Print 2.0 and catching up on my posts

You ever get so involved in something you don't even take the time to look up from your computer to enjoy the view. It's been a great couple months for us. I feel many ways we're going to keep pushing the limits with Cardvio. Here is a great article I found today on HP Print 2.0 Strategy, we met some of the team from Tabblo and we thought there technology was interesting and it's great to see someone get acquired in the space (even though it wasn't us).

There has been a ton of stuff going through my head as of late. Everything from Google Open Social to Print 2.0 to Gmail with IMAP support. Lastly, I saw this great video on Techcrunch about how information has changed since it's all become digital. Below is the list I created from the video of what we do with information on the internet.

Create
Organize
Search
Critique
Distribute
Understand

If you start thinking about these terms and where they are in their Internet timeline, you start to see that some are very mature and others have a long way to go. You can also start asking yourself what is the next word in the list, if you can figure out that you've probably got the next billion dollar idea.

I think we still have a long way to go with Understanding and Distributing information. A lot of people talk about the Semantic web will finally bring meaning to the internet but I think it's going to be very hard to make that work, Google is still doing a better job than anyone else. More importantly, we're still kind of locked down in terms of distribution, we still are confined to browsers and many of our devices still lack the ability to really see information in a meaningful way.

Anyway, I don't want to get to far off track with Printing 2.0 because I think at Cardvio we are really part of it. We are all about socializing the idea of cards and make them into a web 2.0 object with all the qualities that come with that. Printing might also be following the same process we've seen with the server/client model. In other words, printing is moving away from the desktop and moving back to the server. My hope is that this is the case and Cardvio gets to be part of it.

Cardvio for Salesforce

As Promised, today's the day. I am in San Franscisco at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference and we are announcing our new Cardvio for Salesforce application. The application allows any salesforce user to send cards to clients, prospects, or entire companies. You can go to link above and take the app for a test drive to see how it works. We're very excited about it and we're getting a lot of press from Adobe and the reception here at Dreamforce has been great. Also, thanks to our development partners Theikos for helping with the salesforce integration.

Labor Day Weekend

Well, here we are at the beginning of another school year. We have the privilege here in Boston to have more colleges and universities than anywhere else in the world so when September comes, so do all the students. While it does drop the median age in Boston to 33 on labor day weekend there is a massive influx of students and moving vans everywhere. However, it's 10:30 at night on a Saturday and I am sitting here at a little cafe near Tufts University and really enjoying the people and atmosphere.

On another note, very soon we will be launching our first major partnership and plugin with the largest CRM provider in the world. Look for more details in the next few weeks.

Have a great labor day

Carm

Old World Printing

Since I started Cardvio I have had to learn a lot about printing, the terminology and different types of machinery. I watched this video on youtube about a guy in Somerville, MA who runs and old school printing press where they actually set each letter and then tediously print out each page like it's a work of art. I was amazed at the patience and the level of detail that goes into each print. It's this type of care and attention I hope to put into Cardvio. While the message is important, it's also the look and the feel of piece of mail as it arrives and the texture of the paper and the depth of the colors that truly makes a great card. I could only wish to be as passionate as this guy is about printing.

Article on VC Community in Boston

Of course with the summer months comes a lot of running around and spending a lot of time outside and not much time blogging. So, after a friend of mine tipped me off to this article in the Boston Globe and how bad the VC market here is in consumer products compared to the West Coast, I thought I would do some writing. I find it strange the VC's seem more comfortable flying out to the west coast and making deals instead of looking to the local community here in Boston for great start-up. It's strange how well the article reflects many of our experiences we've had with investors. I think it really comes down to looking at the level of risk and how conservative east coast VC's are compared to the the the west coast. I often see rather interesting consumer concepts with no real idea of how they are going to make money get quite a bit of funding on the west coast with not nearly that level of risk here on the west coast. Who is more right? I am really not sure, my only hope is that investors continue to see a market of opportunity and invest in smart people great ideas. Link to Article

Cards 2.0

Found an interesting article in Business 2.0 about a company in the UK called moo.com. They have a new form factor for personal print messaging and have some good numbers in terms of print volume. Good news is that print-on-demand continues to grow at a pretty rapid pace. [link]

Thoughts about D, Surfurce and Other

It's been a couple interesting days on the web, we're seeing lots of acquisitions, like last.fm and photobucket. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs speaking together at D and really talking about the last 30 years and the future of computing. We've also seen the new Surface computing initiative from Mircosoft. It's generated a lot of great discussion as well as a lot thoughts about the future.

