photo. Its simple and elegant - and more or less identical to Flickr’s equivalent feature.

Here’s an email that I sent 2pad:

And here’s good ol’ “Blue Hills” in my 2pad account:

If you don’t have a 2pad account, your first email will get you a reply with a link to follow. When you do so, you’ll start at a gallery page featuring the first photo that you attached to your first email, and an introductory video. After you skip through the video, you’ll be prompted to select a password, and then you’re done.

2pad also apparently has a business plan. Free accounts start with a usable amount of storage, though video addicts will find it very cramped, and its very expensive and limited compared to Flickr Pro.

So - in a nutshell, it seems like a solid me-too entry, and the streamlined email-based usage model and restrictive default privacy settings will no doubt appeal to nervous-about-the-social neophyte niches. Overall though, 2pad doesn’t differentiate enough to justify its steep price premiums.

2pad, flickr photos

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You say Per-say, I say Persai - let’s call the whole thing off

It hard to separate news aggregator start-up Persai from the personality of one of its notoriously pugilistic co-founders, Ted Dziuba. Before Uncov, however, Ted got a degree in computational math and worked at Google, and co-contributors Kyle and Matt certainly seem to bring deep knowledge to the table: both the Persai blog and Dziuba’s former blog (Epsilon-Delta) at least have enough mathematical jargon to wrap an air of credibility around the enterprise.

So - what is Persai? At a high-level, as I understand it (based on the “evidence” cataloged below), its a news reader/aggregator, similar to in basic appearance to Google Reader. Where Persai differs, apparently, is in the fact that your reader’s content is determined by your interests - not just feeds you’ve subscribed to. Persai, based on your added interests and its own relevance engine, serves up content for you in a Reader-like form - acting as a “recommendation engine.” You can then further refine Persai’s interpretation of your interests by rejecting its selections, creating what I imagine to be a Pandora-like experience. Ultimately, it looks like Persai is closer conceptually to an uber-Memeorandum, Megite, or Tailrank - offering a more customizeable, granular experience integrated into a single personalized stream, compared to other sites canned verticals.

There are three pieces of Persai out there right now: a screenshot at Valleywag (displayed above), and two microsites (eyeonfacebook and appleinsight) apparently built to demonstrate Persai’s ability to generate a topical content stream. There’s also the Persai blog, which is long on technical descriptions and short on use-cases.

So - given that I don’t have access to a beta or whathaveyou, I can’t comment on how well it works, or how accurate my understanding of its functionality is. Assuming that I do have generally the right idea, however, I can comment on the business elements of Persai.

In a nutshell: I think Persai’s user-customizeable recommendation engine is bound to secure a dedicated niche user base, and less likely to ever go “mainstream.” Interest-based recommendations would certainly make an interesting addition to Google reader, especially when combined with your search and Reader clickstream history. As a standalone, however, I’d expect it to float in the same orbit at Megite/Tailrank/etc. - perennially there, but never crossing the threshold that separates those businesses that exist from those that win.

google, megite, memeorandum, persai recommendations

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What’s up with NYT’s “Blog”runner?

I just took a first look at Blogrunner, to see what it does differently than TechMeme or TechWatching. Hmmm. Was it always like this? Or has it changed since the NYT bought it?

Here’s a snap from the Blogrunner landing page:

Here’s a list of the above-the-fold links on that page:

BBC News
BarackObama.com
The NYT
The NYT again
The Washington Post
The Financial Times
AP
The NYT yet again

Hmmmmmm. Doesn’t seem very blog-y. Scrolling down below the fold, there’s a long, narrow list of content composed of individual stories. Of the 33 listed when I stopped by…

1. 7 were from the NYT.
2. 19 were from what I would consider to be MSM news sources (WSJ, CNN, Forbes, LATimes, newswires, etc.) - that’s 58%

Blogrunner certainly has blog content - you just need to dig through a layer of MSM window dressing to get to it. Anyway, it seems odd to me that a service that proclaims blog-centric aggregation is dominated by MSM news sources.

