On Thursday we had the pleasure attending Pitch San Francisco 2011, where technology startups from around the world converged on San Francisco’s AT&T Park to demo the next wave of products aimed at capturing the hearts, and minds (and yes, wallets, too) of consumers and enterprises everywhere. With close to a hundred presenters, several big-name VC firms, and thousands of techies in attendance, it was quite the hodgepodge of professionals and novices and was nothing short of a spectacular event.
Though we didn’t get a chance to fully demo Zukmo this time around, we did have the opportunity to explore lots of great products and discover some of the features that software users everywhere have come to value and embrace over the years. Now, it’s no surprise that cloud apps and solutions are a hot topic, but despite there having been more than 10 titles under which a company could categorize itself, it was striking to see that close to 50% of the companies in attendance identified their products as hosted SaaS or consumer Web solutions. Furthermore, many of them were deeply entrenched in the Web 2.0 space with crowdsourcing and social functions as their core value propositions.
Of the three award winners at the event (congratulations to all!), two of them (LawPivot and Doot) were crowdsourcing and social solutions, while the last (NetPlenish) was a data-driven app (but even that was something of a value-adding data aggregation site).
The value that comes from crowdsourced information is virtually indisputable. It’s the same reason that many organizations ascribe so much value to diversity. Nobody is the best at everything, so when a large group of diverse and intelligent people attack a problem from different angles, the best solution is far more likely to emerge from the collective pool of knowledge than if the problem was solved by a single person.
Additionally, on the purely social front (though we won’t even attempt to break down why we as humans are naturally social creatures), the fact is that we ascribe extra value to social experiences. A quick visualization of this would be to compare the thought of going to Disney World alone to that of going with five of your closest friends. Shared experiences mean a lot more to us than we might initially think, and in the last few years a lot of software developers have begun to recognize that.
Though we do still spend a considerable amount of time glued to our screens in an effort to bring you the best, those of us working on Zukmo love a social experience as much as you do. That’s why as we continue to flesh out Zukmo in it’s alpha phase we’ve started to focus on how we can make it more social. From enabling discussions around the content in your library to improving your content sharing capabilities, we’re determined ton bring you the best experience possible. If you have any ideas or suggestions for how we can make Zukmo more useful to you, tell us!
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