Movietally - your movie collection

By Vivek Puri | August 29th, 2006 at 05:25 pm ET         

Another Tag vertical is in the market - Movietally.com. Movietally provides platform for user to organize their movie lists as well as share with other users. You can learn about popular movies, get recommendations, and find other people with similar watching interests as you.

Features: Movietally seems to be building on their feature set, which are very basic as of now. To begin create your own movie collection, you need to signup for a Movietally account. You can search for movies by names or tags. Users get option to add movie to their collection of add movie to their see list. When you add a movie to you collection you can assign new tags, and optionally write a review. For any movie you get stats like “x people recommend the movie” or “y people saw the movie”. You can also search for other users and peek into their movie collection. You can also subscribe to other members movie collection and will get notified when they any updates. One of the better features is that you can get RSS feeds for Recent Movies for a Tag or Updated Movies for a Tag. Movietally also provides tag clouds for Recent Movies, Tags …

Issues: Movietally has feature called Recommendations, which are supposed to be the movies recommended for you. There is no logic provided for the algorithm behind generation of this list.

Deprecated: There is no support for Movie Cast and Crew, unlike IMDB or Yahoo Movies or Rottentomatoes. Maybe Movietally hopes people will use tags for cast and crew. In that case there are going to have good number of tags for each movie. Also users cannot really rate any movie, so you need to rely on recommendation and number of people watching to figure out the best.

Suggestions: While searching for movie and if it’s not in Movietally database, you get a message that movie was not found. It will be much better if you get a form to add the movie to collection there itself. Ajax-suggest searching for movies and tags will add lot of appeal to the site. There should also be way to sort movies within collections.

Future: Movietally still needs to really define the structure for the site so that users have better sense of direction before they start churning of creative content. Hope they also have moderation feature to prevent spam and typos while movies are getting added to the database. Movietally is just starting at a game which was mastered long back by IMDB. It will be interesting to watch their plan in the web 2.0 world.

Links:
Movietally

Gizmo Project on Nokia 770

By Vivek Puri | August 28th, 2006 at 09:37 pm ET         

Gizmo Project, the new challenger on the VOIP Inc block and seems like it will stay there for a long time. Last week I got my new and long awaited Nokia 770, charged it up, loaded Gizmo Project’s client, connected to my WiFi, and for the first time felt that I might not need my verizon-blackberry anymore. Although that time is still far away (unless I move to Mountainview), I must admit that the voice quality and features of Gizmo Project are the best in the market and not to forget the free calling to Gizmo buddies in 60 countries.

Features: After installing the gizmo client, you need to signup with Gizmo Project and get your free SIP phone number and you are all set. Gizmo has all the bells and whistles for the VOIP game including great voice quality, free calling, free voicemail, free voicemail-to-email, free conferencing, list of All/dialed/received/missed calls, and account management from Nokia 700 itself. From the IM side you can chat with other Gizmo users, other SIP-based networks users, as well as your Google Talk buddies. You can create and join conference calls from Gizmo, which can be attended by people using Mobile phones/ Landlines/SIP Phones/ Gizmo. At most 100 people can attend these conference calls, which should be sufficient in most cases.
One of the smart and tiny feature is being able to set the Subject of your call, so that you can remember what you really talked about. You can change your Gizmo account setting and status from Nokia 770, including presence. One security issue I noticed was that in Gizmo account settings, the account password shows up as plain text. Hope they get to it quickly.

Cost: Gizmo to Gizmo user calls are free, but calling someone without Gizmo you need to pay (See Catch22 below). To receive calls to your Nokia 770 you need to pay $3/month

Catch22: Everything is great about this product except for calling non Gizmo users. For you to be able to call free in the 60 countries the person you are calling should be registered to Gizmo, otherwise you need to pay 1cent/minute. I know its a great plan and nice thinking by gizmo guys, but getting all our friends to sign up for gizmo so that we can call them for free is a tough call. I already need to login to Yahoo IM and Google Talk, so will be many other users, to get their complete friend’s list. A third IM client is bit too much. Let’s hope Gizmo gets on the other side before Google or Yahoo also come with the free PSTN calling plans.

Future: I think Gizmo on Nokia 770 is the perfect combination possible for truly mobile pros. It needs to be seen how many developers try building more applications on the top of Gizmo Project API. We definitely need more mashups like SKY-Click.com or eqo.com. Since developer community is not really happy with Skype API, maybe they can channel their energy into Gizmo.

Links:
Nokia 770
Gizmo Project
Gizmo Download
Gizmo API

SocialPicks for Financial Networking

By Vivek Puri | August 28th, 2006 at 05:53 pm ET         

Financial Social Networking sites are popping up quickly. Latest entrant is SocialPicks.com.

