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Coeus Solutions GmbH and evoworkx media from Germany have just launched a screen capture software cacatoo (all lower case - mind you!) that lets you capture screenshots or video from your desktop, annotate them, and then upload them to their service so that you can share it as a link with your friends. Coeus Solutions GmbH is the german offshoot of the local firm Uraan Software, although I’m told that the product is independently made by Coeus.

Screen Capture software is nothing new to the market, and similar services also exist that let you upload the captures and share them. However, cacatoo seems to be making it somewhat quicker and easier to use, with a clean interface and streamlined upload options. For example, you can upload with a single click and as soon as its finished the link is added to your clipboard automatically, so you just have to paste it somewhere.

However, despite having a clean-looking software, the initial setup process may prove to be a bit complex for average users, requiring a software download as well as online registration.

It seems like cacatoo is positioning themselves to let any average consumer use their products, e.g. to share shopping ideas with friends over chats, or other "visual ideas" when communicating with vendors such as interior designers or offshore firms. However, whether or not it really is able to spark the interest of general consumers — especially with a software download requirement — remains to be seen.

If anyone here gets to use this app for a longer time, feel free to share your views on the video quality

This is a guest post by Anthony Mitchell, InternationalStaff.net (http://internationalstaff.net)

What questions should high-tech entrepreneurs be asking themselves as they plan a new enterprise?

What questions will seed-fund managers ask applicants for funding?

Borrowing from the open-source software movement, a new seed-stage investment fund in Seattle has published a questionnaire that they use to create a level playing field among applicants for funding.

The questionnaire suggests a thought process that entrepreneurs can reference to help structure their business ideas before deciding whether or how to move forward.

This new investment fund is called the Founders Co-op (http://www.founderscoop.com/). Its limited partners include many of the Seattle-based heavy-hitters in early stage investing, especially online ventures.

The Founders Co-op is part of the new movement in early stage investing that sees companies being launched with little or no staff outside of the founders (and their outsourcing or vendor connections). It is anticipated that the entrepreneurs to be funded will usually consist only of the techies who are actively engaged in product development.

Because the cost of launching online ventures has dropped in recent years, many of these ventures will never need traditional sources of venture capital, only early stage funding. The questionnaire is consistent with this new style of streamlined entrepreneurialism that is well suited for both Pakistan and the U.S.

In their questionnaire, the Founders Co-op asks that each question be answered in 120 words or less and that the questions not be edited. The Founders Co-op credits Y Combinator (http://ycombinator.com/) for help with ideas on the open application process.

Although the Founders Co-op has not expressed an intention to fund startups outside of the U.S., their questionnaire is relevant for startups in Pakistan.

Here is their questionnaire:

1. Please list your company’s name, URL (if any) and phone number (preferably cell).
2. What does your company do?
3. What’s new about what you’re doing?
4. What do you understand about your business that other companies don’t?
5. How will you acquire customers?
6. How will you make money?
7. Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors?
8. If your project is software, what development stack will you use?
9. If you’ve already started working on it, how long have you been at it?
10. If you have an online demo, what’s the URL?
11. How long will it take before you have a prototype? A beta? A version you can charge for?
12. Why would your idea be hard for someone else to duplicate?
13. What are the biggest unknowns or risks in your idea (what keeps you up at night)?
14. For each founder, please list: name, age, school, degree, email address, personal URL (if any); and present employer and title (if any)
15. What products or companies have any of you built before? (Include URLs if possible)
16. How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet?
17. If you’re already incorporated, when were you? Who are the shareholders and what percent does each own?
18. If you’ve previously received funding, how much did you take and at what valuation(s)?
19. If you’re not incorporated yet, please list the percent of the company you plan to give each founder, and to anyone else (advisors, etc.).
20. If you expect to have any major expenses beyond salary, hosting and development tools, what will they be?
21. How long do you expect to work on this idea?
22. Do any founders have other commitments for the next 12 months?
23. Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that overlap with your project?
24. Was any of your code written by someone who is not one of your founders? If so, do you have the right to use it? (Open source is OK)
25. Please share one personal fact about each founder that helps us understand who you are as a person.

Guy Kawasaki explains the difference between fundable and viable startups in his own down-to-earth style . Following the original post for watching rest of the videos.

Simeon, a serial entrepreneur and VC, has written a thoughtful piece about the success factors for entrepreneurs.

