TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

#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

#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

#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