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October 10, 2007
Hot Alpha and a Gamma: Moovement.fr, Comapping, and Wua.la
Our Hot Betas feature morphs beyone recognition, except for the fact that we are still reporting on new web-based services and applications. The ones we profile here all contacted us within the last week, or so. It is a diverse group, a French job aggregator service, a mind-mapping software startup out Copenhagen, and an online storage company from Zurich.
Moovement Version 2
Richard Menneveux let us know that Moovement just launched a new version of its online job aggregating service. It has about 70K jobs in it now and when it comes to usability, let's just say it makes you appreciate Web 2.0.
Menneveux said he's ramping it up now and plans to raise €2M from outside investors. Moovement is owned by its two founders and one private investor. A feature our readers might like is the Startupjobs feed. This version is dubbed a gamma. Saurier Duval may have trouble with classifying that one, but we're sure he'll find a way.
View Moovement
Global Brainstorming With CoMapping
Comapping is from Denmark and is not in beta, rather it is already commercial. It offers web-based mind-mapping tools, targeting the corporate market, although it does have individual users too.
Business is good, according to the firm's CEO Omar Ahmed, who also told us a bit about how some of the user organizations surprised his team with the way they use the tool, which also saves your data locally in case you lose the Internet connection.
A quick glance shows there's been time spent on design and usability.
Given the positive feedback from customers, he fears he may have priced the software as a service too low. "In terms of pricing we are the cheapest in the market at $11.99 for 6 months. In hindsight, we might have priced it too low because price was never an issue selling to our customers," wrote Ahmad.
The startup has an experienced team behind it and is the result of a Danish/Russian dev coooperation.
View comapping
Wuala's Disruptive Online Storage Model
A low-cost infrastructure enables this tiny startup to offer an online storage service along the lines of some bigger competitors. It is from Switzerland.
When he was a student at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), a project Dominik Grolimund was working on caught our eye, as its aim was to develop a distributed storage platform. We wrote to him at the time, and he responded that it was part of a Masters thesis and that it was too early to talk about it.
Almost two years later, Grolimund wrote back, telling us he has founded a company, and launched its first service in alpha, called Wuala.
Wuala offers users 1GB of storage for free, so do a lot of others in this category. We asked why do you think you will be successful?
"There are tons of existing online storage services, there's Flickr, there's YouTube, so that's certainly a justified question," wrote Grolimund, adding that there is Box.net, Streamload, X- Drive, and Microsoft SkyDrive.
Wuala's advantage he said is that it takes "the power of p2p to make it fast" and to reduce his infrastructure costs so that he can "provide a better service for free".
It is free in the sense of you don't pay any money to use it, but you do have to share your PCs memory resources. It's like Skype or a Bittorrent application, you need a client, and it is based on peer to peer technologies.
We asked for a comparison to AllPeers, a VC-backed startup we've covered here. Grolimund said that Wuala is different from the "send semantic", that is "inherent to AllPeers, YouSendIt, and the like", and that if we are bringing up Allpeers, he said, then we might as well throw Pando in there too.
Apparently, others have compared his product to Pando too.
Grolimund give us a comparison of features and functionality with AllPeers, which uses the BitTorrent protocol to share files, but it required some knowledge of the usage and the technical details of the underlying platform - not possible for us to judge his evaluation. The essence of it is that Grolimund's view is that BitTorrent model has a weakness when it comes to sharing private files.
He sums up Wuala like this: "We've taken the P2P model, added encryption and persistence, and applied it to online storage. "
We figured we better put up our profile on this one quickly, before it gets acquired by Google (see our earlier post on Jaiku this morning). Not that Grolimund suggested that this was his plan. He's actually in Silicon Valley right now making some visits to journalists and 'early adopters'.
View Wuala
Posted on October 10, 2007 12:39 PM | Posted to Early stage | Permalink
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