Widgetbox App Accelerator- App dump on FB

By Vivek | September 27th, 2007 at 03:49 am ET         

Early morning today Widgetbox delivered a truck load of apps onto the Facebook platform. Just to go briefly over the details, if you have developed/worked on making your apps compatible with Widgetbox, you just got yourself more free users. With the newly launched App Accelerator, all you need to do is fill couple of web forms, click on few buttons, and your app is made available to Facebook users who can install and use it like any other out there.

Now this can be an interesting option for developers who don’t really want to dig into Facebook API and instead work with Widgetbox, which in turn integrates with other platforms to deliver you more traction. However there are few assumptions out here-

For one, the Widgetbox development environment is assumed to be robust and flexible enough to dish out apps quickly. Since I haven’t played with it, I can’t say how developer friendly it is. Still, I would expect it to be a lesser pain to work with as compared to Facebook API.

Second assumption is that, Widgetbox would deliver you more users if you work with them, instead of building just against Facebook. Let’s watch on this for next few months.

Lastly, I am not sure how much flexibility/features Widgetbox provides in terms of updating user profile, News Feed, and MiniFeed on Facebook, which completely determines the fate of an app on the fast moving platform.

Nevertheless an interesting application launch from Widgetbox.

MindTouch reaches the first high mark

By Vivek | September 27th, 2007 at 03:14 am ET     4 Comments »    

As they say, getting the first customers is the toughest job. And after that, momentum takes you places. Right now my buddies at MindTouch are hitting the momentum stage. Today the startup announced that it has now crossed 100,000 wiki downloads mark since launching Deki Wiki about a year ago.

According to the company, the current download rate is 500 times per day. That is a real good number considering users are not signing up for some app, but instead downloading to install it on their server/machine. Wonder, how the number looks for SocialText.

Peeking into recent past, it was just couple of months back that the wiki company had launched a feature rich upgrade of their app, about which I had written here. All in all, a truly webservice enabled free wiki software getting the well deserved attention.

Near-Time too mashes Wiki+Widgets

By Vivek | September 26th, 2007 at 07:16 pm ET         

Near-Time, the Durham, NC based collaboration startup is following the expected feature upgrade path. The on-demand wiki startup is now supporting adding of widgets from 30 widget providers. Most of you can very well guess who all is in the list - Google Calendar, 30Boxes, Upcoming, meebo, Wufoo, icebergg, Google Maps, Youtube, Polldaddy,…..and more - the typical widget crowd that most of us have gotten used to using where we want.

As I noted in the title, Near-time is not really the first startup to do that. CentralDesktop already supports selected external apps, Wetpaint enabled widget support long time back, Mindtouch did it’s widget enabled release last month, Atlassian has a petty good plugin support, pbWIki also enables widgets,…….

However, as compared to Mindtouch, CentralDesktop, and others, Near-Time widget support is more in the form of dropping the embed code onto your pages. Which means lesser control over what content users are adding that in turn makes it less attractive of an option for business users. Since business users are the main target the startup is going after, their team really needs to build deep integration with a small-selected external widget providers.

And we are finally back online

By Vivek | September 26th, 2007 at 06:16 pm ET         

With DNS propagation taking longer then expect, StartupSquad is back online and on a newer snappier server. This ends almost almost a week of server downtime+issues that includes an email from my hosting company notifying us that the hosting environment has been compromised. Don’t think anyone would want to hear that, ever. Anyway, thanks to everyone emailing-in and notifying of all-so-visible issues with the site.

Level 3 Platform - What about BungeeLabs Marc?

By Vivek | September 22nd, 2007 at 11:17 pm ET         

Over the past weekend, Marc Andreessen over at his blog had a great post describing internet platforms from developer perspective. Down below in the extended post, he lists the companies offering(sorta) Level 3 platform - Ning, Salesforce, SL, Akamai, and Amazon. While I don’t exactly agree with that list, one company that Marc did overlook is BungeeLabs.

One of Marc’s core requirement is that Level 3 platform should allow third-party application code to actually run inside the platform. If that is the req, no other company has a better lead(roughly 4 years) in the market then BungeeLabs.

As a developer, not only you get  a L3 platform to code in directly, but also a browser based environment that will make you forget your super heavy Eclipse client in matter of few days. And not to forget, you don’t need to get webservers and appservers since Bungee takes care of that too. There is waaay more Bungee then I can put in a post. Wait for another couple of months to discover the real L3 yourself.