Seed Accelerators and the status of the funded companies

There is a lot of buzz about Seed Funds and how carefully the funding happens.I wanted to figure out how actually these companies which get seed funding are actually doing.

Y Combinator - How are the companies doing?

I found this spread sheet which solved my query to a good extent.

You Can see the complete spreadsheet here.

Starting up – These tools will help you

A few days back, I was talking to one of my friends about how young Indian’s these days are taking a plunge into the world of Entrepreneurship. However, it is not a joyride to take the plunge for sure, it is a roller coaster. It is lots of excitement, and yes moments of real fear too. However, Technology should never be mistaken for just Computer Software and Hardware. We are starting to see some very good innovations coming through from India in Clean-tech, Automobiles, Consumer products etc. as well. I will keep writing about these in other posts. Today, I just thought of putting down a few tools which may help these start-ups collaborate and reduce their expenses better. Not every start-up in India gets a $10 million funding, even if its idea is a million times better than its American counterpart which is building a piece of crap.

Google Wave was supposed to be the one stop collaboration tool, but now that we know, it is still in its pre..pre..pre..(repeat 100 times) alpha phase, I am going to put up some tools which people might find useful, and yes the concentration will be on free products. (Remember, we donot have a million dollars to spend, we have to spend out of our pockets to build this).

Skype (Communication): A fairly obvious choice, the international audience might think but believe me not every Indian startup is using it. Skype is just not to be used by the internet savvy companies, it is to be every damn startup  in India. You are a mechanical designing company, a web development firm, a media agency or whatever, i suppose it is fine to presume that that you will have your computers and a decent Internet Connection with you. Skype is not only to be used when you have finally got your first American client and you donot have the money to make ISD calls every other day. Use it for your team meetings, when you are working out of different locations, use it out of your Smartphones in your Wifi area in your office. Use it also for the pep talk which you need to keep yourselves motivated when you are working out of your wifi garage. Believe me, Skype conference meetings are better for pep talks than realtime meetings; you donot have to look into the eyes of your best friend when your a trying to point a finger at his work.

Team Viewer and Skype Together

Team Viewer (Desktop Sharing): You may think, I am just talking about the Internet firms. But is it not true when you and your friend were working together on you design for a flowchart, or the next kickass car design or the next marketing presentation and were talking to each other on your 1 paisa per second STD call (which kept getting disconnected, i.e if you were not smart enough to use skype), you wished how good would it be if we could work together, talking for free and not need to email your work every now and then. Team viewer is exceptional, less than 2 M.B in size, free for personal usage, work on connection speeds of 256 kbps (I would however suggest you to go for a better Internet speed as you will have a simultaneous Skype call going on ), and works from Windows, OS X and Linux(Through Wine) and the desktop sharing happens just so seamlessly.

Google Apps standard editions comes with free 50 email ID's

Google Apps(Standard edition)(Enterprise Applications) : You are basically starting a company, some of you have not yet left their day jobs, and the one guy who went for an MBA amongst you has registered the company on his name.(Donot forget to register your company, it helps!!). The scene is all set, ain’t it , for the next Google to just come up. But, how can you mail people with email ID’s stating XXXXX@gmail.com. It doesn’t look professional enough. Just set up Google Apps, the standard edition gives out 50 email ID’s free (you email ID will now look like XXXXXX@yourstartuprocks.com), all you need is a registered domain hosted on the internet.(Hardly a 1000 INR = 20 USD).

DeskAway or Unfuddle(Project Managment) : Lots of project planning happened when you had your all important discussion for the next 3 months (You did realize that you need to have these all important meetings at least once a week so that the team knows every member is contributing his bit). If you need to do time and project management for yourself,and you need proper milestones to be set up for your team, just go for Deskaway. It just does the job for you. The $10/month edition will work for a startup. However, if you donot want daily monitoring and you would rather love a code repository(and a bug tracking system) and weekly milestones, the $9/month version of Unfuddle rocks. These two tools just work for you.

Dropbox(Folder sharing): Dropbox is a beauty. You just want something like this for free. You get the dropbox folder on your desktop once that you have installed it and all the problems you faced while uploading something to Yousendit are gone. Use dropbox as your folder sharing system on the Internet.(Mind you big companies who are trying to compete with you, and they can’t  because their recently awarded intranet fails much more than Dropbox.

Social Media : You work 20 hours a day to make the next big thing, sometimes 24 hours because your dreams just don’t let you sleep. However, amidst all this you don’t forget to say hi (on facebook and twitter) to the chick who was your childhood crush who is dating this loser M.B.A who never had the guts to do anything kickass after his engineering or Bachelor’s. She also likes to talk about an old friend of hers (word of mouth publicity) who is making the  most brilliant 1000 Rs (20 USD) solar energy device(which is more useful than an iPad any day), which will help the poor children to study at night and their Mom’s to cook food using the same energy. Use this new age media power and donot hire anyone to do this for you(comes so naturally to you) because you deserve good word of mouth and you can get it from your friends.  Also keeping in touch with this chick may help you win her back someday.

