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

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