In this week's episode, Brian Singerman, a venture capitalist at The Founders Fund, shares his opinions on two emerging companies that enable people to share rich-media content in a much easier way. We look at Drop.io and Xoopit. We start with Drop.io, which raised $5-plus million from RRE Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Drop.io is an easy-to-use platform that enables users to share rich-media files, like videos and photos and even voice messages, to a private group. It's really easy and has great UI. From my tests, this site rocks when it comes to sharing files. It's a lot easier than Box.net. And, the upload time is faster.
We also looked at Xoopit, which raised $6.5 million from Accel Partners and Foundation Capital. Xoopit makes your inbox come alive. Xoopit is about finding the media and helping you generate social experiences with people, according to Bijan Marashi, Xoopit's co-founder and CEO. Basically, Xoopit makes your Webmail feel a lot more like Facebook, and a lot less like Outlook.
In this Vator Box, we discuss competitors to both companies. For instance, Drop.io competes with Box.net, Yousendit, and Pando. We also discussed how Xoopit differentiates itself from competitors like Xobni and ClearContext.
The bottom line is that Brian and Ezra agreed on betting on one company. I chose the other as my bet. You'll have to watch to see which one we chose.
Related pieces: The future of knowledge management and Should Microsoft invest in features?
(Note: We welcome your opinions about both companies. And, we welcome suggestions or nominations for companies that should be on Vator Box.)
Founder and CEO of Vator, a media and research firm for entrepreneurs and investors; Managing Director of Vator Health Fund; Co-Founder of Invent Health; Author and award-winning journalist.
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Startup/Business
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Pando Networks is a small company on a big mission; to establish a new Internet infrastructure standard for efficient, secure and commercially viable rich media delivery. Our passionate staff loves new media and shares the belief that current Internet protocols need to be re-thought and re-defined to accommodate our insatiable demand for rich media, particularly high quality video online. We have the expertise to do something about it.
In the summer of 2006 we launched the free consumer service Pando to accomplish a few things; First we wanted to give our friends and family an easy way to use our powerful content delivery engine to move their own large media files. Secondly, we wanted to test and optimize our unique Managed Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology in thousands of difficult networking environments around the world. Lastly, we wanted to deploy our software on millions of desktops to showcase Pando's massive scalability, reliability, effeciency and ease of use.
Since that hot summer of 2006 over 18 Million of our friends and family in over 150 countries have installed Pando, we've optimized our highly effecient networking technology and we've been humbled by exceptional peer and industry recognition of our best-of-breed managed P2P content delivery solution. We are now bringing the power of our platform to publishers with the Pando Content Delivery Suite. Commercial content owners can now seamlessly add secure Peer-Assisted Content Delivery to their existing CDN to unleash the breathtaking impact of their highest quality streaming and downloadable media (e.g. HD Video) at a fraction of the cost typical of server-based content delivery alone.
Pando Networks is backed by Intel Capital, BRM and Wheatley Partners.
Startup/Business
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We are creating Xoopit to help you take the effort out of organizing and retrieving your digital life, wherever it is. There's too much stuff out there and it's impossible to keep your fingers around it.
It's time to clear the clutter...
Xoopit's innovations in search engine technologies allow to deliver the next generation of search, productivity, and social media applications to Internet users.
Our passion is in building smart, simple applications that work for you. We've all grown tired of fussing with applications to get things done. Over the coming months, we will be rolling out a series of applications that make finding and repurposing your information 1 click or query away.
The company was founded around the baristas of San Francisco and through hundreds of hours of personal interviews. Most of these meetings felt like psychotherapy sessions. Relating to all of you is what drove us to build Xoopit.
Startup/Business
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Drop.io enables you to create simple private exchange points called "drops."
A drop is a ‘discrete’ chunk of space you can use to store and share anything (pictures, video, audio, docs, etc) privately, without accounts, personal registration, or an email addresses. Drops are not ‘searchable’ and not ‘networked’, they just exist floating in space, as points for exchange for individuals or groups.
Create as many as you want in as little as two clicks and set things like a password, whether others can add to the drop, and how long you want it to exist (you can renew later). Drops are a simple platform for sharing which are by default private, but can be flexibly used in a range of ways from sharing family photos and videos to collaborating on work documents.
Each drop has four primary input methods – the web, email, voice, and fax – and a few secondary ones like ‘widgets’.
Anything you input into a drop can then be retrieved on the web at the drop location (with ancillary features to help you keep track of updates via email or rss), downloaded in original form, or even faxed out - you can zip files together to get the whole drop. There is more to come on both the ‘Input’ and ‘Output’ sides, but everything in keeping with our two core principles: simplicity and privacy
Startup/Business
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Xobni offers a new way to organize and search your Outlook email. Xobni creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments. Our users tell us that Xobni makes your inbox work the way your mind does.
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Advisor-to and commenter-on emerging ventures