This list cannot be complete for sure because there will many more such tools which can be extremely helpful for you to grow up as a startup. If you consider your team to be distributed in three different cities, then the total cost of having this mini intranet will be (Rs 1400*3(Good Internet)+(Free Skype) + Free (Team Viewer) + Rs 500 (for the Unfuddle or Deskaway account )= 4700 per month ~ 100 USD).  Please help me complete this list by telling me what other tools can be used by small sized distributed startup’s.

Update1: Some More tools suggested by my friends Amit and Rakesh after the post were GitHub, Google Wave in the right way , Basecamphq and Yammer.

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Ray of Hope

Roti, Kapda aur Makaan (food, clothing and shelter) are still the three most important necessities for people in rural India. But one more important thing they need is a source of light at night. The only affordable source which they had till now was a kerosene lamp, which always ate up a large share of their incomes and was also unsafe for use. A kerosene lamp is a health hazard when one sleeps with a kerosene lamp in a closed room, and they are the most usual source of fire accidents in rural areas. Everyone was well aware of the situation, but no one was able to find a way out of this problem. The main challenge here was not to just create an innovative lighting solution, but to make that innovative invention safe and cheap enough that families earning as low as $1 per day living in villages with no electricity could also afford it.

Product Review : Threadsy-Pull yourself together

Do you have an email account.? The question probably is silly. A more meaningful one would be how many. Most of us, if not all, own multiple email accounts, a Facebook profile and a Twitter account. Of course there is a lot more that we own. But Communication/socializing today is pretty much encapsulated in these 4 things : mails/FB/Twitter/IM. And we do invariably open 4 tabs as soon as we start the browser. Would it be any good if we could access them all and access seamlessly on a single tab.? We presume the answer would be ‘yes’. And if you have answered yes, go open Threadsy in that single tab.!!

So what is Threadsy : In bold terms, its an effort at something, Google failed at. Remember Wave – Google’s much hyped (and failed) integrated real time online communication game changer.!! Google tried integrating various elements of online communication in Google Wave, which probably got too much for an average user to handle. The interface was creepy, with functionalities only quarter developed in the beta-launch.!! So is threadsy better.? Well if not better, at least far more organized with a much cleaner user interface and not half developed/integrated features. Threadsy for beginners combines your multiple email accounts, twitter, Facebook and IM at one place. You dont have to sign in differently for them and switch tabs. You just have to have a Threadsy private beta-invite [can be found at the bottom of the post], sign up at Threadsy, enable IMAP option in your mail settings and you are good to go.!!

How well does it give a feel of the actual accounts :

Well, you can pretty much do all that you do in your mailbox or from your Facebook/Twitter profiles. All messages directed at you (in mail or @replies in Twitter) are put together in one stream called the ‘Inbound’ column at the left. And pretty much all that you follow on FB/Twitter are streamed into the column on the right called ‘Outbound’. You can access all your IM accounts too at the bottom bar (all you need is a Mebo account). Every single operation that you do from your inbox has been smoothly integrated, majority of what you do on Twitter : post/RT/favourite/@replies have been integrated as well. Similarly for Facebook pretty much everything has been integrated too : like/comment/post/inbox/profile viewing. One very good feature that comes across is the bio page of a particular user that comes up in the unbound section when you click on one of his messages in the inbound section.

Verdict : Threadsy shows promise. No wonder then that it broke into the Techcrunch50 finalists.

Where does it lack, or can improve :

Our personal/professional communication and networking doesnot exactly end at emails, FB and Twitter. All professionals today own a professional networking profile (say on LinkedIn), are a part of many other social networks like Orkut, Myspace, even a youtube channel. And even amongst what Threadsy has to offer (emails/FB/Twitter), improvements can totally be made.

Emails :  From a personal experience I found out that sometimes some messages simply do not show up on  your email inbox in threadsy (to be truthful this has happened just one single time.!!). Also there is a little delay that can be observed in the timings between say a message arriving in your mail inbox and your Threadsy inbox.

Twitter : No complaints here.!! All messages (tweets/@replies/DM) are captured and without delay. A good feature is that you can see the tweetpics inline. Just one little thing – older tweets of  the day are a little difficult to see. I didnt see a straightforward way to read the older tweets at least.

Facebook : Again updates/inbox are well captured. Older updates are a little difficult to see.

Overall, Threadsy has offered a good consolidated amalgamation of your regular and major communication clients at one point. The interface is well organized and clean. With time as it comes out of private beta and goes for a real launch the User will have much more at his disposal and probably in a better coordinated and feature laden way.