One behavioural element that I’ve noticed in working on the TechWatching algorithm is that MSM sources will dominate a content pool - say what you will about blogging, the MSM still leads most “breaking” stories, and as such, bloggers will point to MSM outlets. A link analysis engine will then float the MSM new sources to the top of the “most relevant” pile - creating a presentation like what we see on Blogrunner, or what often happens on Techmeme. (Note: I’m not saying that’s how those sites work, but I can see how link-watching algorithms could create a page like that on any aggregator).

blogrunner, nyt, techmeme techwatching

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Finding Dulcinea: Attack of the Mahalo Clones

Finding Dulcinea is a freshly launched Mahalo clone that’s labelled itself “librarian of the internet.” How much of a clone, you ask? How about this quote from their PR Newswire release:

“A recent survey showed that 85 percent of all search queries fail; the user tries and tries again, but eventually succumbs to search-engine fatigue,” said Mark Moran, CEO of findingDulcinea. “Our Web site is the cure.”

Or, this quote from the “Why Use This Site” page:

“How much time have you wasted online, wading through a sea of useless or unreliable information? Online searches may give you millions of search results in under a second, but you’re left to sift through them yourself. Our team has spent more than 40,000 hours scouring the Internet for the best resources on thousands of topics. We distill our research with knowledge, judgment and insight, presenting you with Web sites that are clear, informative, and enlightening.”

Sound familiar? It is, because its more or less Jason Calacanis’s story for Mahalo.

Let’s have a look…

The first thing you’ll notice about the FD landing page is… there’s no search box. For an “Internet Librarian,” this seems odd. Regardless of how many hours FD has spent compiling useful data, they’ve made it hard to find. In fact, believe it or not, the ONLY way to get to FD content appears to be navigating taxonomy trees. Don’t believe me? Check out the tour.

Oh, but wait, here’s an article that references the CEO’s response to the problem:

“While findingDulcinea currently has no search engine, Moran says the site will add one in about a month which will be limited to some 25,000 sites chosen by its staff of writers and researchers. The company currently has a full-time staff of about 30, along with 25 freelance contributors.” [from MediaPost]

Ummmm… what? I think both the article writer and Mr. Moran missed the concept: FD indexing the web (or a slice thereof) shouldn’t even be on the radar when FD doesn’t even index its own content.

I wonder if Mr. Moran realizes that in FD’s quest to make information readily available, they’ve taken the “search” transaction from a simple keyword search followed by a click and turned it into a multistep, multi-teired quest through someone else’s content taxonomy.

Anyway…

FindingDulcinae is divided into three sections. “Web Guides” are equivalents to Mahalo SERP’s (Search Engine Response Pages - the result of a query). “Beyond the Healines” is a stab at supplementing topical news items, and “Netcetra” is basically a featured-SERP holding penn. I’m going to focus in on the Web Guides here as it appears to be the core of the business, and the other site sections are essentially alterations to the core guide concept.

Web Guides follow the form of a brief introduction, followed by a list of questions commonly associated with the guides topic, for example, NYC…

Expanding a question reveals a narrower topical summary divided into “Insights” - summaries of important points - and “picks” - well-described external links.

The content of the day’s featured guide (NYC) seemed to be well organized and well thought-out, and included good descriptions and valid links that seemed appropriate to the site’s intended audience.

FD NYC:

Mahalo NYC:

Compare the FD NYC page to the Mahalo NYC page and you’ll see the difference - FD has a lot more human processing going into the construction of their pages; in comparison, the Mahalo SERP looks as sparse as a Google page. While the human-authored text on the page doesn’t necessarily correlate to the quality of the links selected for inclusion, the impression communicated is that FD is both friendlier and better researched.

Of course, I can’t even really link to the FD NYC page, because I can’t freaking find it. Its today’s featured Web Guide, which apparently excludes it from the painful-to-navigate taxonomy. Speaking of which, I finally found where it should be - which is apparently under travel, though given the nature of much of the page’s content, I’d expect it to be under a “cities” category, which doesn’t exist. Attention Mr. Moran: this is the conceptual confustion and cognitive dissonance that imposing one person’s arbitrary taxonomy onto an entire population causes. Compare to Mahalo: I got to their NYC page in with three keystrokes (”N” “Y” “C”) and one click, and Mahalo has a consistent, clean, easy-to-link-to URL.

So let’s leave it at that.

In a nutshell: FD is too early out of the gate, presumably to meet the Christmas rush. Core parts of the user experience are completely missing (SEARCH) or ill-thought out (lousy taxonomy). That being said: FD has what appears to be a great repository of deeply researched content; my suggestion to them is that they abandon their web search engine ideas and focus their development budget inward.

FWIW I’d also suggest a less esoteric name for the site that’s easier to remember and spell. People might not no what “Mahalo” means, but its short, sonorous, and easy to spell and recall.

calacanis, finding dulcinae mahalo

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#3 Deconstructing the TC40: GotStatus

#3 in my “deconstructing the TC40″ series (see #1, #2).

