Scrybe Closes Series A
Nick Gonzalez
22 comments »
Scrybe, the online/offline calendar and organizer, has closed their series A round of financing from Adobe Systems Incorporated and LMKR. In what is becoming an annoying trend, the company is not disclosing the size of the round.
You’ll probably recognize the company from the somewhat viral product demo that swept the blogosphere last October. Since then they’ve been through a private and public beta.
Scrybe is a Flash-based organizational and productivity tool that works both online and offline. It consists of multiple calendar management, to do lists, web clip bookmarklet, contact list (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Outlook importing), and The system operates offline by caching your changes and then uploading when the system reconnects. Zimbra and Google Gears provide similar online/offline products.
The driving principle behind the application is usability. Scrybe’s main selling point is that the application retains the context of the data that you’re working with by “zooming” instead of flipping to the data. One example is the calendar. The cells of the calendar expand and contract as you edit a week, day, or hour more closely while still showing the details of the surrounding days. See the extended video below for more details.
Awesome, I’ve been waiting for this…Scrybe is pretty good at what it does. I especially enjoy the paper sync.
Other than news of acquisitions and Facebook publicity, tell me one interesting thing that Techcrunch has posted in the recent times. There is an interesting proverb in Telugu which says as the number of people grow, the concentration of buttermilk goes down. I guess thats the same case with TC these days. It was way better with Mike alone posting stuff.. But hey, why should anyone care as long as there are viewers and sponsors or should someone actually start caring???
@Nick, url for Scrybe is iscrybe.com, not scrybe.com. It’s ironic that they can sync data to paper but not domain name to company name.
They’re doing stuff with Javascript, not Flash on the client. And they require Firefox 2.0 and whatever equivalent with other browsers for offline activity.
They have a good idea, though it’s disappointing to see that Adobe is bankrolling them, and if they’re successful they will be consumed by the Adobromedia complex whenever they see fit…
Saagar, I don’t know if the fault here lies with techcrunch, or if the industry just seems a bit dull compared to the huge surge of innovation that occurred last year. I like the buttermilk quote though
Even if Adobe is the cash behind this, it does seem like something that will gain momentum, though not sure if it will critical mass or not. I’m just glad it isn’t another microsoft / google venture.
while I’m sure they also make heavy use of javascript, scrybe is a flash based application
Great! I’m glad that companies are trying to keep those things quiet and get down to work to justify the investment.
Honestly, TC is getting boring now. There’s not much posting about real tech innovation in the space anymore, but a lot about Series A’s and B’s and closing a round of funding blah, blah blah.
I keep getting more and more bored as I see TC headlines in google reader… wait…
In fact really, of the last 30 stories, 2 were about funding or acquisitions. Seriously, this is a mid-post correction as I switched back to this tab from google reader. Keep up the good work guys.
Yeah..TC needs some news..Saagar y dun u innovate some stuff and launch something new.May be a telugu riddle web site..:)..or tell ur extremely talented co patriots back home to stop software services and start product companies.Our jobs will be saved:)
yeah, its been a bit more boring on the new innovative company front. Maybe companies are holding off launching until Techcrunch20
They raised a total of $1.5MM. Of this, $1MM came from Adobe and $0.5MM from LMKR. I believe the pre-money valuation was $3MM. This is a company with no business model, an incomplete product, no revenues and no real customers. Not bad!
Though I haven’t seen the beta of this, it looks to be a great organization tool. As far as momentum is concerned, the space is extremely crowded. They must continue to move the product out of beta more quickly than they have in the past year.
I wish there weren’t so many startups based on flash. While flash is great, I believe building web companies around proprietary technologies sucks. Part of the reason the web flourishes is because of open standards.
share your startup stories
http://startupflames.com
> While flash is great, I believe building web companies around
> proprietary technologies sucks.
I haven’t met many people who refuse to hit the “Print” button, just because it engages the Adobe PostScript engine.
(I wonder how many of the “TC sucks” comments here share the same IP address.)
jd/adobe
@Tony: Glad that you liked the quote, I borrowed it from a telugu friend
@John, Thanks for the suggestion, I am working my way towards some new stuff that will probably interest you and if TC feels it interesting enough to post about it in the middle of a flood of funding posts and Facebbok publicity, you will definitely hear of it, but it definitely is not a telugu riddle website
coz that would need me to get into riddle site in an unknown language….
I really wish they started some product companies instead of service companies, but hey who is listening to me when there is quick money involved in services…
Agree that it makes sense for startups to NOT disclose the amounts of their funding rounds. This is information that could help their competitors, and I don’t see what advantage the startups get from publishing the numbers. Plus, without the numbers, journalists will have to write something more substantive about the firms.
Is there any way to get access now? It looks like they aren’t accepting any more registrations for betas.
Uhm…exactly why is it mandatory to disclose the amount of financing raised in a round? I can think of two reasons for not saying - one, if you get a nice round on a good valuation for something relatively simple, the copycats will come in days or weeks. Second, maybe your investors don’t want to let the world know how much they gave you, or valuation figures - so what should the company/founders do?
News Flash - the hundreds of thousands of users who clamored for iScrybe find other solutions - after waiting more than 5 months to get beta invite….
I’m still waiting….
I have beta tested scrybe and although it truly has a “cool” factor, its feature set is minimal. I still come back to Airset for my calendaring needs.
I think such funding is good chance to finally hire a lot of high-skilled flex developers and move the RIA word towards.
Let’s see what will happen.