It’s Christmas today, and there is very little actual startup or technology news happening. So I took a look back at a post I wrote a year ago titled “Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist)” to see how many of the ideas turned into actual startups or products. It turns out many of them are now out there in the world, standing the test of users. Others, not so much.
Here’s what I found:
1. Better and Cheaper Online File Storage
A year ago, Xdrive charged $10/month for 5 GB of storage. GoDaddy charged $10/year for 1 GB. That was too much to get mass consumer adoption. I asked for 500 GB for $20/year.
I may have asked for too much, but online storage prices have dropped dramatically in the last year. The big change came in March, when Amazon launched it’s S3 back-end storage service for application providers. The cost of storage went to $0.15 per GB/month, or $15/month for 100 GB. They also charge $0.20/GB of data transferred. This effectively reset online storage pricing.
Xdrive dropped its prices and now gives 5 GB away for free. A ton of specialized storage companies launched that offer much lower prices than last year as well. Carbonite , for example, will back up a hard drive of any size for $5/month.
And 2007 will bring a new batch of online storage providers. Both Microsoft and Google have products in development.
We still have a way to go. We need more storage. We need easier storage. And it has to be cheaper.
Score: Half Way, but still a long way to go
2. Blog/website Email Lists
A year ago I said I’d pay as much as $20/month for a decent RSS-to-email product. The only product available at that time was Feedblitz, and it didn’t offer much in the way of stats or customization.
Today we have a number of excellent option. Feedblitz is a significantly better product and handles 80,000 or so feeds. And Feedburner launched a free product in April that integrates nicely into their other RSS products. We now have over 7,000 email subscribers to TechCrunch.
Score: Done
3. Portable Reputations
Last year I mentioned eBay’s Feedback system and said it was arguably their biggest asset. Even with its flaws, I said, it is one the biggest drivers of trust between two people buying and selling who’ve never met and never will. But it’s a closed system, usable only within eBay and only for eBay transactions.
We needed an internet-wide identity and feedback system that any reputable application can tap into, both pulling and pushing data.
At the time we had taken a look atiKarma, but they seemed to have missed the boat by ignoring the portability aspect of reputation.
Rapleaf launched in April. And while it’s still quite early, it does exactly what we need it to do – provide a good off-ebay reputation system. eBay banned Rapleaf in May (They learned their lesson with PayPal it seems), but the company is still chugging along.
Score: Done
4. Tailored Local Offers (via RSS)
I think there should be a service where you sign up, give it as much demographic and personal information as you like, and get a personal RSS feed in return. Local merchants can send you coupons and special offers via that RSS feed.
Zixxo launched a coupon-to-RSS service back in April, although they seem to have gone somewhat quiet. I still think this is a great idea, but it will be hard to hit critical mass. Existing Yellow Page companies and Citysearch are in the best position to win.
Score: Half Way
5. Facebook, in other countries
Done. Many times. And there are lots more, and will be lots more.
Score: Done
6. Free Music
AllOfMP3 is still hanging in there, but it would be a big stretch to call them “legal.” And they aren’t free, just close to free. BitToreent is free, of course. But it is far from legal. This was and always will be a stretch, but there are encouraging signs out there that at least DRM may be going away.
Another positive sign: the rise of sites like Amie Street, which offer DRM-free music for free at first, and the price starts to rise as downloads increase. The highest priced songs on the site are also the most popular, by definition.
And there is also Spiralfrog, which has partnered with a couple of labels and will distribute music for free. However, the DRM wrapper appears to be a nonstarter.
Score: Not even close
7. Open Source Yellow Pages
I said last year that we need an open source Yellow Pages. With Tagging. And open APIs. Google and Yahoo are dabbling in this space, but the only ones that can make a full on open source Yellow Page happen is one of the incumbent offline players. And they don’t get the space, so Google and Yahoo are going to eat their lunch.
Score: Nada
8. Podcast Transcriptions
Amazon launched Mechanical Turk, which makes it possible for a startup to do this as a service without worrying about finding translators. A site called Podtranscript launched but has since died and is now pointing to an expired domain landing page. CastingWords, another service, seems to be going strong. They charge $0.42 per minute.
Score: Done
9. Decentralized Review Aggregation
People review stuff all the time on their blogs, and there’s a need for a search engine to aggregate those reviews. Kritx launched to do this, although there’s little activity on their site today. Microformats can play a part in this as well as people structure their review data properly. And of course, Yelp, Judy’s Book, Insider Pages and Riffs are all creating their own review sites, with decentralized aspects, such as user blogs and RSS.
Score: Independent sites are doing well.
10. Build Something Cool with SSE
SSE? What’s SSE?
Score: Big Zero
Summary
My overall score suggests that it is a good thing I am a writer and not a venture capitalist. A couple of hits, and lots of misses. Merry Christmas, everyone.
