Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » DEMO startups say it's all about community -- Ugh!

September 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)

DEMO startups say it's all about community -- Ugh!

TAGS: DEMOfall 07

Okay, like everybody else I have a limited amount of patience. Well, unfortunately for Advanta and Spigit I'm all out.

I guess you could say I just don’t get it.

Advanta has something called IdeaBlob, a community site for posting business ideas.

Okay, number one, who is this community? Sounds like something out of that great British TV series the Prisoner.

Advanta claims you will attract mentors who can help you with your idea.

The New York skeptic in me says it will attract people who will steal your idea if it is really good and or if there are actually mentors offering advice on your business idea I would imagine they will want a piece of the action before they deliver any meaningful advice.

In the demonstration the CEO suggested that you will get the advice you need. Rather I think you will get hundreds of useless comments and from these you will pick out the advice that you agree with anyway.

Okay, next up, Spigit, is another one of those sites that offers up "the wisdom of the crowd" as Paul Pluschkell, CEO put it.

Well, as a reader of history, I'm not sure the crowd is always wise.
I leave it to the reader to fill in the blanks here and come up with their own examples of the wisdom of the crowd being a very scary idea.

Nevertheless this idea of the wisdom of many persists on the Internet in these collaboration sites and it appears to be growing. Ugh.

Okay, maybe I'm out of patience because I don’t get it and I don’t believe it. Whatever.

Pluschkell says by using his analytics and evaluation engine the site captures comments and quantifies them bubbling up to the top what its engine considers the best ideas.

If I hear of one more company that bubbles the best ideas up to the top I'll scream.

This is a social collaboration platform according to the CEO which "gives structure to the process of collaboration."

Users actually get something akin to merit badges, like in the Boy Scouts, and if you earn enough badges you can launch a virtual IPO.

As skeptical as I am I am duty bound to tell you that SAP is one of the early adopters.

Okay, SAP could use a few good original ideas. Microsoft take note.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 25, 2007 10:38 AM

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