I thought it would be fun to judge along with the real judges and this was my winner too, although it was tough. The strongest companies for me at first were pinger, cloudflare, and badgeville. I thought those companies just had tons of potential -- actually do have it -- but qwiki was stuck in the back of my mind. To force out a winner I asked which would be the one company, if none could exist except for choosing one, to win. I felt I could find alternatives/workarounds to all except qwiki, which was the one I still really wanted to exist (the morning automated info stream is compelling). All finalists were strong to tell the truth, a really impressive, disruptive field.
The field was good this year. The only company I didn't really like/get out of the finalists was Badgeville.
My favorite was Cloudflare because I had a similar idea years ago that I was going to do as a startup, but chose another idea instead.
The tl;dr version of it is a forwarding proxy for your website that speeds up page delivery (gzip, etag etc), filters out vulnerability and exploit attempts, filters out spammers, filters out mis-behaving bots etc.
I am not sure if Cloudflare is application aware. The way that I was going to do it was to build modules for popular web applications and optimize based on that (eg. it would recognize Wordpress and compress the JS/CSS, sideload images, etc.)
That is an impressive website (even with flash disabled) and a welcome change to the standard screenshot/header/sub-menus/links in footer boilerplate that we see too often.
(As an aside, the winner, Qwiki, is co-founded by Louis Monier - link for those who don't know him or don't recognize the name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Monier)
Badgeville is going to be huge. For some reason game mechanics really can affect user on-site behavior. For example, HN would still probably be just as awesome as it is without the karma counter, but there is something about having it there, even though it means absolutely nothing. I care way too much about it -- in a subconscious way. I don't let it affect my commenting, but I would be lying if I said I didn't glance at it, and wasn't aware of it in an almost hypnotic way. It's just there. Maybe it's growing up in the gamer generation that's permanently internalized any on screen score as being important. :) But, yeah, Badgeville has already signed up something like $50K (or was it 500K?) worth of new customer subscription revenues, including TechCrunch. They're just getting started.
There are at least five other companies, that I know of, all trying to do the same thing. Inevitably one or two companies will succeed in the e-wards market, while others will fail. At this point it is anybody's game - including yours.
I'm probably in the minority, but I don't know think badgeville will be as big as people think it will be. Sure it's kind of cool to earn little badges and unlock achievements, but it seems too gimmicky for me. Right now people are trying to "game-ify" everything like it's a magical pill that makes everything boring super exciting and addictive that people can't stop. They say the whole point of adding these features is to drive user engagement up on the site...or to focus users on the tasks that website owners want. If that was the case as a website owner I'd give out badges and virtual prizes for clicking on ads. "You just unlocked the ad clicker badge!"
Aside from that it seems silly after a while when the make the barrier so low to gaining badges and achievements. Once you start rewarding every little thing it starts becoming less meaningful. It's kind of like getting those Certificate of Participation awards at a science fair. Sure you got an award, but you just had to show up.
Next thing you know badgeville will try to expand into human behavior...creating achievements, points, and badges for every day human things. Stuff like Showering 5 Days in a row badge, Nose Picker badge, and Poop Twice a Day badge... Now that I think about it THAT actually might be more fun.
For anyone who's curious, like me, Qwiki (Query Wiki?) is auto generated "wiki" pages on subjects pulled from multiple data sources. I haven't been able to find a demonstration video, but this seems similar to DDG / Google / Bing zero click information, only with more pictures.
One of the founders of Cuil decided that the final mystery-meat feature from Cuil (cpedia) needed to be its own company, plus automatic powerpoint creation with text-to-speech narration.
I'm very skeptical about Qwiki. It's a text-to-speech Wikipedia/Flickr slideshow mashup. The most useful demonstration they gave was for a smart alarm clock. Not exactly a burning problem.
I'm surprised the judges were so easily impressed by this kind of flashy widget.
The fact that I could sign up to CloudFlare's site and finish changing all my settings and nameservers before they even completed their presentation is a testament to their UI and ease of use. Their site went down for a few minutes a little bit later, which briefly caused some problems, but other than that I'm excited to see what results come from using their service. Oh, by the way, they had my vote for first.
Am I the only one skeptical about CloudFlare? I, for one, would not be comfortable changing my name servers to them. Shouldn't we actually find and patch security flaws instead of putting it behind some 'firewall in the cloud' (security through obscurity, anyone?) which can cease to exist any second?
And, why do they call themselves a CDN? I watched the video on their site and I still don't really understand how they work. Do they work like a reverse proxy? A reverse proxy would create an even greater security concern than what it tries to solve. An attacker would be able to deface thousands of sites by attacking just one of their proxy nodes.
20 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 41.1 ms ] threadMy favorite was Cloudflare because I had a similar idea years ago that I was going to do as a startup, but chose another idea instead.
The tl;dr version of it is a forwarding proxy for your website that speeds up page delivery (gzip, etag etc), filters out vulnerability and exploit attempts, filters out spammers, filters out mis-behaving bots etc.
I am not sure if Cloudflare is application aware. The way that I was going to do it was to build modules for popular web applications and optimize based on that (eg. it would recognize Wordpress and compress the JS/CSS, sideload images, etc.)
Clickable link: https://www.cloudflare.com/
That is an impressive website (even with flash disabled) and a welcome change to the standard screenshot/header/sub-menus/links in footer boilerplate that we see too often.
(As an aside, the winner, Qwiki, is co-founded by Louis Monier - link for those who don't know him or don't recognize the name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Monier)
TL;DR: Get going!
Aside from that it seems silly after a while when the make the barrier so low to gaining badges and achievements. Once you start rewarding every little thing it starts becoming less meaningful. It's kind of like getting those Certificate of Participation awards at a science fair. Sure you got an award, but you just had to show up.
Next thing you know badgeville will try to expand into human behavior...creating achievements, points, and badges for every day human things. Stuff like Showering 5 Days in a row badge, Nose Picker badge, and Poop Twice a Day badge... Now that I think about it THAT actually might be more fun.
One of the founders of Cuil decided that the final mystery-meat feature from Cuil (cpedia) needed to be its own company, plus automatic powerpoint creation with text-to-speech narration.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/30/qwiki-ipad/
I'm surprised the judges were so easily impressed by this kind of flashy widget.
And, why do they call themselves a CDN? I watched the video on their site and I still don't really understand how they work. Do they work like a reverse proxy? A reverse proxy would create an even greater security concern than what it tries to solve. An attacker would be able to deface thousands of sites by attacking just one of their proxy nodes.