As I see it we're are truly in another special time with the internet, trying to make sense of our online offline selves, creating new understanding of how we interface with computers and how future devices will look. I definitely see mobility, natural interface and online/offline connectivity as the next stages of computing/the web. Part of me really sees an opportunity within the operating space. I think Microsoft has really lost touch with Vista, it's and operating system that doesn't do much except for creating a more visually pleasing UI. I really hope one of the big players, google or yahoo or someone takes on this challenge. The idea of hierarchy file systems and even the Desktop is sort of an old idea. If I asked you the first thing you did when you sat down on the computer, you don't go to your desktop, you open your email or go to your browser. I think the Desktop needs to morph into a new idea that gets away from useless icons. I see how widgets are starting to to that, but I just think they are part of the story. We really need someone to rethink the desktop and the issues with online/offline information, why is it that I have two copies of everything everywhere. I would love to just store all my information in the "cloud" of the internet and not store it in a hierarchy but just tag the information and throw it up there. I make my information either public or private and that's it. That sure would make it a lot easier than uploading, not to mention sharing with friends and family. Well, let's hope someone takes this one on.

Lastly, if you are passionate about the entire climate change issue, you need to watch this video by John Doerr at the TED conference. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/128.

Memorial Day Thoughts

So, first let me send my thoughts to all those serving our country. It's been a tough couple years and let's hope our government is smart enough to make things better. It's strange because thinking about today has made me take stock in where things stand and also reflect on the 07 so far. Looking at Cardvio, we've created some great momentum and I can't wait to see what happens over the next few months. It's been amazing watching people share and contribute through Cardvio. A lot of people said that we could never make Cardvio personal enough because we can't replicate someone's handwriting. After months of watching people send cards, I have to say that's just not true. I have seen people pour their hearts out, say I love you and ask for forgiveness. I hope we can continue to make it easy for people to express themselves in a very unique way.

Also, I would like to make some predictions about 2007. First, it's definitely going to be the year of the widget, sites are now becoming extremely modular and you now take your favorite parts and put them on your site, blog, etc. I also think the web will finally start coming to the desktop and it needs to happen. This idea that we keep duplicate information on our desktop and on the web is crazy. I wish Vista would have created more tools to help people do this, but we are talking about Microsoft.

Speaking of which, if someone out there wants to create the next operating system, I think this is a great opportunity, with the failure of Vista this is a great time to innovate. Yes, there are companies like Ubuntu and others doing pretty good job of duplicating a Microsoft like operating system. But I truly think someone needs to really start over and rethink how people use their computers. The reality is that we should never save anything locally again, we should all be saving our content to the internet "cloud" and then be able to access it from anywhere. Tagging our data instead of organizing it into folders and making it private or sharing/contributing with others.

Alright, enough thoughts for today, hope all of you having a good day off.

Encyclopedia of Life

Today, I was blown away by E O Wilson's wish at the very popular TED conference to create the Encyclopedia of life. The demonstrations and screen shots look amazing and the idea of cataloging the 1.8 million species on earth is mind blowing thought. The site, eol.org, will be backed by 50 million from various scientific organizations and I imagine some day it will be as well known as Wikipedia. I look forward to seeing the project evlolving and hopefully being able to participate at some level.

This actually brought up an interesting discussion I was having with a co-worker about doing something similar with the history of the world. Essentially building a virtual globe that becomes a catalog of human history and being able to go to any point in time and read about human events. I think it would be a fascinating project not to mention the differences you would run into regarding how people view historical events.

More On Widgets

Ok, so I've been getting a lot of great feedback on our new widgets tool, a lot of people want to know how to get it on their site/blog. I am hoping to have the feature available in the next few weeks. In any case check, if you really want it in part of your site, let me know and I'll hook you up with the link.

Cardvio Widgets

After some handy work by our technical team, we made it so you can embed cards directly into your blog, Myspace page, or any other website for that matter. If you click the card to the right it will bring it up directly in our editor so you can start customizing the card and send it to your friends. Very cool and easy to setup. Enjoy.