GotStatus. Analytics for back-end, server-side stuff.

Summary: Gets a “hold” rating from me. Tech sounds good, value is there, but target market is too small.

The Proposition: GotStatus claims to be the “Google Analytics” of the server-side. The goal is to make gather statistics (about your database performance, for example) as simple and as powerful as Google has made gather stats about your user’s experiences.

Value Add: Monitoring site health is an often complex process. GotStatus wants to make it simple.

Warning Bells: Sites that are big enough to need serious-server side metrics are already getting them through professional IT shops, packages like WebTrends, and built-in transaction logging systems. Sites small enough to not have access to these resources I’d say are generally small enough to not need server side metrics in any serious way at all. In other words, GotStatus is targeting a very small middle ground: companies that are big enough to need server metrics but small enough to not have “professional” means of accessing them. How big is this market?

analytics, gotstatus, tc20, tc40 techcrunch

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#2 Deconstructing the TC40: Faroo

#2 in my “deconstructing the TC40″ series (see #1).

Faroo. P2P search.

Summary: DO NOT WANT.

The Proposition: No crawler, no centralized index. Instead, Faroo relies on users (presumably with a browser toolbar); each page a user visits is added to the Faroo distributed index. Visitor metrics gathered across the Faroo network drive rankings in search results.

Value Add: Better search. Advertising revenue shared with users.

Warning Bells: Revenue sharing is commonly a prop to support a core business that doesn’t have the strength to stand on its own. Faroo results will be based on popularity - a poor proxy for either quality or relevance. Similarly, Faroo’s results will be a thin slice of the net. Finally: Faroo’s website talks about Faroo as an alternative to [Google’s] “info monopoly” - mixing “information wants to be free!!1!” politics with business is a warning sign about the company’s readiness to compete on the main stage. Basically no barriers to entry.

Death Knell: Both del.icio.us and StumbleUpon could build out similar “social search” functionality around their indexes very quickly if the concept got any traction.

faroo, google, search, tc20, tc40 techcrunch

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#1 Deconstructing the TC40: Clickable

In this series of articles, I’m going to share my take on as many of the TC40 as I can stand (or find info on), based on the list provided by Paul Boutin.

First Up: Clickable.

Summary: Looks good. Buy rating.

The Proposition: Its an account management aggregator for search engine marketing. i.e.: Clickable lets you manage your campaigns for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft through a unified interface.

Value Add: Streamlined administration for individual advertisers and agencies. Highly configurable alerts to maximize responsiveness. A single view across all search properties allows for superior evaluation of ad spend effectiveness.

Business Model: Unknown - subscription fees? A percentage of spend?

Prognosis: Seems to me to be a natural evolution; as the volume and complexity of campaigns online increases, the space for “middle-men” grows - Clickable fits in nicely offering advertisers a valuable streamlining management service, reducing the overhead of conducting ad business online. Industry knowledge and workflow integration provide barriers to entry to competitors.

Warning Bells: Clickable I assume is API dependent, meaning its dependent on the continuing benevolence of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Similarly, Clickable’s value proposition is vulnerable to improvements in G/M/Y’s tools, particularly Google’s, given their dominance of this space.

adwords, clickable, google, sem, seo, tc20 tc40

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Keegy: Geo-relevance rankings

Keegy has an interesting concept: Its a website that serves up “relevant” news by correlating what other people from your same geographic region clicked. Localization is a good buzzword to be touting at the moment - Keegy’s execution seems to be confused on a number of levels.

1. Geography? Arguably, when it comes to web browsing, geographic location is a poor basis for relevance correlation to begin with. Clickstream behaviour is motivated by interests, which in internet land are loosely if at all correlated with location. i.e.: A gamer living in Winnipeg is more interested in international “gaming” news, not news that other people from Winnipeg may have enjoyed. It seems to me that location should be one spectrum of correlation - not the only one.

2. Transparency - Its unclear how Keegy relates my location to the content it serves up. At what level does the relevancy calculation take place? Province? City? Country? Can I change it? Given that there doesn’t appear to be a way to get an un-modified view of the site, I need to know “how” my world view is being generated.

3. Ranking - imagine if the Digg homepage didn’t tell you the number of diggs any given story had gotten. Would you find the page more or less trustworthy as a news source? Just how relevant are results are on Keegy is currently a mystery - i.e.: how much clickstream data is the page that Keegy served up based on? What I want is a “digg equivalent” score for each story that clarifies its ranking: “Viewed by 28 Winnipegers, 76 Manitobas, and 891 Canadians” would be a nice summary.

