Software

Five Questions with….SoftShell

By Mark Evans in Five Questions With..., Software, Venture Capital 4 Comments

SoftShell
My mother is a Luddite with a capital “L”. But the reality is she’s pretty typical of the 60+ demographic that find computers far from user-friendly.

What’s interesting is that for all the hype about Web 2.0, meeting the computing and Web needs of a huge population hasn’t received nearly as much love or attention.

London, Ont.-based SoftShell is looking to fill the “senior’s void” with software that makes using a computer simple and easy to use. Sitting on top of Windows, Softshell lets people do four things and four things only: e-mail, games, photo-viewing and Web browsing. There’s no bells and whistles. It’s no-frills computing.

At first blush, SoftShell looks like a no-brainer given the market is potentially huge. There are, however, two major challenges: developing a business model where people pay for the software directly or indirectly; and getting distribution, whether direct through retail channels or deals with computer makers.

SoftShell hopes to take an interesting forward by seeking $200,000 in funding from the Dragon’s Den – a venture capital reality show now in its third season. SoftShell co-founder Stephen Beath wouldn’t spill the beans on whether SoftShell was successful but he did answer Five Questions with….

Q: So, how did SoftShell get started?

A: Our story started two years ago. For me, my family thought about getting my grandmother a computer to keep in touch. There was no way I was going to give her a Windows or Apple interface – the fonts are tool small and there’s too much going on. We looked around for a simple interface so we could e-mail. There was nothing around so we decided to build an interface.

We want to get this generation that had been left behind by current computers engaged. We had alpha version of the software. It is an interface that takes over the whole computer. It provides e-mail, games, photo viewing and Web browsing – the four most popular things that seniors are interested based on our research. It puts really simplified easy high-visible intuitive interface on those functions and strips out a lot of the functionality.

Q: Where are you in terms of development?

We have had an alpha version for eight months. We have been in beta testing of the past eight months. We have been testing with individual users, retirement homes, senior centers and geriatric centers. The software will be publicly available on Monday. You can download it for free from our Web site.

Q: What’s SoftShell’s business model?

Eventually, we are going to go with a two-tier system. You can pay or maybe you can have an ad-supported or partnership-supported version. We could build Skype into it. If the user goes for a Skype subscription, maybe Skype could pass along $5.

Q: How much money are you seeking from the Dragon’s Den?

A: We asked for a $200,000 investment on the show. We now have a product people love, we see it as marketing issue. We are looking to hire a marketing focused CEO; that would be the main purpose of that money to promote software and get us into other channels. It would be amazing to go into Future Shop or Shopper Drug Mart and see the product.

Q: Are there are companies focused on the seniors market?

A: There is a couple – none quite like ours. There are two Silicon Valley start-ups. Presto and Celery.

Technorati Tags: ,

NitroDesk: A New Way to Manage Photos, Video

By Mark Evans in Software No Comments

Picture 2-44
It has never been easier to take photographs and video but managing everything can be a huge challenge given there a variety of places on the Web where your photos and videos are stored and featured.

NitroDesk aims to solve this problem with the launch of software that makes it easy to upload your photos and videos from your desktop to multiple photo sharing sites at the same time. It also allows you to transfer photos from one site to another, as well as synchronize photos from your desktop with your online albums.

Among the sites supported by NitroDesk include PlanetEye, SmugMug, Zenfolio, Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Shutterpoint, Windows Live Spaces, Vimeo and YouTube. The software (Windows only) can be downloaded here; people will want to purchase a license can get $10 off $29.99 retail price by using MARKEVANS in the coupon area.

NitroDesk is the self-funded creation of Goutham Sukumar, who started it as a side project. I had a chance recently to do a Q&A with Goutham about NitroDesk and why he created it. (Click the “more” button at the bottom for the second part of the Q&A)

What’s the genesis of NitroDesk? What problem did you see and why did you decide to create NitroDesk to solve it?

I have been taking pictures for a long time. Naturally, sharing photos online is something I always do. However, different photo sharing sites are slanted towards different goals: PlanetEye is for travelers to highlight the places they have visited, Flickr has a good community slant to it, SmugMug and Zenfolio are typically used by professionals to host their portfolios and PicasaWeb is simply great for sharing with family and friends.

When I started using more than one site, I realized the need to use different tools to upload the same pictures to multiple places. I also quickly lost track of what I had uploaded and where. Having come from an EAI and thick-client world, I came to realize too, that the same principles we use for integrating legacy backend systems could be leveraged to make all photo sharing (and similar) services work/play well with one another. Photo site integration is just one example which I decided to tackle right away.

Can you give me an overview of NitroDesk’s features? What does it do, and how do you expect people to use it?

I think i can best answer that by talking about how I use NitroDesk:

Multi-Loading
Every time I take pictures at an event or a trip, I put them on Picasa and do the necessary corrections to the images (back-lighting, auto leveling etc.) Once I’m done, I select the pictures that are worth sharing, and upload them through NitroDesk to one or more sites simultaneously (SmugMug, Picasa primarily, and now PlanetEye). Waiting around for uploads to finish is something I did not like to do, so NitroDesk has a mechanism where the images are uploaded in the background without making the user wait. This was especially useful when loading the hundreds of MBs of HD video to SmugMug for showing in the challenges page on our Web site.

