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

MIT Enterprise Forum - Web 2.0

Had a great talk last night at MIT discussing Web 2.0 technologies. I was on a panel with a guy from Allurent Technologies who is also using Adobe Flex. They are building some very interesting e-commerce solutions using the technology and creating an amazing shopping experience for users. We also had a great discussion on Adobe's next project called Apollo which connects local data to RIA's seamlessly. It looks like a very intersecting product and we might end up doing something with it for our card artist system. It's nice to think that one day we will not have to replicate our data everywhere and the versions we have locally will be the same as the ones on the web.

Cardvio Article in Mass High Tech

We got written up this week in Mass High Tech this week, which is read by about 60,000 people in and around Boston. Big thanks to Chris Calnan for interviewing me and writing up the article.

Young Entrepreneur greets online card business with Cardvio


-Carm

New Version Finally Out

For those of you who might have been on the site late Sunday night we did finally push out a new version. We had some issues with conflicting code, but it seems to be working well right now. There are still some minor things that need work, but for the most part this new version is much more stable and has many new features. Enjoy... www.cardvio.com

-Carm

Pause... Launch happening on Friday

Just a quick update, we moved the update to Friday. After one last test through the software we wanted to take out a few more bugs. I'll post as soon as it's out on Friday. Thanks.

-Carm

New Version Of Cardvio Coming out Tonight

Just letting all the people who read my blog, haha that we are about to deploy a new version of our software tonight. Couple new features:

- Lots of bug fixes that were causing the application to hang or crash. Hopefully, it's the last time we will see them.
- Improved user session management
- Mail Merge with recipient validation and easy ability to add and remove contacts
- Better login and logging out features
- Easier checkout features
- Pricing by vendor or user

Maybe I can detail these a little more in my next post. Also, we'll be updating the main website in the next few days. Thanks again for all of you who have been supporting us over the last few months.

-Carm

Cardvio Featured on go2web20.net

Just found out we got featured in the Go 2 Web 2.0 Directory. Very nice of them and it is also driving a ton of traffic to our site. Check it out: www.go2web20.net

Back At Northeastern

On Monday of this week I got the opportunity to go and speak to a group of entrepreneur students at Northeastern about Cardvio. It was great to be back at NU and see all the progress the school has made. However, I was somewhat surprised by the students, they lacked the enthusiasm or genuine interest in starting a business. I love the idea of being and entrepreneur and wouldn't trade it for anything. The idea of working for a large corporation doesn't interest me at all and I don't think it ever will. I also spoke with a guy from my class who runs a dry cleaning business called Husky Express, http://www.huskyexpress.com/, interesting business but he has been running it for 5 years and looked really exhausted. However, he still seemed to have some passion for the business and wanted to see it grow much bigger than it already is. I wish him the best of luck.

Cardvio Current Status

Ok, so it's been a while since I put up my last post and lots has happened at Cardvio. We have added a bunch of new features and have continued to work out lots of bugs. The best new feature is the mail merge which allows you to upload a csv file and send a card to a bunch of people. We also let you save and load previously designed cards.

I really hope we continue to grow our artist side of the business. I imagine will eventually have a system where anyone can become and artist, design and share cards, even make money off them. I keep thinking how cool it would be to have thousands of free lance artists submitting content and maybe even a whole community where people can ask for specific types of cards and get artists to design them for them.

We are also starting fund raising next month, which is not one of my favorite activities, I enjoy much more running the business than trying to convince people that your worth investing. But we will see how it goes. Well, if you haven't done it already check out the latest version of the site at www.cardvio.com.

Thoughts On Flock - Can a browser really define Web 2.0

Today Flock was released to the general public, in a beta release. I find the entire concept of flock rather interesting. It's goal is to be the web 2.0 browser we have all be looking for. While I applaud there ability to make it easier for me manage my photos, blogs and bookmarks, I don't think its heading in the right direction.

The reason I say this is because I think Web 2.0 is all about pushing the browser to the background. It's about unlocking the door between our local stored information and make it transparent to the web. The browser has always been the door to the outside world and I think it's time we start looking at it differently. Web 2.0 also expressed goals of emulating desktop application through the web. Flock, in my mind accomplishes neither of these goals.

If you look at Flock, its a dowloadable program that you have to install and then it opens like a normal browser. There are some simple setup steps to gain access to your flick/photobucket, blog and del.icio.us accounts and it does make the process simpler yet it doesn't really make the way in which I do things any easier.

Let me put it another way, what I would really like is a system that just does away with the browser completely. Basically the easiest way I can see doing this is by enhancing the right click options. For instance, I should just be able to go to My Pictures, right click on one and go sent to flick/photobucket. Or maybe I just open MS word or Notepad write a few lines of text and then right click and select "send to blog". Lastly, why not just link my favorites to del.icio.us directly, or anytime I come across a link, whether online, in a pdf or .doc and right click and go "send to my del.icio.us".

Maybe we could just call the company RiteClick and get rid of the browser completely. Lastly, if you really want to re-invent the browser, make a system for people to more easily develop rich applications though the web. I think it would be great to have a shopping application that I could run from my desktop, maybe something that looks at dozens of shopping sites and makes it easily for me to review, compare, sort and buy and do it dynamically so you don't have to refresh and you can easily drag and drop items into your cart or favorites.