We tend to say that one of the marks of great entrepreneurs is that they know how to operate in uncertain environments. I believe this is very true but it merits asking the further question about why are entrepreneurs good at this, or rather, why do we perceive them to be. I believe there are three main reasons which complement each other:

• Luck & timing. Many startups succeed primarily because they are at the right place at the right time. That’s not to take away credit from the teams for taking advantage of opportunity and executing but simply to point out that the presence of certain exogenous factors plays a fundamental role and/or point out that absence of certain exogenous factors could guarantee the startup’s failure. (More on this here.) As an industry, we have a terrible track record of applying revisionist history to explain success driven by luck and timing as success driven by brains and guts.
• Gut sense. Let’s face it, some people just have the combination of a great gut sense and the confidence to go with it. Like sharks that sense infinitesimal traces of blood from miles away, gut-driven entrepreneurs pick our opportunities well ahead of the market. Their biggest problem is finding like-minded people who either see the same trends or are willing to trust the entrepreneur’s gut sense. Sometimes luck can be confused for great gut sense. I attribute success to luck & timing if success is primarily driven by a confluence of exogenous factors that weren’t specifically identified by the entrepreneurs ahead of time. If, on the other hand, the future unfolds according to plan, I’d attribute success to great gut sense.
• Iterative improvement. Some entrepreneurs look at startup decision making as a process of defining testable hypotheses around key strategy and execution questions and designing the quickest, cheapest tests for these hypotheses. Will consumers recommend products to their social network? Rather than assuming they will and building this into a new online service, which may be the approach of a primarily gut-driven entrepreneur, this type of entrepreneur may decide to run an independent test pitching a few offers to consumers independently of the specific online service and seeing what consumers do.

The best entrepreneurs have both a strong gut sense and the ability to iterate quickly and cheaply. This tends to make them luckier because they are better prepared to take advantage of opportunities.

Read the rest …

A quick scan of my google reader shows a lot of activity in the social networking / social media / social technology area. A few established sites have reached critical mass. Many many startups are coming up with a re-hash of the same idea or with ideas which have small incremental worth. I see an interesting trend here, just like the first wave of dot coms. The lessons from then are worth applying to the situation of today. First, there are many trivial ideas which are getting funded - the next bubble will take care of them.

More importantly, companies and enterprises are struggling with how to best leverage the boom in social media. I think they are missing the point here, just as they did before and are too slow and bureaucratic to catch up. For example I came across this interesting presentation where the CIO of INTEL spoke about their approach towards social technologies. There is a lot of learning needed here. But it is evident that the empowerment through social networking will be pervasive.

I also believe that there are many improvements needed with the way social networking happens today. Personally I am already wary of the personal / consumer networking trends: invasive privacy policies, cluttered interfaces, no easy to export your contacts, multiple sign-ons, invitations from complete strangers and annoying ads. But thats my personal gripe and perhaps related to my age! Apparently tens of millions of other much younger enthusiasts don’t care.

I was showing a prototype to the CEO of my company and explained to him that the solution will be available on mobile devices as well as an accompanying web portal where users can register for the services. He looked at me and asked if the portal can be completely optional. “I don’t want to register for another service on the web. I don’t like to remember passwords”, he said.

This is a problem for most users: countless user name and passwords. With the  mushrooming of web 2.0 applications, every app wants you to begin from scratch - as if you never existed before. It is fine if you use Yahoo or Google etc but most of the interesting new stuff is by startups. The existing and proposed solutions such as OpenID etc have not been able to address the issue adequately. There are all kinds of applications out there (online, desktop and mobile) which will securely (yeah, I know, its hard to know who to trust) keep your ids and passwords and help you in sign up. Even after you do all of that work, you still have to go through the registration process of new web sites and all.

By the way this is a huge problem for enterprises also. Single sign-on, as it is called, is the holy grail for companies which have multiple login systems, causing much anguish and creating silos within the organization.

So what can you do if you are developing a new application which requires registration for a new account? Make it as easy as possible. The registration section of your app has to be really really user friendly and without glitches. You don’t want drop-outs at this stage.  See this good post from G. Kawasaki on registration best practices.

Sohail Abid of IdeasHut.com has posted some interesting questions about developing a local Location Based Services (LBS) platform in Pakistan. This is in the wake of recent announcements by Yahoo (FireEagle) and Google (see below) to make it easy for developers to use LBS. His thinking is that this local platform will be based on an existing solution such as Google and will be an open API which other developers can use to come up with their own apps. He wonders if the carriers will be receptive to this idea and how will such apps be received. I am posting an excerpt from the TGP thread below. My advice is to forget about the mobile carriers - there will be lots of ways to make it useful for individuals and businesses.

