Two passionate companies (that are seeing huge adoption)
Why do I like geeks? Cause they get excited by building things. Solving problems. You can see it in their eyes. When I was at Carnegie Mellon in the Robotics Lab a geek yelled “it works!” when his code compiled and made the robot do something for the first time. I love that act of building. Of discovery. It’s the purest thing about this industry. All the other stuff. The accountants. The lawyers. The PR. The marketing. Are things that geeks put up with so that they can fund another moment of discovery.
I’ve been very fortunate in the past 24 hours to be able to look in the eyes of a couple of remarkable geeks: Richard Lusk, CEO of Foldera and Albert Lai, founder of Bubbleshare. They showed me their products. Demoed their latest features. And talked about their dreams. I’m kicking myself for not videotaping them, but I’m sure you’ll all discover them soon enough anyway.
Both told me about being shocked by just how fast adoption is happening. In Foldera’s case they had 400,000 signups in their first 14 days (it was all kicked off by a link on TechCrunch). I hear, from Richard Lusk, CEO and Oliver Starr, CMO (pictured here getting ready for my demo) adoption has actually increased in the past two days (those numbers are three days old). These are remarkable numbers. The word-of-mouth network is far more efficient than it was. Remember ICQ? They released November 1, 1996 to 40 people and by December 15, they had 65,000 downloads. These numbers BLOW the ICQ adoption curve away.
Is Foldera real? Damn, it is. I want it. It’s like Sharepoint and parts of Outlook put on the Web. Small businesses are going to eat this up. And I was suprised to learn that it’s built in .NET. Even better. But, I don’t want to hype it up too much. This is something you need to discover for yourself.
Bubbleshare? They just released a few new features yesterday. They have the first zoom (I snapped a picture of Albert’s screen when he demoed it to me — all done in AJAX, it’s very cool). The first audio annotation on photo sharing service. Cool blog integration and more. I’m going to start using Bubbleshare for my photo sharing. You should check it out. It’s not as hip with the insiders as Flickr, but they are doing some cool stuff that Flickr isn’t doing that makes it worth your consideration.
I hope you get to see the fun that both of these teams are having building software. That’s what it’s all about.
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March 3rd, 2006 at 8:13 pm
hyping a competitor to Office Live. Your shareholders will be so grateful
March 3rd, 2006 at 8:15 pm
What HUGE adoption has Foldera seen? Are you saying all 400K are using the service? How many of those 400K have actually ADOPTED it?
March 3rd, 2006 at 8:22 pm
Foldera looks kind of cool. Might be useful for organizing open source development projects. I’d be interested in trying that out.
I don’t think it’ll get commercial adoption unless you can host your own. Ask yourself if, seriously, MS would use it to manage a product team? How comfortable would your security people be with proprietary information about product schedules and release dates located on servers outside your firewalls?
I’ll wager “not very”. That’s always the problem with the web things and the big companies. You have to be able to host your own - sort of a google appliance kind of approach is likely to be a big win.
March 3rd, 2006 at 8:27 pm
Scoble, 400k have signed up, i signed upto wallop but never use it. going by your standards if i made a website and got a billion people to signup i’d be a huge succeess, but if only 29 people of the billion used it, what would i be?
in 1996 there were around 36million online http://www.netvalley.com/intvalstat.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Number_of_internet_hosts.svg. comparing back then and now is very hard because it’s like comparing the uptake of the first car compared to how well a volvo XC90 sells now.
March 3rd, 2006 at 8:41 pm
Why should I have to put up with this mumbo-jumbo. What moment would I get ? :)
March 3rd, 2006 at 9:45 pm
Saw this comment on TechCrunchm, He’s right, they are very similar (except Joyent is Ruby on Rails), take a look, I think I like the Joyent solution better.
This sounds *exactly* like Joyent [1]. Their connector suite build around the same concepts — except the use the more generic “tag” mechanism to group related items together.
Supports email, calendars, IM, files. Specially designed around teams — so you can tag something, and it will magically appear in your team member’s special folders and so on.
Check out the screeshots [2] and the getting started guide [3].
[1] http://joyent.com
[2] http://joyent.com/product/screenshots
[3] http://joyent.com/product/getting-started
March 3rd, 2006 at 10:11 pm
Looks like techncrunch does more for companies than any other PR mechanism around.
