Flovv - online form-builder with workflows

By Vivek | July 31st, 2007 at 06:24 am ET     6 Comments »    

With quite a few existing options in the online form-builder space, I don’t really see another startup getting the kinda traction it needs to get going. Frevvo, Coghead, and Wufoo are some of the most compelling options to choose from according to your requirements. And now, Sri Lanka based startup Flovv has it’s own plans around the form-building space.

Flovv comes with all the basics Wufoo and Frevvo offer - quickly assemble forms by adding fields and than deploy the form on your site. The big plus offered by Flovv is the ability to create a multi-page form and define workflows among these forms. So, you can very easily build backend-complex forms by adding validation, branching and conditions.

Having said that, Flovv really really lags on the UI side of things. The interface is least intuitive that I have come across. For instance if you want to deploy the form on your site, you need to remember to activate it first. While I can understand the good intentions of the product team, but it would be much better if the forms are activated by default on creation, and not the other way round. Also there is no easy way to grab the embed code, and the site lacks on it’s own error handling. Hope the Flovv team identifies all these issues, and also gets a blog and a forum to become more user friendly. 

Links:
Flovv

Updates on Talkster

By Vivek | July 30th, 2007 at 01:02 pm ET         

I had thought Talkster had entered the land of oblivion. Apparently that is not the case and here we are with some fresh news. The Canada based mobile startup has hired a new President - Jim Ferguson. Jim will be working at Talkster to bring about a fundamental shift in Talkster’s strategy.

For a brief bio on Jim - Before coming to Talkster, Jim was President of Sales and Marketing at Mpower, the business telecommunications services provider, from 2003 until its acquisition in 2006 by TelePacifc.  While at Mpower, Jim guided a team of 150 employees in marketing, sales, field support, engineering and product life cycle teams that delivered more than $200 million in annual revenue.  Prior to that, Jim also held executive roles at Global Crossing, Frontier Communications and Cable and Wireless.

Previous coverage of Talkster- Talkster enables free Mobile to IM calling

Let’s see what the startup has to offer next.

Yaari.com - If nothing works, SPAM your way to social networking stardom

By Vivek | July 30th, 2007 at 11:06 am ET     26 Comments »    

In the world of social networking there are couple of ways to grow fast. Either get a team of really bright people to build the initial platform and than deliver the API juggernaut n-enjoy, OR simply spam your way to victory. Ofcourse with the former route startups have the real user numbers to speak about, while in the latter startups get thousands of users up their ass for spamming their mailboxes. Since delivering THE real platform is easier said than done, more and more startups are looking to take the easier route. Newest to join the ranks is India focused social networking site - Yaari.com (Yaari = Friendship)

The spamming issue originating from Yaari was first reported to me by one of my readers, before I digged in myself. Basically all that familiar thing happened - the user started getting bombarded with Yaari invites. Little bit of digging revealed that  Yaari recently started asking it’s users for their Gmail/Yahoo password with no clear reason. And all this happens at the sweet spot - while a user is through the registration process. Yaari’s registration workflow doesn’t let a new user proceed without giving out their gmail/yahoo password, if that is the email being used to register. And if you are not paying attention, in few seconds, Yaari goes out and spams your whole contact list.

If you are one of those you keep getting spammed and were thinking of going to Yaari’s blog to express yourself to the fullest, don’t even bother. It is long gone now.

foonz group calling service gets a shortcode

By Vivek | July 30th, 2007 at 09:31 am ET         

foonz today added a shortcode to it’s feature list that would very well reduce the friction in getting started with the service. I had written about this group calling service couple of times before. From the very start, the service enabled users to initiate a group call by calling the foonz number. However that is not a convenient option for the young crowd who are more hands on with texting. To get to that target group, foonz has now enabled it’s users to text START to foonz (36669) and get on with their group call.

To get into details about how the feature really works -  foonz sends a text message with simple text instructions for how to start the call.  When the user initiates the call, foonzMobile sends instant invitations to participants via text message to their cell phones.  After that just like a typical conference call, participants dial the number in the invitation to join the call and foonz connects everyone together.  

If some contacts aren?t available, the call initiator can leave a message just for them on the same call, completing the communication loop with everyone in the group. Those contacts receive a text letting them know they have a message waiting and instructions for retrieving it.

As for the actual way to start the call, you can text START and include names from your contact list names(ex: START Mary, Joe, George) or start a call with a previously defined group (ex: START family).

The Techstars stars - madKast and Filtrbox.com

By Vivek | July 27th, 2007 at 03:08 pm ET     6 Comments »    

Season for Techstars incubator startups to come to life is up. To start with, let’s checkout couple of them-

madKast: Small but helpful mashup that makes it easy to share blog posts with your buddies. Once a blog owner installs the widget code, an icon appears next to each post title. Clicking on that results in a popup window from where you can easily email or txt message the URL for the post. Besides that, the app also makes it easy to bookmark the post on del.icio.us and likes. However the pain is that while bookmarking, you are still redirected to the respective site. I think enough sample code is lying around for the related APIs to deliver a better mashup.

Filtrbox.com: The Colorado based startup is looking to solve the problem of news overflow. Don’t have more details than that. They are looking to launch sometime soon.