We now have a horse race for who will become the enterprise version of Twitter. Today marks the beta launch of QikCom, which is aimed at companies that want their employees to communicate with each other privately in a Twitter-like fashion. QikCom joins Yammer (winner of this year’s TechCrunch50), and Present.ly. We have exclusive invites for TechCrunch readers (sign up here with a company email address).
All three are micro-messaging services that ask: “What are you working on?” Employees update each other in 140-character bursts. (You can read our writeups of Yammer here, and Present.ly here). But QikCom out of Austin, Texas, has a few twists of its own. For instance, it lets you delete a message after you’ve sent it and you can set up an org chart.
But the biggest twist is QikCom’s TabStore. It is modeled on Apple’s App Store for the iPhone. QikCom will keep adding features as new tabs, and allow other developers to do the same. At launch there are three free tabs in the TabStore that anyone can add: a To-Do list manager, a place to keep frequent numbers used across a company, and, my favorite, a competition tab.
The competition tab lets you add the name of any competitor or product. QikCom then goes out to look for feeds from that competitor and populates that tab with the feed appropriate feed entries. Each entry has a rating slider that lets everyone on QikCom rate the threat level of each item. I tried it by typing in some blogs and news sites and it fetched the feeds instantly. It also finds mentions of competitors in news articles. Right now you can only rate each item, you can’t comment on them. And you can only see the competition feed in the competition tab. But commenting is coming soon, as is the option to make the competition feed show up on the home page. (It is in beta).
The TabStore is also how QikCom hopes to make money. Any employee can use the service for free. And, unlike Yammer, which charges companies to gain administrative control of their corporate Yammer networks, QikCom also gives admin control away for free. It plans to charge a monthly subscription fee for new tabs it will create in the future, and take a share of revenues from tabs made by other developers, which will also be available in the tab store.
Yammer doesn’t have a TabStore, but it does a better job on basic messaging features such as the ability to send an update by SMS. You cannot do that yet with QikCom. (It is working on a a way to email in your updates, though). Yammer is also further along in creating an API
that will allow it to get its messages out to other services. QikCom is working on its own API for Twitter-compatible services.
If you were working at Yammer, how would you rate QikCom’s threat level?
QikCom
Yea Qikcom definitely offers some good value for coworkers to share some much needed quick response on time. It may work even better in Agile projects than the usual SDLC projects.
http://www.yocial.com
Apparently no relation to Qik the video site.
My problem with these services is enterprise is too tough to break into, and providing a product that large enterprise software corps could bang out in a weekend with immediate distribution capabilities (Oracle, SalesForce, etc) seems very threatening.
Enterprise care about security and protection of data, if that can be provided I am sure it can be pboken into. Specially the small enterprises who are distributed.
-Vikram
http://elagaan.com
Eric:
Why does your puffyfaced boss–Michelle Arrington–take all of her pictures posing sideways? Is it to make the public believe she isn’t fat?
If so, it aint working. Eat a salad, Arrington.
wow as if the “domain qiksand” isnt full enough there are still more startups jumping in. Present.ly pushes the confusion bar to a whole new level.
http://seesmic....deos/Q7B9X13aTE
PresentLocator.com
I have questions and please answer them, if you answer them honestly I will stop replying to your spam, if not I will post them to every comment I ever see you make.
1. Is this you (http://www.xtremelocator.com/) if so this is good, and can see the use for it.?
2. What exactly does your service do? I mean I watched your video declaring you “king of location” but I can’t locate anything on your site, so what does your site currently provide, and what does it hope to provide?
3. I thought it was used to locate things, so say I wanted to find bibles I would go to bibleslocator.com, if I wanted prostitutes I would go to prostitutelocator.com, watches go to watcheslocator.com? Yet when I go to watcheslocator.com I don’t get presented with watches I get NOTHING, ohh I have to go to watchlocator.com, but I don’t get watches their either, no I get http://professi...cator.ning.com/ that shows me videos of “votelocator.com” not exactly what I wanted is it? So I see other locators to the left side, nope watches not there either, let’s try clicking on all 78 (how does 1200 domains translate to only 78 of the locators?), wait it’s not their either… hmmm I guess I can’t locate watches in the new and improved way to search for things???? That sucks, can I go back to the old way of search?
4. Explain to me how a directory listing of all content is better than the current search? I mean currently I go to the search engine of my choice, there is a box I type in what I want, and they display sites that match my search (takes all of 5 seconds). Your I type in almostanythinglocator.com and I am redirected to a main page then I have to find the category I want, then have to dig through the stuff (and what determines the display order) to find a site or content (this takes allot longer), and has been done, yahoo dir, dmoz, and many others, this same principle is on all classifieds, ebay, and any other listing service (yet because this method sucks, they all have what…. A search box).
