Kindling, the first web product from New York-based design and tech firm Arc90, is looking to help business share ideas more effectively. The site offers a Digg-like system for voting on ideas, allowing team members to hit a ‘+’ or ‘-’ next to each project or idea, with the most popular ones floating to the top. Users can also indicate if they’re going to complete a project, which makes Kindling double as an effective task manager.
To help give each vote some significance, Kindling caps the total number of votes that can be submitted by each user (the default is 10, but the administrator can allot more). As projects are completed or ‘fade’ out of the system for not getting enough votes, these points return to the user and can be redistributed. The service is $5 per user, per month, with a flat rate of $99 for non-profit and educational organizations.
Kindling isn’t particularly novel – we’ve seen similar apps from IdeaBlob, Kluster (covered here), and a handful of others. And most large businesses will likely turn to more robust products like those offered by 37Signals for task management. But for basic idea management Kindling is very well done, with an intuitive and attractive interface that lacks any distracting frivolous features, and may be appealing to smaller businesses and organizations.
Kindling is something that I want to use for my startup
I’ve been using http://www.empl...ggestionbox.com … pretty good for small businesses, but this thing looks interesting as well …
Hi all,
Thanks to TechCrunch for the kind words. We’ll be watching this thread and are more than happy to chime in to answer readers’ questions or comments… so have at it!
Thanks again and happy Kindling,
Jen Epting
Kindling Client Relations
Many others are doing this already. Shareyourbrain.com has been doing this for years – as well as Crowdspirit, Fellowforce, etc.
$5/user/month is a bit pricey as well. In fact, Shareyourbrain.com is *free* to use – there is no reason to pay for these services when free alternatives are available.
enterprises want to pay
it adds crediblity to the product
why use oracle or iis when mysql or apache is available?
Looks to me like shareyourbrain is targeted at social situations. I think kindling is targeted at businesses that don’t want these sites publicly available. ever. They need role-based account control, SSL, etc. Sounds like team/consensus building. It sounds novel and interesting to me (positioning is weird like that:).
If there is a way to do that with shareyourbrain, please let me know.
Yes – shareyourbrain.com does both – public, mass-targeted participation as well as private/internal support. Private group projects are of course hidden and much of the traffic consists of business projects that do not choose to make their projects public.
I agree that Kindling looks good and is as claimed – clean and to the point – but I argue the novelty.
I think this product is neatly done and the UI looks good. But, 5$ per user per month is too expensive.
Is there an upper limit. If its org of 1000 employees, its 5000/month??? Although I guess big companies wont use this as a platform to share thier ideas. Is there a non-hosted solution too, so data can be safe?
Great question; we do have special pricing for enterprise companies with more than 100 users. Larger organizations should feel free to get in touch with us to discuss pricing.
We’re working towards a non-hosted version of Kindling, though we don’t support it just yet. Organizations interested in hosting their own Kindling instances should contact us for more info.
Thanks,
Jen
Based on my initial review, too expensive and there is no single user free account to try it out. I don’t want free 30 days, I am likely to forget to cancel. Lower your price. $1 per user sounds more like it, at the most.
Looks great.
Pricing suggestion: Price the product significantly lower on per user basis or have flat pricing with more costly enterprise features. Otherwise, it’ll be a tough sell.
Either way, good job Arc90!
Thanks,
Ivan
Cool.
Hah. What’s the big deal. We made something very similar for a client of ours, and it took us about 4-5 days to customize WordPress to do exactly this.
More and more it seems other companies are making clones of popular sites but adapting the for the enterprise. I am always a fan of arc90 stuff thou
Certainly a useful tool, but there are many ways to do this for free. You can simple integrated a wordpress plugin and create blog posts as ideas (comments used for..eh hem…commenting).
We did this here, but not for ‘new ideas’ but for apps entered into a contest:
http://www.apps...tion-directory/
The similar functionality, but open-source ZoneIdeas
http://zoneideas.org/
Nice UI, pleasant look and feel and certainly *looks* good. Certainly fits the Web 2.0 design standards.
What’s missing a mapping with how real companies work or should work. If I look at the demo and not read the positioning, I would describe this as something between a task/project management and a wiki — both of which have plenty of incumbent solutions in real companies.
This does look like a great new tool. Looking forward to trying it out.
IdeaBlob has voting and ideas, but it’s actually a community for young entrepreneurs to share, develop, and potentially collaborate on their new business ideas. At the end of each month, the idea with the most votes wins $10,000 with no strings. For example, Kindling could have been an idea submitted and developed through IdeaBlob, and it could have won the $10K. It still can, in fact. Any business idea, whether in the formative stages or fully operational, qualifies.
They are also taking the concept offline with http://www.bloblive.com. These events are streamed live on Ustream.tv, and they are heavily Twittered.
This is what Yahoo should be using to filter the good ideas emanating from their employees, not the designated “creative” people at Brickhouse. Of course, nobody should pay $5/month per user for this type of service.
testing comments with fb connect
sounds like another “me too” product – see BrightIdea.com, UserVoice,…