InCircles is not dead; It’s Pladeo now

By Vivek | April 30th, 2007 at 10:51 am ET         

I had written about InCircles.com last year when it had launched it’s widget based chat client through which users can chat with others on the page it is installed on. While the idea looked interesting to start with, but was not able to get traction with users. Why? ‘Cause unknown entities don’t really have anything to exchange besides “test” or “asdfasdf” or “123123123″ or “hello”. Once those kind of messages start showing up, anyone can tell where the community effect is headed. Now the saving part here is that InCircles team has realized the shortcoming and planning on marking some serious upgrades to the widget. First among which is change of name. InCircles will become Pladeo in the next few days. As part of the real upgrades, the Pladeo widget will be able to manage content, play video, chat over video, create avatars, view profiles and communities. Unlike the previous anonymous user based system, Pladeo will enable creation of profiles while site owners will get access to sophisticated analytics tools to monitor all their video distribution activity, user demographics data, and dialog traffic. Latter part of feature set is definitely dependent on how big the community grows.

Others in this domain - Xpanity, and Me.dium. Difference being - Xpanity, and Me.dium are browser extensions driven by users, while Pladeo driven by site owners and flash based.

Links:
Pladeo

CircleUp’s group collab goes beta

By Vivek | April 30th, 2007 at 01:02 am ET         

CircleUp, which been working behind the scenes for the past few months has finally gone live with the public beta of it’s smart collaboration app. I had written about CircleUp last month when it had partnered with e7sports. CircleUp’s concept is to make your collaboration easier by allowing you to pose questions and gather needed information from groups of any size and get back a single, organized response that can be used and shared among all members of the groups. All the communication happens via email and IM, while CircleUp keeps tracks of your responses to eventually aggregate the details.

Personally I hate going to yet another site that tells me it can make my online life easier. All it eventually means is another app, another id, and another place for me to login. Naaa. CircleUp understands this fact really well since with this launch it is introducing “What’s Your Question” widgets for Google Desktop, NetVibes Start Page and an Outlook plug-in. That means not round-trips to another site to get your questions kicking. Just get things done right from your personalized page. Lazy-feature list doesn’t stop here. CircleUp delivers RSS feeds for your questions, the aggregated “Daily Result” delivered to your email, and export to Excel and PDF. CircleUp has even the microformat fans covered by enabling browser export of contact information directly to tools like Outlook, or mashups with Google Maps, and more. On the whole a pretty well featured application to start with. Still would like to see integration with other IM clients besides AIM, Yahoo.

Grouptivity is a similar solution but without the IM integration that tends towards getting discussions enabled around any webpage or content.

Links:
CircleUp

oh! Yahoo does a big deal

By Vivek | April 30th, 2007 at 12:24 am ET         

Without any doubt these are the days of advertising where anything to everything in advertising would sell. Earlier this month it was Google/DoubleClick deal and now it is Yahoo finally planning to go for a big deal by acquiring Right Media for $680 million in equal parts of stock and cash. Yahoo had invested $20 million in Right Media late last year for a 20% stake in the company. Right Media, which was founded in 2003, is big in banner ads with more than19000 advertisers in it’s marketplace.

Yahoo’s plans are to use the platform to drive more ads to it’s online properties for the non-premium ad space.

The deal aside, not sure how the CPMs and CTRs are at Right Media as compared to DoubleClick or Yahoo Panama or Google.

Evincii - Search meets Brick-n-Mortar

By Vivek | April 27th, 2007 at 03:43 pm ET         

Ever found yourself lost in Walmart or Best Buy or one of those big stores? or Going round in circles with being able to find the stuff you are really looking for. Big stores aside, I get lost in Blockbuster and end up spending 30 minutes just to locate a DVD that I might not eventually like. Well, as it seems right now, search god has listened to our prayers once again and sent Evincii to our rescue. You might ask, Who’s Evincii? Evincii is your soon to be yearned for Search Engine in the Store. Yeah, I am talking about brick and mortar. Evincii team has been working on this cool concept that will deliver plug-n-play search engine to retailers that in turn will make our shopping life easier. Once the system shows up in your local store, you would have to go through just the right set of questions to know where exactly the product in located on miles long shelfspace in your local WhateverMart. The solution although difficult to design and deploy, can eventually be a killer product if delivered as depicted.

Links:
Evincii

Virtual World - What’s up next month?

By Vivek | April 27th, 2007 at 03:18 pm ET         

Few major releases are coming up in the 3D virtual world space. First is from Kaneva that will be offering more options to it’s users for creating life-like avatars. Obviously to get that you need to pay $$S. This in other words means that users will be able to purchase new items and upgrades including clothes, furniture and homes with Kaneva’s new Buy Credits system. Just like SL, Kaneva platform would still be free to use.

Second in line is 3B, about which I had written about last year. 3B would be launching significant set of feature updates to it’s 3D virtual world client early next month.

Besides the above two, Qwaq should also prepping for the launch of it’s enterprise focused 3D-based collaboration client sometime within the next month of two.

Would get more details on each of these near their launch.

Related:
Qwaq can make WebEx history
3B adds personalized avatars to it’s 3D World
Kaneva’s Virtual World is now open