« Previous post
Next post »

March 28, 2007

And Now, Something A Little More Frivolous From Zoho

Michael Arrington

35 comments »

ToonDoo launched this morning, a new site that lets users easily create comic strips with pre-built or uploaded images and text. This is an Indian company, and has the same parent company, AdventNet, as Zoho (one of our current sponsors), a fairly serious online office application startup (see our coverage here).

The creation tool is a Flash applicaton that includes a number of options for characters, props, backgrounds and text bubbles. Users can also upload their own images and include them in the comic strip.

Once the strip is created it can also be published to the ToonDoo platform, along with a title, tags and a description. User comments and rankings help bring the good stuff to the front. The service just launched moments ago, so there isn’t much content there yet, but the most favorited strips are here. This is my personal favorite. ToonDoo is free.

Check Comeeko and Stripgenerator, two existing services, as well.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 4:00 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages Through Our Student’s Eyes » ToonDoo

    March 28th, 2007 at 5:58 am

  2. Zoli's Blog

    March 28th, 2007 at 7:15 am

  3. Widgets Lab » ToonDoo.com Comic Strip Creator

    March 28th, 2007 at 9:43 am

  4. Space is not the final frontier at ToonDoo » Make You Go Hmm

    March 28th, 2007 at 10:45 am

  5. Celi Online » ToonDoo

    April 4th, 2007 at 2:31 pm

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. steve

    March 28th, 2007 at 4:18 am

    Hmmm an odd thing for an office ’style’ company to go into - cartoons -

  2. Dhawal

    March 28th, 2007 at 4:25 am

    Its ok…..!

  3. yongfook

    March 28th, 2007 at 4:25 am

    Brilliant strategic move or jumping the shark? I can’t decide.

  4. yongfook

    March 28th, 2007 at 4:32 am

    maybe I’m missing something, but why does it say “powered by Jambav” all over the site? Are AdventNet and http://www.jambav.com/ related somehow? If so it might de-confusify the article a little.

    Also, my initial comment was based on me thinking this was an addition to the Zoho suite, which it isn’t - the title just made it seem like that.

    (my fault for not reading)

  5. Tom Turner

    March 28th, 2007 at 6:02 am

    Just blogged my reaction about this neat tool over at my Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages blog. I think the ramifications for the educational field are pretty high. I know in my class I use digital storytelling as a tool to assess my students and what they have learned from our discussions and activities. ToonDoo gives them a viable alternative to create something. That’s just my take on it.

    Tom.
    http://tnturner.edublogs.org

  6. Rajeev Vashisht

    March 28th, 2007 at 6:12 am

    So some action for the Kids Too.

    http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com

  7. rack pallet

    March 28th, 2007 at 6:48 am

    - Expand and see what sticks -

    - Atleast all their eggs arent in online software; office / -

  8. Sridhar Vembu

    March 28th, 2007 at 7:21 am

    @yongfook:
    Jambav http://jambav.com is a kids interactive site that has been around for more than 2 years now. It is supported by AdventNet. It was born out of a desire to provide online interactives appropriate for all kids, including special needs kids (my son has autism, which provided one inspiration). Interestingly, Zoho was born after Jambav, in AdventNet chronology.

    The Jambav guys did a comic strip creator as a fun project, and that became so popular within AdventNet, they decided to launch a separate site. That is explained by: http://toondoo.com/View.on?param=2184

    Sridhar

  9. socialmd

    March 28th, 2007 at 7:29 am

    @youngfood,

    checkout jambhav’s about us page: http://www.jambav.com/jambav/a.....jambav.php

    Looks like they are funded by Adventnet.

  10. Vikas

    March 28th, 2007 at 7:33 am

    Interesting place for cartoonists !! Good place to start for a novice like me :)

  11. kenny

    March 28th, 2007 at 7:44 am

    Strip Creator ( http://www.stripcreator.com/ ) also allows users to create comic strips.

  12. Sweety

    March 28th, 2007 at 7:49 am

    Hey i checked that stripcreator….
    it is really yucky, i couldn’t see any colouful innovative cartoons there.
    it is all black and white, so you can’t compare that with this cool tool.

    Thanks,

  13. Nate

    March 28th, 2007 at 8:28 am

    Was there not just a post talking about not covering frivolous startups/sites?

  14. engtech

    March 28th, 2007 at 9:57 am

    I understand doing these things web based because you get people creating content that you can then monetize… but I’ve yet to see a good dedicated freeware app for this.