Michael, I probably missed it (since I’ve been on vacation for the past 10 days or so), but where has Natali disappeared to? I haven’t seen her posts in recent days.
I hope you have a very merry and blessed Christmas with your friends and family. Perhaps you should consider taking the day off from work.
Michael, you didn’t mentioned anything on the healthcare space? Merry Christmas
Michael, 1 site you should check out as far as music goes is http://www.amiestreet.com
It isn’t free once the song becomes popular, but all songs start off free. The artists have to make a living, and this promotes the creation of quality music.
Merry Christmas! And this reminds me that I’ve been reading posts here for a whole year, without missing one single article. Thanks for your great efforts, Michael, and wish you a happy holidays. from China.
Decentralized Review Aggregation – I registered ReviewTrack.com almost 3 years ago with the intention of creating something like that… never got around to it. Review aggregation does exist in some specific verticals, though. Like GameStats.com for games and RottenTomatoes.com for movies.
Merry Christmas.
Decentralized Review Aggregation does exists,check out TC review of viewscore.com – that aggregate reviews and use natural language processing (NLP) technology to generate score and ranking to the aggregated products.
-Ami Z
Adam – we’ve written about Amie Street often. Thanks for reminding me, I added them to the post above.
Hey Michael,
I am wondering which concepts are you looking at for the next year.
Merry Christmas.
Cheers!
Siddharth Thakkar
Nice ideas, and more it’s nice seeing that more than one became reality.
Will the Internet continue to rise in 2007? Will Web 2.0 continue being around? Will there be a Web 3.0? Or will it turn into Bubble 2.0?
Merry Christmas and a happy new year!
great post Michael.
reading this post and one a year ago makes you think of changes.
btw, “Score: Big Zero” for SSE means SSE is dead, just forget it?
To the 1st: The mediamax.com is offering 25 GBs free storage.
merry christmas michael!
Merry Christmas!
Great post indeed!
Okay, Rapleaf must come from an older company – darn it, but I can’t remember the name, but it used to let you show your Bidville and Yahoo Auctions feedback on eBay, and vice versa. I just went to sign up, never having visited Rapleaf before, and it said I was already registered. Sure enough, I’m in there, so they must have brought their old info over from the old business. If I find the name, I’ll post it.
I notice that there was no mention of omnidrive.com in the online storage part of the question ? Any particular reason ?
Regarding Joe’s coment at #1:
Best wishes to Natalie, if things didn’t work out. I’m not convinced that she got a fair shake from tech crunch posters. Here’s wishing you a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.
I was going to ask if you had nothing better to do at Christmas than posting an article, but then again, I’m reading it.
Merry Christmas!
It is good to see Techcrunch having achieved great success in 2006. keep it up.
Nice post! I wish we could see more general analysis in this space (as done here) on top of the requisite company profiles.
Michael, wouldn’t it be great if there were a site that combined all the best elements of the p2p networks, refined them, and then packaged them in a legal, DRM-free environment where users get compensated for sharing (a la p2ps)?
I’d like to suggest NewsOutlook (http://www.newsoutlook.org) as a basic but free and open source alternative for Blog/website Email Lists.
Regarding online file storage, the best choice nowadays: Gspace.
It’s a free Firefox add-on that turns your gmail account into an online hard drive (currently almost 2,8 GB).
http://www.getgspace.com/
https://addons....g/firefox/1593/
Looking forward to read your review about it.
Merry Christmas!
Hi Mike:
Take a look at iNods.com which is built on the concept of aggregation of decentralized review content.
Best,
-Vaibhav
I used feedburner but only for the burner none of their other applications.
I’m thinking about #7.
How about this.
Collaborative yellow pages. Businesses submit their business, customers submit feedback. Tagged, geotagged. Not a wiki-like style. Customers browse businesses by tags, location. Discussions. Folksonomy and all that stuff.
Who is interested?
Zixxo was showing some promise….but as they prepare to start charging coupon advertisers, their feeds and searches seem slow–way slow. There are also some selling and marketing points that need more thought and refinement. Still a good idea—but will need some work to function and sell as envisioned.
You are looking for the best online storage solution out there?
We offer 50GB of free online storage here: http://www.mega...oad.com/signup/
And for as little as 49.99 a year you get 250GB of online storage with unlimited transfer volume. Meaning you can share your files with anyone and don’t have to pay extra for the transfer volume.
Sounds to good to be true? Its true. We are in the Top20 of Alexa and have over 1000TB of online storage capacity. In 2007 we will tripple our capacity. And we have enough bandwidth to provide everyone with the fastest file transfer experience available (actually we have more Gigabits than Google).
Santa loves you. Merry Xmas Mike.
What a great article! I’m kind of excited to see what you are hoping to write about next year, since you were spot on with a few of these.
@ Tim, most people here know Alexa’s a little flawed – what are your other stats?
