Champagne Velvet

I need to get more organized and this looks extremely interesting.

TechCrunch » Foldera: Never organize your inbox again

Foldera’s approach to productivity is in direct conflict with the way we use applications like Outlook today (just think about how much time we all spend organizing our inbox, filing emails, etc.). Foldera has a better approach (one that seems rather obvious now that I’ve seen it) and they have a chance to seriously disrupt upcoming product launches like Office Live from Microsoft.

Most of us are used to working with email folders today, where an email message can simply be pulled into a folder for easier discovery later. The idea around Foldera starts there. They’ve created an Ajax rich web application that includes email, calendaring, instant messaging, document storage and versioning, tasks and other features into a single web application. Everything is folder-centric

Almost as interesting is that the stock is up 18% today with a market cap of $82.5 MM and they are pre-launch (no revenues).

Edgeio Edges Toward Launch–and a Clash with E-Commerce Giants?

Edgeio is doing just what its tagline says: gathering “listings from the edge”–classified-ad listings in blogs, and even online product content in newspapers and Web stores, and creating a new metasite that organizes those items for potential buyers.

The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word “listing” (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the “listing” tag and index them on Edgeio.com.

I really like the idea, as well as basically everything that takes advantage of the long tail. Tagging usually works well also. It would be interesting to see the percentage of CL and eBay posters/sellers that have blogs today versus one, two, and three years ago.  People who sell random things only once in a while should have no problem posting to their personal blog and those that are “Power Sellers” can and should have a site dedicated for that business.  The only issue is inertia / critical mass.  I’m sure their marketing plan is very viral intensive.  The most interesting part may be seeing how well a guy who spends his days reviewing web2.0 companies can execute.

Originally uploaded by jbum.

It’s pretty amazing how quickly a new company, web site, etc. can become such a part of life that you forget what we did without it. Flickr’s birthday has made me think about a bunch of others:

• Amazon - 1995
• Craigslist - 1995 (on Usenet)
• eBay - 1995
• Google - 1998
• Napster - 1999
• BitTorrent - 2001
• iPod & iTunes - 2001 (iTunes was Mac only until 2003)
• Wikipedia - 2001
• Mozilla Firefox 1.0 - 2004

As well as ones I can’t believe have been around for so long:

• Plasma TV technology - 1964
• LCD monitors - 1968
• GSM - 1987

An evening with Googles Marissa Mayer
From a while ago but still interesting.  Some of the better points:

• The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface
• The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it
  was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience.
  Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
• Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the
  public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users,
  and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6. [no mention of what the 6 types are…]

fastr - a flickr game

Ah, web2.0: fun with tags, fun with flickr. More fun with flickr with flickr colr pickr.