Vidquik Beta is Live!

Our beta is live! Well, it’s been alive for a few weeks now, but our blog gets the standard blog treatment among social media. Twitter and Facebook get much more attention hence the delay in posting this announcement on our blog.

As a recap, on September 13th, 2011 we launched our free one-to-one web conferencing service, which is video plus online presentation sharing, at DEMO, the prestigious launch conference in Silicon Valley.

There was great confirmation from people who were seeking an easy-to-use web conferencing solution and along the way we garnered some great press:

“DemoFall 2011: Top 5 New Techs I’d use” IEEE Spectrum

“The 15 Most Intriguing Pitches from DEMO Fall 2011″ Network World

“Vidquik tries to disrupt online meetings with free 1-to-1 web conferencing” VentureBeat

You can read more news clips from our Facebook page here. We also revealed our strategy and product direction, which is to focus on enhancing sales productivity and providing salespeople powerful but easy-to-use tools related to our web conferencing platform.

Vidquik is not focused on the collaboration space and providing tools to enhance corporate communications. We are focused on increasing sales productivity and helping salespeople close deals, so as we look towards our official launch in November 2011 we ask for your feedback and any recommendations you might have for our product. We appreciate your continued support and help!

About.me Beta... Pretty Cool

About.me has started their beta. I've been trying it out while in meetings today, and I like their design driven approach to creating a personal splash page for people. About.me allows you to create a simple, personalized and beautifully designed (or self-designed) home for all of your online identities. More from their site:

We designed about.me for ourselves. A lot of us have multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. And one problem we face is pulling all of this information together to build a single on-line identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional on-line profile. Our focus is simple, enable you to:

1) create a personal, dynamic profile page (think splash page) that points users to your content around the web (versus depending on Google search); and

2) understand how many people see your profile, where they're coming from, and what they do on your page.


Here are a couple tests I put up. The first is selected from About.me's pre-loaded templates, and the second is a picture with one of our daugthers, Kendra. My About.me page is here.

StarCraft II Beta: Who is BetaWorks?

I never have seen this happen before in the hundreds of Starcraft games I've played. During a 3v3 match, my own player attacked and killed my base. I did a sneak attack with cannons and then my own ally attacks my base and then leaves the game. What the frick was that? I've never seen such odd behavior. Some player named "Betaworks", which will obviously change now or after the beta period. Maybe I was attacking his frirend? Random act to amuse himself? Just a complete idiot? Who knows.

Postbox Beta Live... Email Client for Your Mac

Catching up on some emails, so here's an announcement that Postbox went live with their beta last week. Some initial good reviews from CNET and Lifehacker. It seems their initial beta has only a Mac version, but I know a Windows version is planned for. More from their site:

A new kind of messaging application, the Postbox™ email client helps you spend less time managing email and more time using email to get things done. Postbox automatically analyzes your e-mail messages, documents, photos, and links to web pages; then it catalogs all this information making it faster to search for and retrieve.

Easy-to-use tagging features let you organize messages the way you want and then focus on one project at a time without missing out on important new messages. You can also gather messages by conversation, annotate messages and create to-do items that appear in mailbox windows.

The Daily Grommet Beta... Fresh Finds and New Products

The Daily Grommet is a new site that showcases new discoveries, products and services. It's cool because the pitches come directly from the designer, artist or entrepreneur behind the product or services. More from their site...

What's a Grommet

* It’s a wonderful product still waiting in the wings, just ripe for discovery.

* It has great utility, or style, or invention. Or, very often it has all three.

* It comes from a designer, or inventor, or artist, or manufacturer who is clearly passionate about what they create. Someone who loves to share their creations and talk to people about why they do what they do.

* It comes from a company that treats its customers well.

* Finally, like any intelligent or beautiful product, it has a great story, ready to be told.