I hope you are having a good holiday, Mr. Arrington
Hi Patricia,
We have 90 million unique users per month. I think we should already be in the Top10 of Alexa. So I agree with you, Alexa is a little flawed (but still a great tool in my opinion).
I wish all of you a successful 2007.
1.) For online storage I am partial to Xdrive, for some obvious reasons; however isn’t http://www.OmniDrive.com innovating in the online storage space?
6.) I agree with you and Adam, http://www.AmieStreet.com is a pretty good system for music downloads. Also if you use http://www.Zamzar.com to convert music you can get around issues that might arise due to incompatible file formats with your music device (i.e. iPod, Zune, etc).
7.) I think http://www.MojoPages.com may be tackling this one but I do not know if it meets your specific requirements.
http://www.some...ages_putti.html
10.) I wonder if FeedBurner is looking into this? Something to ponder over the holidays for sure.
Merry Christmas!
Somewhat Frankly,
Frank
>We needed an internet-wide identity and feedback system that any >reputable application can tap into, both pulling and pushing data.
>At the time we had taken a look atiKarma, but they seemed to have missed >the boat by ignoring the portability aspect of reputation.
Not at all. I try my best to increase the name of iKarma in Germany. After a few month, I think that we are on a good way.
Marco
Merry Christmas! and great write up.
ONE YEAR ago ? How time goes fast ….
Great post! How about another set of 10 for 2007?
Mike – nice summary. How about a yr-end list of startups you found promising and where they’re at now..maybe a spreadsheet like listing of funding activity, growth, user base, yada yada…
Anyway, keep writing compelling stories with personl insight.
Happy holidays…!
Numly’s Identity 2.0 service (Vouchor) just released a few really cool Reputation 2.0 features today including: tagging, rating, and reviewing.
Vouchor.com is a community-based online identity verification service. Once an Internet user becomes vouched, the Vouchor API can be used to certify its members identity. This becomes important when the verification of an Internet identity is necessary to an individual rather than a user id or login. Vouchor aims to verify the identities of Internet users through face-to-face witnessing of government issued photo identification documents. Email addresses are also certified in the vouching process.
I know they are not live yet, but what about http://www.spir....com/about.aspx for legal free music?
I like NPR.
MERRY XMASS TO ALL AND TO ….ya.what he said.
I agree with you and Adam, http://www.AmieStreet.com is a pretty good system for music downloads. Also if you use http://www.Zamzar.com to convert music you can get around issues that might arise due to incompatible file formats with your music device (i.e. iPod, Zune, etc).
Hello Tim! I saw your comment (50 Gb storage for free “Sounds to good to be true?” – it souns great!), after I registered to the Megaupload free version, but sadly I discovered something which looks like a trap: “Expiry time for unused files: 90 days” Is it mean when I (or anybody else) don’t downloading my all files in every three months at least once, your company will be deleting?
A screenshot with that sentence:
http://img148.i...gauploadde9.jpg
(Or just I don’t understand truly? I’m far to perfect in the English language, but that seems like one mean.)
Mike – Great summary of the past year. Glad to see back posting on TC regularly, I enjoy your writing. Best wishes in the New Year, and I’m excited to see what startups you cover in 2007. Curious as to what your wishes/expectations are…
@Mike: your vacation is over :p get back to work
kidding – enjoy the rest of the holiday season
merry Christmas everyone
Good job Mike. You put a lot of work into your writing, and it shows. Looking forward to what 2007 brings as well!
Great idea about 1 feedback system for all Internet. I do have a good domain name that can be use called Itverfied.com If anyone interested, contact me at johnson360@gmail.com
I was equally as excited by SSE when Ray Ozzie’s group published the draft spec. Unfortunately I haven’t seen any follow-through whatsoever. Google on the other hand not only published the spec for GData–their answer to SSE–but also put it into production on a number of their services.
We’re building Spanning Sync, which syncs Apple iCal with Google Calendar, using GData. It’s basically RSS/Atom, plus the Atom Publishing Protocol, plus OpenSearch, plus some XML-based formats for calendars, contacts, etc. GData is what SSE should have been.
-Charlie
spanningsync.com
A website that rates yellow pages businesses is a good idea.
Millions of offline businesses looking for good word of mouth.
Millions of yellow pages users who want to share a good experience (they had with a business) with the world.
Downsides include, gaming the sytem for false good ratings and potential defamation, but done right it’s a great idea.
of course ‘the’ yellow pages could just do it, but knowing how ‘corporate’ works. they’d probably stuff it up.
Megaload Tim – your download/upload sw is a steaming pile of turds…
On the topic of RSS to email products, I am surprised that you didn’t mention rssfwd.com
When I compared it to feedburners product, it was far, far better.
On Better or Cheaper online storage, Seagate is acquiring Evault, targeting SMB’s. Though a different segment than box.net of the world, it an interesting development and validates the growth prospects in that segment.