May 2008
Monthly Archive
Startup #3: Soocial
Posted by Yannis Lionis on 09 May 2008 | Tagged as: Internet
This is the third entry in a series of reviews of startups that were present at the Next Web 2008 conference.
Soocial has set out to solve the fragmentation of your Contacts. I don’t know about you, but I have friend’s and colleague’s contacts all over the place, mainly split between various email clients and my mobiles. There are websites or tools lying around promising to import your contacts, but what about synchronising back? Well, soocial promises to synchronise from and to your phone (400+ phone models supported) , GMail, Highrise, OS X Address Book, while also providing a web front end to manage it all.This is a very clear proposal, when the (very wacky) guy presented it everyone got it straight away and started asking for more (”how about Outlook?”, “how about synching your calendar?”). I’m waiting for an invite for the closed beta, but Kerry tell me it works. Bring it on! Oh, and check out their 404 page. Very wacky too.
Startup #2: CoComment
Posted by Yannis Lionis on 01 May 2008 | Tagged as: Internet
This is the second entry in a series of reviews of startups that were present at the Next Web 2008 conference.
Don’t you really hate it when you write a comment on someone’s blog or post at a forum and then you never remember to check back for replies? Well, I do. And CoComment provides, among other things, the ability to track that, via a browser plug-in that tracks your comments and replies to them pretty much anywhere. It would be unfair to say that this is all CoComment does though. Another interesting feature is the ability to start a discussion on any web page you want and other cocommenters will see that when they visit the page, thus getting a conversation going between the cocomment community on virtually any page on the internet.As cool a feature as that is, I fear that it’s quite easy to blog about something interesting I spot on the internet by including a link to it, or twitter about it if I have a very short comment on it. And I know that my friends follow my blog or my twitter updates, whereas they will not necessarily be CoComment users.
Nevertheless, I’ve seen a lot of startups trying to somehow combine a social aspect with blogging/commenting, and this is one of the most original and interesting ones. Let’s see where it takes them.