This thread aims to find/develop a foundation that can be used by mobile-applications to get the location of the mobile user. This has to be open and available to all mobile-developers without any carrier-dependencies.Background:
~~~~~~~~~
A few days ago google opened two programming techniques that can be used by mobile (web) developers to get location of users.

1) a javascritp call to google api that in turn gets city/country via the ip
2) new google gears geolocation api: “On mobile devices with Gears installed, the Geolocation API can use the cell-ID of nearby cell towers or on-board GPS (if either is available) to improve the postion fix”

How Does Google Do it:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Many phones with GPS connect to google maps application and share their lat/long and cell-tower-ids. google has thus made an approximate location data for cell-towers locations. And when a phone without GPS loads google maps application, it is given MyLocation based on the existing data collected via phones-with-gps.

Can We Use it for Pakistan
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Unfortunately, it wont work that well because most people have phones without gps. And its unlikely that google has got the location data for most cell-towers. Moreover, this google’s api can only be used in web-applications. (and gears geolocation api is only supported for some handsets with Windows Mobile).

Read the rest …

These days its hard not to notice the increase in popularity of cloud computing. Amazon can be credited for taking this technical concept to a mainstream level. Now HP and other giants want a slice of this.

Cloud computing can be thought of an extension of software as a service but with an interesting twist that it is within the reach of start-ups and the pricing has dropped to almost nominal levels. All you need is connectivity and the infrastructure is yours. Great thing is that you don’t need to know much technical details - freedom from reliance on system admins using Internet technologies to multiple external customers. Just in case you are not familiar with the concept or want more technical details, see this article. There are plenty of issues associated with clouds - the disruptions to services is the main one and it has happened a few times already. Usability is another one.
For emerging markets such as Pakistan where always-on connectivity is a premium and infrastructure is lousy, can clouds become useful and popular as elsewhere? I doubt it but I will ask the readers to answer this question. I am interested in hearing from any Pakistani start-ups who have considered it. I promise to compile the answers and post an update.

Update: The name of the product is Mango - Manoparty is just the domain name

Confiz Systems recently unveiled their second product targeting the PK Market. Mango is a "SMS based social network" for the masses. It is somewhat similar to Twitter, but not focused on micro-blogging - rather they let people mass-send SMSes to their friends or to special groups.

A number of our readers are already aware of this startup, and some were quick to point out that this is very similar to Chopaal.pk. Both Confiz and Chopaal were incubated out of LUMS but there is no clear indication to imply that the idea was shared.

I’m not a big SMS user, but I can see this application taking off in this market. First of all they’ve designed it so that the app will spread virally because people can sign up and sign their friends in with just an SMS. The value to heavy SMS-users is the money they save from sending fewer messages to reach most of their friends, added privacy via number protection, and a more streamlined way to communicate with each other because you can just set up a "anyone for lunch" group rather than sending out a number of sms’s to different people. Groups based on different topics of discussion just seems to make sense.

For local Twitter users, Mango and Chopaal both offer a similar system (create a group and communicate) but with a local number instead of the UK number to sms to.

An example that is very similar in a nearly identical context is SMS Gup Shup based in India - although initially called a Twitter clone, they allowed people to join networks quickly and virally through sms alone (and without going through a website registration) which has led them to gain 7-times the userbase of Twitter. SMS Gup Shup recently raised $10M in funding from Charles Rivers Ventures and Helion Venture Partners

Good luck guys and keep us posted on user uptake.

Aarpix caught my attention recently, and I’ll be honest, I’m still taken aback by just how much they’re doing! Seriously, I need your help in evaluating this startup.

Here goes:

Aarpix.com is a web, images, audio, video, news, sport, blogs search engine (powered by Windows Live), a dictionary, encyclopedia, casual gaming site, gamer discussion site, article hub, and also a webmail service (powered by Windows Live).

But that’s not all!

Aarpix.net is a full blown social network with profiles, galleries, user blogs, forums, polls, groups, (pant pant writing this is tiring), music sharing, video sharing, classifieds, quizzes, (!! make it stop!), events and perhaps even more.

I’ll be honest - I have no idea - none - about how to evaluate this startup. I didnt see a business model beyond google adsense (and seriously, which young startup kid is thinking beyond that these days anyway?) and cant come to any sort of conclusion on whether what they’re doing is good or bad or what!?

So help me out here - what do you think of them?

Aarpix guys - share some of your usage stats here.