Carm

Joost and Disruption

While this is rather off topic from Greeting Cards, I came across this article on my Google Reader and couldn't help to post a link to it. The article is a review of Joost, the new TV platform that is coming out and I think it makes a couple great points. First there is a reference by Mark Goldberg to The Iridium Syndrome' - an engineering-led solution solving a non-existent problem resulting in massive flushing of cash?". Which I think is a good way of describing a lot of web products we see today in the marketplace. There are a lot of neat ideas, but what problem are they really solving.

Secondly, talking about disruptive technologies in that the " ...most successful market disruptors start with inferior goods or services that are aimed at marginal markets." The article gives the blackberry as an example.

Now in my mind this is kind of a brain twister. The logic being that most really good products like the blackberry started off as a really bad product aimed at really marginal market. I think the only concern from this viewpoint is that this involves some serious risk because for every one disruptive product there are thousands that just don't make it (i.e. the apple newton).

-Carm

Why it's going to get harder for Social Networks

I found this article on Techdirt that shows how even the top players in the social networking space are having trouble making money. It seems that while Myspace boasts some impressive membership numbers their revenue seems to be much less. In my opinion this is where companies like ours step in to help out. Generating offline opportunities that social network users are willing to pay for could be a huge money maker for these sites but many are too focused on ad revenue. They are going to have to drastically change their thinking if they truly believe that there are enough ad dollars out there to go around. Once the venture capital runs out I see two options for many top sites, either they get rid of all their overhead and become lifestyle business for the founders or they get innovative and figure out a way to monetize their traffic and users and ad dollars are most likely not going to cut it. More importantly investors will want to see a better return on their money and my hope is that they will seriously consider using products like Cardvio to help them make money.

- Carm

Web Innovators Demo

Wow, what a night, I just got back and had a great time presenting at the Web Innovators Group here in Boston. Really amazing group of people and it's great to see so many people interested in the Web 2.0 space. Also got to meet some of the people from Tabblo who got acquired by HP last week. Anyway, I really enjoyed presenting and everyone seemed to enjoy the fact that I started the company because I wanted to send a greeting card to my grandmother (even though a few didn't believe me :). Many thanks to all the people who came and spent time with us tonight.

- Carm

The Latest on Web 2.0

I really enjoyed this article by Peter Rip, interesting overview of where things stand in the web 2.0 space. It's great to see companies start thinking about offline usage as well. Zoho is in the process of coming out with their desktop version and showing impressive usage numbers. Lastly, my friend Harsha asked me to write an article for his blog and it got posted today. Also, looking forward to Wednesday night and the Web Innovators Group. We'll be presenting!!



-C

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HP and Tabblo

Big news this week, HP acquired Tabblo which I think is great as it speaks to the opportunity we are pursuing at Cardvio and how we are trying to change the landscape of the greeting card market. It's amazing how we continue to evolve in our company and when acquisitions like this happen it just proves that we are on the right path. The next few weeks are critical for us and am really looking forward to them. Also, if you are in the Boston, this Wednesday, the 28th we're going to be at the Web Innovators Group presenting. Hope you can make it.

Carm

Valentines and Raising Money

If you haven't already, send some Valentine's day cards to someone you care or love. www.cardvio.com. Lately, I've been all about just building my own cards from scratch with pictures (and yes, I actually use the product). Lastly, read about the youtube guys pulling in about 300 million from the Google acquisition. Not sure how I feel about it, amazed they did it in 18 months, but think Google overpaid and we'll have to see how they monetize the investment. I understand that part of the purchase was a defensive stance, but still think it's an over valuation. I heard a VC say that they thought Google could pull 150 million a year if they just put adsense advertising on the site, which means that paid 11x on their money, that doesn't sound so bad, but they have yet to do it.

Carm

Experiments - Trial by FIRE!

Hi,
I just sent a blog post to Experiments - Trial by FIRE! a blog by Harsha Raghavan. He and I met quite a while ago through linkedIn and he expressed interested in Cardvio. Since, then he has moved on to Talent Burst and has a very interesting blog. Expect my guest post soon.

Carm

Technorati

Just upgraded my blogger account and added myself to technorati. Pretty cool.

Technorati Profile

-C

Ok, It's been a while and Happy New Year

Hi All,
Ok, yes I have been really bad posting anything to my blog and I actually owe a friend of mine a blog that I am a month behind on. Anyway, Cardvio had a great month of December and we were really pleased with how much traffic we were able to generate and our conversion rate was very high. We are looking forward to a very exciting and prosperous new year. Looking forward to raising some more money, making the technology even better and changing the greeting card industry.

-C