Features: SocialPicks allows users to search for stocks by ticker symbol and among others things, gives the stock Buy/Sell Rating, user analysis, related discussion between SocialPicks members. Users can add stocks to their watch lists, or write analysis about them. Users can also get others sentiments about a stock, whether it�s bullish or bearish. As expected you can assign tags to stocks, and pull up all stocks related to a tag.
Another main feature is the People area where you can view any user’s profile, their investment ideas, Personal portfolio, and Investment Accuracy. You can follow a user or you can add them as your friend. Members can also join groups or start a new group, to diversify their market knowledge, which will provide a competitive platform between members, or as groups as they compete with other groups on SocialPicks. For every group there are Stock Panels, Investment Ideas, and Whiteboard.
The site is geared towards user collaboration, which in turn will provide better information about stocks and investment ideas. Each user is assigned a score based on number of investment ideas, accuracy of shared ideas, return of personal portfolio, number of analysis written. So if a Financial Geek wants to prove himself, SocialPicks is the right place.

Technology/UI: Site is logical and straight forward and works perfectly in Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. RSS feeds are there for anything and everything, which is a nice idea. You can get feeds for Recent Picks, Popular Picks, Recent Analysis, Popular Analysis, Recent Activities (including pick, sell and watch) for People. Given that it’s a new site, it was expected that stock quotes and charts will support Ajax based refresh, but that doesn�t seem to be the case. Hope it�s on their feature list.

Revenue: As of now site is free of advertising, which makes me wonder how they will go about funding their operations. Maybe they can start charging user for creating groups just like meetup.com.

Competition: Social picks will face major competition from Finance giants� yahoo, Google, but has advantage ’cause of its community based features. Also, more competition comes from similar startups including Feelingbullish.com, Bullpoo.com, Gradr.com, and Stocktickr.com. It needs to be seen how they will differentiate themselves and carve out a better strategy against their big and small competitors.

Future: As per Weiting Liu, SocialPicks is working on development of better set of collaboration tools and fully integrating Groups feature into the SocialPicks site.

Right now SocialPicks is in the beta testing phase and are looking for users to profile their site. I have 20 invites for people who want to try out SocialPicks. Email me for invites (vp at vivekpuri dot com).

Links:
SocialPicks

Zend gets 20 million in Series D Funding

By Vivek Puri | August 28th, 2006 at 11:03 am ET         

Zend Technologies has secured $20 million in series D fund round led by Greylock Partners. According to Zend News :

“The new funds will enable us to expand faster in emerging geographical markets, accelerate our product development and extend the services organization to meet the demands of our growing number of enterprise PHP customers, said Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, the co-founders of Zend Technologies. It is great that a venture capital firm with the stature of Greylock Partners shares our vision for the PHP market and will help us realize Zend�s potential.”

This is a great news for PHP Development community on the whole. PHP is the most popular language for building dynamic web applications with more than 22 million Web sites using it currently. With the huge install base and great support from hosting companies, and ease of development PHP is a force to reckong with. PHP 6 and Zend Framework are the 2 most exciting things i am looking forward as a PHP enthusiast myself. Other products include Zend Studio, which is one of the best PHP IDE’s in the market, and Zend Platform, which provides high scalability, better performance, and improved efficency.

Earlier Zend had raised $8 million in Series C funding in July 2004 and about $9 million in series A and B. Zend’s investors include Azure Capital, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Platinum, SAP Ventures and Walden Israel.

Links:
Zend.com
Zend PHP Framework
Zend Studio

Goolge Apps for small businesses

By Vivek Puri | August 28th, 2006 at 06:58 am ET         

Google is on track to build competition for Microsoft Inc’s office product line. They have introduced hosted version of Gmail, Google talk, Google calendar, and Page Creator as Google Apps. Right now, these Apps are targeted towards Small to Medium businesses and might expand to bigger organizations later on. Setting up an account with Gmail Apps is simple. Just submit you domain name and answer few questions and you will get an invite in your gmail account and you are all set. First 25 user accounts can be created for free and you need to pay after that, although i didn’t see an option to pay. The best part is you can also chat using Google Talk, which will counter the IBM Sametime in coporate world. All i need now is a free version of webex or gotomeeting.com and i am all set to collaborate.
Personally I have been using these Apps for couple of my domains and pretty satisfied right now although Om Malik seems to have reservations due to privacy issues, which offcourse are valid and will determine the future of this service. My basic requirements were web-based solution with spam control which i got for free. Below are some screenshots for the service. Overall, another of Google’s nicely package app.

Links:
Google Apps