One of the things that nobody talks about when they look at "Barrier to Entry" is the amount of work that has to into a startup. Between technical, business development, sales, marketing, and administration, there's a lot to do - much more than one may initially imagine. That is, I mean, if we're talking about building a real company with a real business model. Which is a good thing: Even though the idea may sound simple, proper execution is a real barrier to entry. So you have to fear less about competition, but you still have to watch the big guys deciding to do what you're doing. They already have the execution infrastructure in place.
Anyhow, all of this long prolog was to say in a way that a lot of work has gone into launching the new version of Frucall. Look and feel of the site are now much better, voice user interface works better (and you can use * as a backspace when you enter barcodes), and group voice messaging is fully functional.
Here is the Press Release. Enjoy!
It has been a while since I have had a chance to post to the blog. That's due to a lot of activities, both on the technical and on the business side.
I'm glad to let you know that the new release of Frucall is now in production. A number of interesting features, such as group voice/text messaging, sponsored and targeted advertisement, better voice user interface (specially, using the * key as backspace when one enters the barcodes), and more are now in production.
We were also ready to roll out our "one button purchasing" feature, but we seem to be a little bit behind on the legal side which may take another week or two. So we decided to release everything and hold off on purchasing - stay tuned for purchasing to be announced. We are very excited about the ability of purchasing something online right on the phone when you shopping in a store.
It's sad to see Kiko is going down. As Dalai Lama says, "If you lose, don't lose the lesson". The number of write ups about why this happened to Kiko is huge, but it was a pleasure to see that people from the core Kiko team took it upon themselves to analyze what happened and do a post mortem.
In Actual Lessons from Kiko, Richard White writes - amon other things - "You must have a plan for escaping the Technosphere":
"... but if you ever want to gain any real traction as an online calendar service you have to target the cubicle dwellers and their Outlook calendars that only exist outside the sphere. Techie users are fickle, transient and demanding. You can spend all of your time implementing ATOM feeds and hCalendar export and never be the better for it."
I frankly believe that this is a warning to a lot of startups in the Web 2.0 space. On can easily confuse the feedback from technology watchers with actual user (read mass consumer) adoption. If the latter is not in place, the former is not going to do the business much good.
It's amazing - although one does not expect it - how hard it is to get the messaging right, specially for a consumer site. We have changed and refined our messaging several times, to make sure that the visitors of the frucall.com will see and understand our value proposition right away when they visit the web site.
You will see the new messaging and artwork as a part of our release, which is to go out in a few days.