Management:
If you had 100 photos in an album, 20 of them being taken at Niagara Falls and you wanted to set their titles to “Niagara Photos”, you will quickly see some pain points. I use NitroDesk to multi-select these photos and set the title/keywords once and apply them in bulk. Same thing with privacy settings, categories, etc. This is not unique, Flickr provides you with some bulk-editing functionality, but NitroDesk extends it to all other sites that allow individual image property editing. You will also notice that each site has its own unique set of properties that you can edit. NitroDesk handles that too. Depending on the site you work with, some functionality may be unsupported, but we take a best-effort approach.

Transferring:
Once in a while, I feel that some of the photos I have on my Picasa or SmugMug albums are probably going to fetch me a fortune on ShutterPoint (it has never come true but there’s nothing wrong in dreaming). Or maybe a friend on Facebook asked me to share pictures from an event, which I had originally uploaded to Picasa. For this, I drag and drop the pictures from the source album to the destination (say PicasaWeb to ShutterPoint/Facebook).

Technorati Tags: , ,


More

No More Upgrades

By Mark Evans in Apple/iPod, Google, Software No Comments

I’ve learned a really important lesson this week: if your computer is humming along, then ignore any temptation to upgrade or tweak it.

Earlier this week, one little upgrade of a Firefox extension (Better GMail) suddenly caused my GMail password to stop working. We’ll see if it returns to life in four days when Google lets me answer a security question.

This morning, Apple wanted me to upgrade iTunes and Quick Time. No, thank you. Unless it’s a major security flaw, I’m sticking with the status quo.

The beauty of Web 2.0 is that everything happens through the browser so you can dabble with all kinds of different services without threatening the health of your computer. It’s a long way from the days when you had to using a dial-up connection to download cool-sounding shareware.

More: One more thing – I shouldn’t have been so excited to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. If I was smart, I would have waited a couple of months before taking the leap.

Update: Google Operating System has a post looking at how small new features are making GMail 2.0 better. Given my experience, the new and improved GMail is not necessarily a good thing.

Technorati Tags: ,

Mossberg Sorta, Kinda Disses Vista

By Mark Evans in Main Page, Microsoft, Software 3 Comments

Mossberg
When the Wall St. Journal’s Walter Mossberg talks, people listen. So, I suspect many people at Microsoft must be somewhat disappointed with Mossberg’s take on Vista, which is sees as a “worthy, but largely unexciting, product”.

“Vista is much prettier than previous versions of Windows. Its icons look better, windows have translucent borders, and items in the taskbar and in folders can display little previews of what they contain. Security is supposedly vastly better; there are some new free, included programs; and fast, universal search is now built in. There are hundreds of other, smaller, improvements and additions throughout the system, including parental controls and even a slicker version of Solitaire.”

My take on Vista is pretty much the same as Mossberg’s. Vista is a definite improvement from a user-interface perspective with some really nice, user-friendly features, particularly the multi-media players. That said, my overall reaction is akin to what my mother says when goes to a movie or play that’s alright but not amazing. Her default phrase is “It was very nice”, which is a mild praise, at best. (I’ll provide a more in-depth review of Vista in a few days.)

As one of the bloggers who received a Ferarri laptop pre-loaded with Vista, one thing I can say is I’m more impressed with Vista than the laptop. The Acer machine has a great screen but it’s fairly heavy, difficult to open and the exhaust fan blows on your hand (if you’re right-handed).

Technorati Tags: , ,

Iotum Wins Award

By Mark Evans in Main Page, Software No Comments

Canada's version of the high-tech Oscars was held yesterday with Iotum snagging an award in the emerging technology category. It has been quite a run for the Ottawa-based telecom start-up, highlighted by Demo God honours at the Demo show in Phoenix earlier this year. Now, all Iotum needs is a user-friendly VC so it can boost sales of its relevance engine. Aside from cool technology, another thing Iotum has going for it is PR savvy (it helps having Andy Abramson onboard). COO Howard Thaw's RedBerry was recently featured in a media report. Not content to accept a black Blackberry, Thaw went to an auto body shop for some custom work. Nice.

Memories of Scott McNealy

By Mark Evans in Main Page, Software 2 Comments

So Scott McNealy is finally handing over the reigns reins to Sun Microsystems after 24 years. I've only had the privilege to interview him once but can't say it was the best conversation I've ever had with a high-profile CEO. In contrast to the peppy, funny, irreverant person who puts on a laugh-a-minute show at high-tech conferences, McNealy was unenthusiastic, grumpy and far from newsworthy. It could have just been a bad day or it could have been he was less than thrilled about talking to a journalist from a newspaper he never knew existed. I guess part of being a CEO is you have a role to play – sometimes you're on, sometimes you're just not into it. McNealy must give dozens of interviews a year so it's not like each one will sizzle. Like a professional athlete, I'm sure he gets up for the “big games” when the Wall St. Journal or New York Times comes calling. For the rest of us, we have to hope he's having a good day. It should be pointed out McNealy is a bit of an anachronism these days given the disclosure restrictions that CEOs of publicly-traded companies face every time they're out and about. These rules do little to encourage a CEO to candid or straightforward. While McNealy will no longer be Sun's CEO,  I'm willing to be bet  he'll be as active and outspoken.

Ads by AdGenta.com

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
1 2 3 4 5