Google Chrome... Pretty Cool But Someone is in Trouble

The blogosphere is buzzing about Google's stealth browser project, Chrome, after Google Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen received a comic book by mail and posted, "Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project"

I'm wondering if it really was by mail or was it by hand? Philipp took the effort to scan and post it up here. I think someone is in trouble over at Google. Wondering what would motivate a person to leak this in light of the consequences? Or was it just loose lips falling on the wrong ears?

Kara Swisher has already started the war drums on the battle between Microsoft and Google, "Google Ignites a New Browser War With Microsoft By Unveiling One of its Own This Week"

Webware has a good overview, "Google 'starting from scratch' with own browser, Chrome"

More from TechCrunch, "No Joke: Google Introduces The Chrome Browser With A Cartoon" and ReadWriteWeb, "Google to Offer its Own Browser: Chrome"

UPDATE: Officially announced on Google's Blog, "A fresh take on the browser"

Since it's officially out, I can blog now that I saw it in action this past month. I've always maintained my silence when it comes to Google's alphas since I'm respectful of my wife's position at Google and Christine is a very conservative, by-the-book person with a mean right hook :)

Anyway, I'll say that the Google Chrome team did a great job. The browser looks and works like a lightweight app. It's fast like a high-performance car and there are features that I appreciated, such as their Omnibox. I look forward to testing it out this week.

Signal Patterns Beta

Just trying out the Signal Patterns beta. Their overview:

Our research helps people develop a deeper understanding of their personality and preferences. By fostering self-discovery and expression, Signal Patterns gives people new ways to make powerful connections to the world around them.

I wonder what their core product will be? Hmmm... Anyway, I love these assessment tools. Very helpful in building teams and managing organizations. Here are my results:

You are Extroverted, Friendly, and Authoritative.

Wisia Beta... Social Recommendations (Win A New iPhone!)

Wisia is a new social recommendation service launched out of IWIlab, a startup incubator. This was started by Brian Kim, the co-founder of Hangame and former CEO of NHN Corp. Hangame, which was the leading online casual gaming company in the world, merged with Naver.com several years ago to form NHN Corp, and today they dominate the search market with approximately 80% market share in South Korea.

Anyway, Brian, Dean, John and their team have been working hard to churn out various products for multiple markets across the globe. They recently launched Buru, which was covered by Mashable ("Buru: FriendFeed Plus Delicious").

Now they have launched Wisia's beta and are looking for more beta testers. Just go to their site and use this invite code "bernardmoon" and hack away. Blunt and bold feedback is appreciated.

They are also giving incentive for people to crank on their beta by having a contest where you can win a new Apple 3G iPhone or $50 iTunes gift cards. Check it out!

Web 2.0 Asia has more about Wisia here.

GoogleTalk... Watch Out Skype?

Another service I saw about a month ago but couldn't blog about. Google's IM/VoIP client seems like any other and I disagree with some of those that say there isn't room for another IM service. Wanna bet? It's not about challenging the incumbents, but about keeping people within the Google universe. Like I wrote back in March, I was just waiting for Google to create the universal login that ties all their services together and keeps people in the world of Google. Looks like it's going to happen. Is that the Death Star theme or the Mary Poppins chimney song? Silicon Beat has more:

It's official: Google has launched a Google instant messenger/chat service, called Google Talk.

Yes, Google shared the news with us a couple of days ago. Alas, they required us to hold to an embargo of this evening, 9pm, as a condition of being included. So we've faithfully sat on this all day, even as many other folks have reported on elements of it.

So here's the fully story, to run in the Mercury News tomorrow....

Google already offers everything from e-mail to social networking. Now the popular Mountain View search engine company is jumping in with another popular form of communication: Google Talk, where you can instant message and chat with your friends directly from your computer to theirs.

Google also may unleash a voice service that lets you call fixed-line phones too, the company said. It's Google's latest effort to expand beyond simple search into a wide array of communication services. It is also taking on competitors Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft's MSN, which already offer instant messaging and chat and are also trying to upgrade their voice communications -- though it has been slow-going. (full post)