Company: KaboodleLaunched: October 26, 2005
Status: $1.5 m in angel funding
Location: Santa Clara, CA
Kaboodle opened its doors this afternoon for an official launch on Wednesday.
I met with Manish Chandra, the CEO, earlier today for a walk through and came away very impressed. In addition to Manish, Kaboodle’s founders include Keiron McCammon and Chetan Pungaliya.
Kaboodle is a free social bookmarking service. And it really does take things to the next level in terms of usefulness, particularly for certain types of stuff. For instance, Kaboodle really shines when bookmarking ecommerce content.
The first thing to do after registration is add a kaboodle button to your browser. When you click to bookmark content, you are redirected to Kaboodle where you select a “page” (topic). Content is auto-selected, including an image. A click lets you change or add to the content and/or select a new image.
Once you’ve added content to a page you can choose to make it public or private, and share it with others. New content can be added to a page from other sites. Each piece of content can be rated by others, and free-text comments can be added. It is an excellent way to collaborate with others in comparing and contrasting related content. In fact, in many ways Kaboodle reminds me of a wiki once the collaboration on a page begins.
Coming soon functionality includes page badges, search and RSS for users and pages. I’d also like to see tagging functionality added to pages and individual pieces of content.
Om Malik wrote a lengthy post on Kaboodle a few hours ago. In my opinion Manish Chandra and the rest of the team have done a great job rolling this out. They are talking to bloggers and mainstream press simultaneously, and the site is a textbook example of how to walk new users through how the service works. They’ve thought through launch strategy and usability in a very intelligent way.