DEMO - First Afternoon

The afternoon started off with a bunch of collaborative browsing, social search, and tagging services.

It was hard for me not to think that we've been down this path with Delicious, but nevertheless there were some interesting new twists.

We started out with Gravee, a social search engine where the content owners share in the revenue.  A novel idea. Although I don't know if sharing the action with the content owners is going to "disrupt" the web search market at this stage.  I'd love to see it happen though.

Then we moved on to a couple presentation/meeting related services which didn't do much for me.

Then we got right into the social/tagging world in a big way with presentations from Kaboodle, Plum, Raw Sugar, Riya, and Tagworld (which also announced an investment by DFJ).

Of these I liked Plum and Riya the best based on the demos.

Tagworld is clearly gaining some real usage among the myspace crowd and it is always worth going up against a competitor that has recently sold out for a lot of money.  But honestly these social networks are about scale and myspace still has that in spades.  It will be interesting to see if more functionality and a better experience beats out the largest social network.

Riya is very slick.  It's a great demo.  The founder and CEO ended with the search engine finding a photo of his son on the wall of his office in the background of a picture of him.  The engine found something we could barely see.  Very nicely done.  This guy is a demo god in the making if he isn't already one.

What I want to know is if Riya can scale to the web at large.  Can it work on Flickr?  Can it work on all the photo sites combined?  If it could, that would be an amazing thing.  My daughter Jessica once said to me, "Dad, if you want to make a lot of money, invest in a company that can find pictures of people".  Riya does that, right now in a limited way, but possibly over time in a much bigger way.  I am going to give it a spin for sure.

Of all the tagging/social services I saw today, the demo I liked best was Plum.  I have to go see them at the pavilion to get a closer look, but I like the way its integrated into the web and doesn't try to be a destination.  I like that every collection is an RSS feed.  I like that they demo'd Plum working with Flickr, with blogs, with email.  That's how this stuff needs to work.

Then we got treated to a few web services that work with the open source software world, Krugle, Jitterbit, and IPswap.  To be honest, these all felt more "new" and "different" to me than the social/tagging/collaborative browsing stuff earlier in the afternoon.

Krugle was the most interesting of the bunch.  It's a search engine for open source software.  Vertical search for open source.  Sounds like a good concept.  The demo was simple and the proposition was compelling.  Not sure how they make money, but the demo isn't supposed to focus on that.

A fellow VC said to me that he likes that DEMO focuses exclusively on the products, plain and simple.  And its true. I am having a lot of fun focusing on the products for a couple days.

Time to get back for the DEMO jam and see the USB guitar in action.  I sure hope its a Gibson Flying V.

Comments

[Myron Kassaraba]

Hi Fred,

Thanks for the inside view! Glad to hear that Munjal from Riya did well. They are a good group and are going places. I wrote a review of Riya for The Future Image Report (only print unfortunately) and was really impressed with their Alpha. The "find a picture of Fred Wilson anywhere on the web" problem is a very hard one. Almost totally impossible on random images on the web and without other metadata. Riya is pointed at automatically finding people in your collection of personal snapshots where they can use other clues and context to help with the recognition.

On a site like Flickr you could also make use of tags as clues. Once Riya has a large enough set of profiles, you could throw a picture at it and ask "who's this"? If there is a shared profile in the database then it should find the person.

Try it on your own photos, the best part is they make the "teaching & tagging" fun since it takes a while to build up the profiles. The reason this makes sense as a web service is they can incrementally improve the recognition algorithms and add more techniques as they become available.

MJK

[jackson]

The problem with the Gibson 'Flying' V is that it's a difficult guitar to play while sitting down.......SITTING DOWN!!!!

[Jon Gonzales]

I heard DEMO was for new and different ideas, but Krugle.com sounds like a Koders.com wannabe. I've been developing with Koders for over a year. Now Koders.com has plug-ins for Eclipse and Visual Stuido, with a cool intelligent agent feature that alerts me when it finds reusable code matches. I don't search for code anymore, because it finds me. DEMO that!

[Ewan Grantham]

Signed up for Riya two months ago, and have never heard back. So if you do get accepted, I'd love to hear how well it works. Of course, it could be that I mentioned I had about 7000 flickr entries that I wanted to submit, and they may have been concerned I'd be stress testing them a little early :-)

[bluebalz]

Riya and Krugle have adopted a very risky strategy: Tease a product before it's ready and hope it lives up to the hype. The sheer hubris of it all makes me ill. Especially for Krugle, which is a copycat service. Ever heard of koders.com and docjar? What amazes me is how easily the blogosphere and the press are manipulated by such stunts? Fact checking is out of style. First Bush, then Oprah, now DEMO. Before declaring Krugle to be "google for developers" all of these journalist and reporters should have done a google search for "code search engines". There are several that already exist, some better than others (I happen to like Koders, for their simple interface). Sorry to disagree, but there is nothing new and different about Krugle.

[max]

Is krugle like docjar?