March 3rd, 2006 at 11:45 pm
You shouldn’t start using the service instead of Flickr. There is no excuse for the service not to provide integration with flickr, no matter how competitor they are. That’s interoperability, and that’s why non-Microsoft services could suck less.
March 4th, 2006 at 12:45 am
Mike: huh? Why would I care about that if I was going to put all my photos on Bubbleshare? In fact, I am probably going to use BOTH services cause I like them both for different reasons.
March 4th, 2006 at 4:26 am
That’s fine Scoble. I am saying that you are wasting a lot of your time and doing the dirty laundry of services that don’t provide it to you. You think blogs are great because they are provided to you, I think services are great when they solve a problem.
March 4th, 2006 at 10:42 am
Mike: and Bubbleshare solves several problems for me: it makes it easier for me to share photos with my friends and family.
March 4th, 2006 at 11:36 am
Mike, we’re happy to make things interoperable.
We have RSS out, and we have an upload API.
You want to make Flickr and BubbleShare interoperable… go mash it up yourself. ;)
We didn’t build BubbleShare for Flickr users, we built it mostly for novice users, and first time photo sharers.
If there’s any way you think we could make the service better, we’re all ears. =)
March 4th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
I hate services with a passion that let you upload media on sites. That’s very crowded. Have you any idea that the value of your service is diluted by the sheer amount of places where users might upload/download media?
Users should be able to share media without hosting it in your silo, erm site. There’s a whole lot of decentralized options here. Software like Foldershare+BitTorrent are examples. An obvious decentralized, interoperable service is one that indeed is able to work full-duplex with existing services like Flickr, which is not only of the dominant players but also a “data source”. It’s a no-brainer, even when you are a competitor. Especially if you are a competitor.
March 6th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Geo,
If Foldera and Joyent are exactly the same, then saving $15/month by using Foldera for free seems like a good idea.
But in looking them both over, they don’t seem to be *exactly* the same. What I get from Foldera is that everything gets sorted automatically. It seems like Joyent makes me sort everything.
I can see how Joyent would appeal to techies - especially with the idea of “tagging” which is very “tech”.
Someone else on TechCrunch said: “Looks nice but I hope that they allow tagging/categories… and what’s with priorities on tasks? That is waaaay 90’s…”
Well, maybe so for the techies, but from the perspective of someone working in the corporate world, folders and task priorities are good ideas.
Maybe working with folders IS old-fashioned. But so is double-entry accounting. The thing is, it works.
I’d like to check out Joyent, but I don’t really want to spend $15/month just to check it out, especially since I’m uncertain how well it will work for me after looking it over. Too bad they don’t have a free trial. OTOH, Foldera is free, but I’ll have to wait to actually get to use it.
I’ll get on the list, I guess, and wait. Nothing lost if I don’t like it, right? That’s a risk I can afford to take!
March 7th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Read foldera release closer. They do NOT have 400K sign-ups. They have XX sign-ups who self-reported number of people in their organization so 400K is a multiple of these two. Assuming ~20 people average this gives 20K sign-ups, good - but not too impressive.
I saw the demo at eTech and I am not impressed. Very techy, not too usable. How is it better than Basecamp?
March 8th, 2006 at 10:21 am
Boy there sure are a lot of skeptics out there! For those of you who have posted some the more hyper critical comments I have to ask why? If this is truely an application that works it will be an awesome tool and there will be many users/adopters including me. I would also suggest to many of those who are posting question’s to visit the Foldera web site and read about the company and product. It will answer most if not all of your question’s.
March 9th, 2006 at 10:32 am
I read the comments…looks like a great application if it all work’s.
April 27th, 2006 at 12:23 am
[...] Exit Strategy is Important. Once a customer entrusts their data to us, we become part of their team. If we fail, they fail. It is important, therefore, for customers to know in advance that they can get their data out of Foldera in a usable format. I’ll be thinking about this. See the conversation up at Steve Borsch’s blog. The Integration Concept is Really Resonating. Numerous people … Chuck, Emily, Phil, and Scoble … really like the idea of integrating the various communication and collaboration tools into a unified whole. It’s a pain when people have to self-assemble a collection of point solutions to deal with an overall problem. People Are Really Thinking About How to Embrace Web 2.0 at the Office. Saul has a great post about the various tools and technologies a small business could use, and Foldera’s definitely in the mix. It is good to see different people really looking at the idea of using Web-based applications to help run not only their lives, but their businesses as well. [...]