5. Your own site has a search box, so I am supposed to abandon current search methods, to come to your site and use the current search method to find the correct group so I can then use the “new search method”?
6. How are you profitable? 1200+ domains cost you a minimum of 12,000 a year for reg alone, not including man hours, hosting, paying ning to remove the ads, so how are you making money from all your time?
7. Why did you go with xxxLocator.com incurring a 10 yearly fee for each one, running the risk of someone owning one you want, when you could have done subdomains? X.mylocator.com, x2.mylocator.com and so on?
8. I want to find information on the latest Chevy prototype, explain to me step by step how I find that using your locator? Or I want to find out about Levis how step by step can I do that using your service? I couldn’t figure it out on my own. (maybe I’m stupid, or maybe your service needs allot of work?)
He’s looking to boost page rank on a bunch of shitty domain assets which is why he links relevant domains to certain article topics on TC. His sites offer very little meaningful value and instead, are plugged with content to feed the search bots.
It’s like flipping real-estate, except he’s very bad and obnoxious like a used car salesman. It wouldn’t surprise me the least if that was his former profession.
I presume he’s hoping ONE of his many sites gets an offer for ~six-figures, which then makes it worth it in his eyes. The risk is rather minimal as even a modest PR can be flipped for a few grand to low 5’s, purchased my link farm hosses to add to their array of polluted nonsense.
Bant!
Businesses using this will definitely find value and add broaden levels of communications. The admin tool seems really interesting.
smh. these twitter knockoffs are the lamest enterprise application ever developed in the history of enterprise. no serious enterprise would waste company budget on these trash of apps. the reason companies have email is to keep trash like this out of the space.
I don’t see this going anywhere. just another knockoff.
http://gatesand...s.blogspot.com/
The question is how fast will this functionality get sucked into an existing enterprise collaboration platform? Twitter created a community of people, a company is already a community with a set of existing tools. You should also add Socialcast to your list as “private twitter” is already a feature in their system.
I don’t get this. Enterprises will approve and pay for software that lets their employees twit and follow
Would there be some questions about worker productivity?
TechCrunch, let’s reduce the noise and focus on products that make a difference; particularly in this troubled economy.
-Dash
http://adecon101.blogspot.com/
I heard these guys originally got bank funding using this company http://oceanviewlenders.com/
Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Good writeup. QikCom has a cool concept that will probably appeal to a lot of smaller businesses. I can’t see large enterprises adding tabs for to-do lists or other simple apps when they can get these enterprise grade apps through vendors like SalesForce.com.
DomainLocator: I’m not sure how present.ly pushes the confusion to a new level? It seems pretty simple to me.
Note: Present.ly also allows you to delete updates after they’ve been posted; allows updates through IM, email, SMS (and media through MMS!); already has a full API that is twitter compatible so you can use existing Twitter applications, and provides other functionality like groups to make further sense of your company communication.
I really don’t understand this type of business model. I guess this is for the private sector. If you really want my business (Government agency) you will need to sell me a application (like this one), that I can host on my servers within my intranet.
I just do not see the public sector (city, county, state, or federal government) using something that is in the cloud. Yes, I know this is a web 2.0 blog, but I would really like the idea of this type of communication tool just not with someone other than my organization holding the keys.
similar concept to: http://prologue....wordpress.com/
not sure which came out first
cool concept, but don’t think it will withstand time, lets face it twits for corporate is very nitch, few companies will allow it.
You have several players in this already nitch market, and as already posted it won’t be long till salesforce or the likes release something similar all but taking over this nitch market.
I don’t see it happen that big companies will use this because it is still outside their enterprise infrastructure. Only intranet products with Twitter like capabilities stand a chance. So as long as these tools are not installable inside the enterprise walls it will not succeed I guess.
Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering
Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering
Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering
Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering
Volunteering Volunteering Volunteering
I agree that micro-blogging is a niche product. Especially for enterprise. But keep in mind that about 95% of businesses (in the USA, at least) are SMALL companies. Most companies in the US are not IBM, Microsoft or McDonalds. So micro-blogging may not be impossible to sell to these companies. As long as it has a valuable purpose. And right now, no one has found that valuable purpose (for the business at least)
Now, I’m not saying that micro-blogging is going to be the next best thing for companies, but I do think that someone will find a useful product using it and then sell it to the business market.
If you break it down, ask yourself, what IS micro-blogging? Ignore the SMS for a minute.
You type a message, other people see it. People that “follow” you or subscribe to you.
For the BUSINESS world, what else does that?
Hmm…I’m thinking email.
I can create a list of “Developers” and send an email to Developers and bam. Instant message delivered.
Between email and IM, it’s going to be very hard for micro-blogging to wedge itself in. It will probably happen somehow….but we shall see.
Anyway, just my opinion…