The Keegy press release helpfully offers this non-explanation:

“In a personalized news service users interact with the site and their activity anonymously generates statistics for each city/country. Using this information, an artificial intelligence algorithm ranks the posts for relevance according to a visitor’s location and the stories and home pages are edited automatically every minute.” [from Press Release]

4. Don’t Confuse Yourself with a Search Engine: For some reason, Keegy creates and maintains its own index of content blogs, fundamentally limiting the depth and breadth of Keegy-served content to its own crawl. Why not tie Keegy in with a browser extension and let users roam the net? I imagine that would create a much more valuable and interesting clickstream, and keeping only reasonably correlated data (across a given geographic user body) would eliminate “outlier” content.

In a nutshell, Keegy seems like a half-implemented slice of a larger project. Err, fortunately Keegy is “…closing seed capital stage on November 21th. and starting their first round of investment next October.” [from Press Release] Well, good luck to you. In a crowded market of social discovery services, I don’t think Keegy has the spark to go big.

aggregator, digg, keegy, news, social stumbleupon

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Make it Stop: Groovle

Someone please explain the point Groovle. This questionable service gives you the (thrilling) ability to create a browser homepage with a stock photography background and a bone stock Google search box, branded “Groovle.” Searches conducted go to …. the Google search results page with a crappy Groovle frame on the top.

Check it out, Charlotte Bobcats fans (see the page):

In addition to likely violating Google’s TOS, Groovle pages include this humourous disclaimer on the bottom:

All sports logos are the property/copyright of their respective owners/organizations.
Groovle.com claims no ownership or rights over these images.
All Images are hosted for fans of each team/organization.

Whoa! You mean Groovle hasn’t officially licensed these logos from their parent organizations and leagues? You mean there’s no affiliation between Groovle and these teams??! This is a rare instance where I’ll support the gratuitous application of trademark law.

Yeah, Groovle. Who spends their time on these projects and why don’t they have anything better to do?

google, groovle, litigation trademark

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PodClass - online course startup or wiki platform?

Podclass is another startup in the online course/learning space. Like video upstarts SuTree or 5min, Podclass aims to be a community oriented clearing house of online courses; unlike other options, however, Podclass goes beyond video, and wraps a paid-content model around it all:

Podclass has been designed to enable multiple users to collaborate on any topic and create course content for group learning. The course content can later be sold as a paid online course or distributed freely. “The option to sell content makes Podclass unique,” says Gil. “It’s just one more reason for people to contribute.” [from Press Release]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that sounds like a multimedia wiki with an optional pay wall. And that’s not a bad thing.

At the moment, Podclass is pretty quiet with a limited number of courses and communities. Founder Gary Gil is working hard to capitalize on some hype, however, starting with a collaboratively built course about monetizing Facebook - certainly a topic of interest as of late. See the press release for more.

A recommendation for Podclass after reading the press release: back off the hype train. That press release hits on every buzz word - social media, 2.0, digg, facebook, crowdsourcing, etc. Hyped keywords, however, are by definition a flash in the pan - and most of those mentioned have flashed and gone already. If you’re serious about building the business in the long run, focus on communicating the core value proposition, not on trying to piggyback pageviews on buzzwords.

Which brings us to that core proposition. As with any content startup, Podclass faces the chicken/egg conundrum - without compelling content, there’s no community; without community there’s no compelling content. Differentiating in this space and attracting content and community are not easy task - but not impossible either.

My suggestion? Follow the Apple example. Apple entered into a crowded DAP market by creating an offering that was overpoweringly superior in a few key points (synch simplicity, design), and had parity in all others. Podclass needs to pick two relevant service differentiation points, build the crap out of them, and then communicate & evangelize them.

Second Suggestion: Compelling seed content. Monetizing Facebook sounds like a good start, but there’s a couple of other perennial winners that will get traffic and backlinks: SEO springs to mind as a natural. Contact some pop-blogger SEO gurus and get some interviews on camera, and throw them up - a series of half-hour webcam interviews would be a popular resource.

Anyway: Bottom line is that Podclass looks to be a solid, if not overly differentiated offering in a crowded field. A focus on the differentiating essentials and building out an attractive content library IMHO would position Podclass for solid growth.

5min, course, learning, podclass, sutree tutorials

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