SezWho’s raises $1 million for commenting app

By Vivek | October 31st, 2007 at 04:09 pm ET     3 Comments »    

Blog commenting app space is finally turning the corner. Yesterday we wrote about launch of blog/site commenting application Disqus and today another competing service SezWho informed us about closing of it’s Series A round of funding. The company has raised $1 million from KPG Ventures.

From competition standpoint Js-Kit has raised $1.2 million in seed funding, Intense Debate is funded by Techstars, while Disqus seems to have raised money but are not officially coming out with the news right now.

Coming back to SezWho, apart from the funding the startup also introduced two new widgets  - The Red Carpet widget that lets communities feature top-rated participants on a virtual red carpet. Each avatar links to individual profiles that provide a history of comments, associated articles or pages, and the overall ranking for each. Besides that a new SezWho badge lets contributors display their personal rating and expertise portfolio on their blogs or other sites to reinforce an earned reputation.

To  add a bit more, SezWho now also provides statistics for both contributors and site owners. This includes number people rating and viewing a contributor’s profile, and traffic SezWho is driving and where that traffic is coming from.

Central Desktop: Web DB + File Previews + more….

By Vivek | October 31st, 2007 at 04:35 am ET         

Central Desktop, one of the smarter, profitable, and never funded team collaboration startup, delivered another feature full release of the web app yesterday. Desktop’s new database features enable teams to create online, relational databases  and link database records with tasks, documents, spreadsheets as well as launch discussion threads within the database application.

In simpler words, this makes Central Desktop’s contextual collaborative database ideal for managing customer and partner contacts, product listings, price lists, corporate compliance or custom workflows. In comparison terms, a competing product for all the Web DB app providers like DabbleDB, Coghead, Trackvia, and more.

In my PoV, the real deal in the new release is the new File Quick View feature. Desktop users can now preview, zoom, scroll, search, copy and paste within the most widely used file types including MS Office and Adobe PDF. All this without leaving the Central Desktop workspace or downloading the file to a desktop. While I still need to dig up details behind what is powering this feature, from the end user standpoint, this really seems to be a great option to have. Last time I heard, among other things Koral had delivered a similar feature for Powerpoint previews(read only mode), before they got snapped up by Salesforce.

In addition, Central Desktop’s enhanced APIs deliver custom project management triggers and the ability to import, export and merge data within workspace applications as well as from external applications to streamline lead generation projects for sales, business development and marketing.

Disqus launches Blog Commenting App

By Vivek | October 31st, 2007 at 04:18 am ET     4 Comments »    

Disqus, about which fellow blogger Ashish Singh had written about couple of months back, today finally launched it’s feature-full blog commenting system. Among others, the YCombinator startup competes with Js-Kit, Intense Debate, and SezWho.

Disqus is branding itself as a “distributed comment system for blogs and websites.” The app delivers both a forum like interface to keep your conversations glued together, while replacing your existing commenting app. As a blog owner you need to install the plugin for WordPress, Blogger, MovableType, and TypePad to get going quickly. Comments from your existing/default commenting system stay put, and for any new comments, the Disqus app kicks in.

Blog/site owners have pretty much complete control over the look and feel of plugin. For those concerned about the content, Blog/Site owners still own all the content created and stored at Disqus. And when you are talking about comments, commenting spam is never always the thing to watchout for. Disqus team has built an inhouse comment spam protection that is backed by Wordpress’s Akismet. Disqus has also introduced an API with the launch, but I am not sure what direction they are taking with it.

As for search engine indexing of the comments, the app places all the actual comment content on the blog/site page. In other words, no loss over SEO goodiness.

From comparison standpoint, competing commenting application Js-Kit also makes sure that search engines can index  publishers data. As for data backups, Js-Kit provides access to blog/site owner data via RSS feed which provides real-time export of all comment data back to the publisher. JS-Kit has also added moderation tools to it’s Comment Service, including Pre and Post moderation of comments, SPAM protection,
and Session & IP level blocking. The app also comes with visitor controls like “score” comments and the flexibility to sort comments by score (”Karma”), visitor name, and date. 

On the whole, the basic feature set is comparable but Disqus does beat Js-kit in terms of UI/end user experience. From my standpoint, I am still undecided :-/

Back in action

By Vivek | October 31st, 2007 at 03:37 am ET         

Well, it seems blogging-fatigue and week of cough and cold has taken it’s toll on the blog. And all this while my email box is getting piled up with all the startups that want to be talked about. So here I am covering as many as possible.

MOBIVOX hires Former Skype Mobile head

By Vivek | October 23rd, 2007 at 03:28 pm ET         

Canadian telco startup MOBIVOX seems set for long term Skype strategy. The startup announced yesterday that it has appointed former head of Skype Mobile Product Group, Nitzan Shaer, as the company?s Chief Operating Officer.  Shaer was also appointed to the MOBIVOX board of directors.

Shaer’s past experience includes working as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at IDG Ventures. Among others, IDG ventures was one of the venture firms that participated in MOBIVOX’s $11 million Series A round of funding.

Prior to IDG, Shaer was the head of the mobile product group at Skype. According to the information we have, Shaer was worked on development and marketing efforts that made Skype available on Nokia, Motorola and Windows Mobile.