  15. Alaska Miller

    March 28th, 2007 at 10:17 am

    You need to create a company of Indians to get this started?

  16. Moyeen

    March 28th, 2007 at 10:25 am

    hey is that got embedding in blog too….then it will interesting to include in blogs…or making jpg out of it..

  17. Dave Q

    March 28th, 2007 at 10:42 am

    No, wow factor yet.

    Maybe the (not-so) funny strips got to me. Better get real funny ones in here. Or at least the “most favorited” are really cool!

    Calling Chris Pirillo (Blaugh) or at least just someone with wit.

    It’s good to note that Zoho is a long time TC-sponsor. Right, Mike?

  18. jc

    March 28th, 2007 at 11:09 am

    “Hmmm an odd thing for an office ’style’ company to go into - cartoons -”

    Not really, it fits with the quality of their other work!

  19. How to start a clothing line from scratch

    March 28th, 2007 at 11:46 am

    I was thinking about building a blog where the users could submit story lines from blog strips and vote on them and the best strip would be created weekly and become a series created by the community…I still think it would be a great idea…anyone interested in getting it started email me dobizo@dobizo.com

  20. RyanBarrett

    March 28th, 2007 at 11:52 am

    This site looks like King’s Quest on my mom’s old IBM.

  21. Zaid

    March 28th, 2007 at 11:54 am

    Once again, I wish Zoho just focused on cleaning up and doing quality control on the many products they have already released.

    It is annoying after a while to see a company you want to use for your project management stuff to keep releasing new tools when they should be fixing major issues with their existing products. Of course they can do the fixing and the new products at the same time…but a) they haven’t been able to so far and b) I question the good in any company releasing new stuff every two weeks(name dilution, anyone?)

  22. Ralph

    March 28th, 2007 at 12:08 pm

    zoho + toondoo ==> future Dilbert cartoons!

  23. Sridhar Vembu

    March 28th, 2007 at 12:28 pm

    @Zaid,
    The only reason Zoho’s name got involved today at all was for full disclosure about the AdventNet backing of ToonDoo. Nobody here ever heard of Jambav, and we could have just released it as a Jambav project, but it would only be proper to disclose the AdventNet background, which also backs Zoho. No team from Zoho was involved in this.

    I am sorry we aren’t meeting your expectations on Zoho Projects. We are working hard to get it moved to the new infrastructure, but that is the only one that has not moved. We are updating every Zoho service every month, including Zoho Projects. We will move it within the next 2 weeks. I will have the lead developer contact you to discuss your specific issues.

    Thanks,
    Sridhar

  24. MovieWalah

    March 28th, 2007 at 4:19 pm

    neat idea…..but the comic strips were awful though…..reminds me of Sanjaya great talent in a wrong package but has the potential to get better with age:-)

  25. Death Date

    March 29th, 2007 at 3:55 am

    Great

  26. Martin

    March 30th, 2007 at 3:47 am

    Heh I like. It’s a good concept for those who do not know how to use illustrator/photoshop, etc…

  27. splashmaddy

    April 3rd, 2007 at 3:44 am


  28. craig

    April 16th, 2007 at 8:15 pm

    It sucks! Is Jambav into SEX education?

    Read the last point mentioned in http://vadivel.blogspot.com/20.....bav-2.html

  29. Rajendran Dandapani

    April 16th, 2007 at 10:13 pm

    While Sex Education, as those of you clued on to Teaching Trends at school will know, is an important and unavoidable subject to learn, no, Jambav is not interested in it right now.

    Our focus has been to build and provide easy-to-use but powerful platforms for creating customized games for children of all ages and abilities.

    But, please note that quite unlike Jambav (which is a fully moderated website), ToonDoo is as socially networked as they come, trusting in the wisdom of the crowds and the overall goodness of the community. We do have an inappropriateness-alert mechanism, that well-meaning sentinels can use, very soon after which the editors will remove such content from public view.

    We are also experimenting with other mechanisms for maintaining child-safety without jeopardizing what some may call freedom of expression.

    Hang on, we are hard at work! Keep watching ToonDoo for interesting developments!

    Rajendran.
    ToonDude from http://www.jambav.com

  30. Mahesh

    April 18th, 2007 at 11:02 pm

    I was looking for an Indian site that can combine news, movies, cricket and also social networking aspects such as forums, user points, blogs, private messages etc. I stumbled upon http://www.hangoutwith.com and found to be great! Hangoutwith.com is a good social networking site especially for Indians and it is much cleaner than other sites such as orkut, tagged etc.

    Give it a Spin!

« Previous post
Next post »