January 2008

If new technology interests you then Chris Shipley’s Demo show is the place to be. I’ve met Chris on a couple of occaqsions and she’s a seriously smart people connector. I can’t be at Demo in person but it doesn’t stop me getting a front row seat courtesy of BitGravity’s excellent streaming video…. My colleague Dan Farber wrote up Blist, a database that behaves like a spreadsheet: Blist allows you to store lists of infinite length in a cell, store documents, and set photos, checkmarks and ratings as column types. You can even have a table in a cell, create pick lists with icons, and show thumbnails of Web URLs…. First glance suggests this is a welcome addition to the stable of applications that endeavour to take 20 year old technology paradigms and turn them on their head…. Despite the Microsoft hegemony, many potential users avoidy this kind of application because they’re just too hard to understand. Simply because vendors like Blist are outside the mainstream does not mean we should dismiss their efforts.

It’s a US based mail receipts mail-in service that digitizes receipts and spits out a spreadsheet for later use…. It backs up its value add story with a calculator from which you can see the potential savings from using the service. As a concept it is fine but late last year, they switched focus away from being a business oriented play to one that embraces consumer spending. TechCrunch thought it was pretty good but a stream of comments about how it has a string of reps and affiliates running around college campuses attempting to sign up users got me worried…. My guess is that Shoeboxed didn’t get a ton of takers after its initial pitch to business and despite it getting plenty of press coverage…. The ever watchful blogs took this as a sign that all is not well and they may be right…. The US is still very much postal driven and claims a high delivery rate…. Pity about the infrastructure upon which it relies and the inevitable need to incur charges for registered or recorded delivery.