Wixi – a web-based desktop for all your media
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The people behind Wixi invited us to try out their service soon after their appearance at TechCrunch40. After tried it a couple of times it makes me wish I was back in college to have really put this to good use.
Wixi is a place where you can store all of your media, from songs to videos to flash games and more. It helps you get by without the need to fill up thumb drives or mp3 players with songs that you might want to hear in different places — since Wixi is based on the web, you can simply get to your media wherever you are.
On top of this, they let different wixi users share their media with each other through a very simple process — browse your friend’s songs or videos, click to add to your own wixi.
The overall interface is sleek, fast and looks a lot like one of the webOSes we’ve covered in the past. Ajax here is put to decent use to create a believable environment.
I see both useful consumer usage cases for Wixi but also practical uses that companies can use Wixi for – read on for more analysis and a demo of wixi.
For consumers Wixi is a great get-away from real-life whenever things get tough. Invariably a lot of us are spending a lot of time online, but often on computers that we do not own – If you get a few minutes off in between classes or work or can afford a 5-10 minute break, you could simply hop onto your wixi where you might have some of your favorite flash games stored.
But Wixi also lets people share their content externally on blogs or other websites through embeddable flash players (see below). Using this, I think companies can benefit in a unique way — a company can use wixi to organize and diseminate video content in a controlled way. Thedy would put up their embedded video player on their main website, adn then their marketing dept can collect and organize all of their ads, promotional flash objects and videos. Finally, they can decide when they want to broadcast these. I think that makes for a slightly compelling use-case.
From Wixi’s business point of view, however, they face competition both from traditional video or media aggregators like Revver, but also webOS players like Glide. Keeping users on their platform may become a challenge for them over time, since a lot of their consumers would invariably already be in similar platforms. What would help them is being able to find that one killer use that no one else allows right now and making that the driver for increasing their user-base rapidly — what would work is for Wixi to let other people downstream offer somethign to their consumers — e.g. let musicians run their promotions there, let politicians run campaigns, or let other companies benefit from running product demos through Wixi somehow.
Try it out though, and let me know if this would work for college / university students.
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