TEAM Microreviews wishes Team threadsy all the very best in  their efforts.

Note : 10 Private beta invites available : http://bit.ly/4APKQk

Similar upcoming products in line are Silentale and Zood. Keep tuned in for them.

For more on tech product reviews, pls contact ArchieIndian and Aditya Prakash. Mail them here and here.

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User comments are solicited.

Entrepreneurship ahoy!!!

Entrepreneurship is the way of living that has caught attention in the fashion circles recently.

WHAT THE HECK DOES THAT MEAN???

Let us try to decode that. Entrepreneur is a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, esp. a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk. (as per dictionary.com). So, its not difficult to understand that the art of taking initiative and risk to earn money by managing a business or enterprise may be called ENTREPRENEURSHIP.

Now, if it is simply managing one’s own business enterprise, then why do I call it a way of living. If we travel some time back in time, then government jobs was the path everyone wanted to tread, as there was nothing more secure than that. When this sector got saturated, then came in the IT outsourcing industry to fill the gap, and then came the big giants looking for MBA grads. But how many of the billion people could be entertained by these few sectors. Entrepreneurship had always existed, but it never dared to raise its head due to the risk factor involved. India always had the largest market share covered by local retailers rather than the big giants. These people were no other than our own entrepreneurs. After agriculture, this was the largest sector which fed almost a quarter of India. This is why I called it a WAY OF LIVING.

With the recession hitting everyone hard, especially the bigger players, we saw that no one could feel secure in any kind of job. The safest of the sectors saw companies sinking faster than the Titanic, and the ones which managed to stay afloat were spitting out employees faster then World War II death rates. Where could everyone take cover with the pink slip venom free-flowing everywhere. This is exactly when someone realized that our own retail market had almost no effect of the recession, and he cried out loud that he had found the solution to epidemic like cancer named recession. This is how this sector got everyone’s ATTENTION.

With insecurity prowling free in all industries, everyone’s best bet was the confidence on one’s own skills. This is how this undergrowth like sector started growing into a tree, which would support a majority of India in the coming years. Now that this tree has started bearing fruits, everyone wants a share of this fruit. Today even an IIM grad has no qualms in doing the same retail business which our neighbourhood grocery store had been doing for years. The only difference they are trying to bring in is a global face to this age old art. Every second grad from the elite IITs and IIMs now wishes to be an entrepreneur, as if it were a FASHION.

Now that you have understood the first statement clearly, I can discuss the highs and pitfalls of it.

Good things that will happen:

• India will learn to become more independent, rather than depending on the outsourcing by the west.
• India’s best talents will be engaged in-house rather than leaving the shores.
• They will compensate for the lack of innovation in our government enterprises and industry giants.
• Government wont have to spend a large share of revenue on employment schemes. 🙂

Bad things that are waiting to happen:

• Not all seedlings would grow into trees, a lot of them would either be wiped out or taken over by other trees.
• Fashion is a very volatile activity. Entrepreneurs who do not check their premises before taking the dive would be out-fashioned very quickly.
• With so many mushroom companies everywhere, financial security would become a big issue for loan providers to these companies.

Let me now introduce to you some of the real activists of this fashion industry. Introducing to our readers – the E-Cell from  IIT Kharagpur.

E-Cell in its mission to promote entrepreneurship, not only within confines of IIT Kharagpur campus, but also across the whole nation, conducted the Entrepreneurship Awareness Drive (EAD). E-Cell undertook this massive initiative to promote and encourage students to embrace the concept of starting one’s own enterprise. EAD was launched on 29th September, in the presence of Rashmi Bansal, author of the bestseller Stay Hungry Stay Foolish. Starting from Chandigarh on 29th September, E-Cell conducted Entrepreunership Awareness Camp (EAC) in ten cities in a time span of 10 days. Each EAC featured a successful entrepreneur as the speaker. Some of the speakers were:

• Mr. K.D. Singh, Founder CEO, Alchemist Group
• Mr. Arbind Singh, Social Entrepreneur of the year 2008
• Mr. Pramod Rao, Co-founder, Elitwit
• Mr. Gerard J. Rego, Founder CEO, Vayugrid (Charter member – TiE)
• Mr. Gaurav Ahuja, COO, Red Ginger Hospitality
• Mr. George Anand, Founder CEO, Semantics Learning
• Mr. Pravin Shekhar, Co-founder, Dexterity Ltd.
• Mr. Murugavel Janakiraman, Founder, Bharatmatrimony.com
• Ms. Rama Devi, Founder Chairman, Association of Lady Entrepreneurs of Andhra Pradesh

This post has been published in collaboration with www.orangified.com, another budding enterprise from IIT Kharagpur.

Greenobin – Complete Recycling Services to India

There has been a lot of talk about Green-tech, Clean-tech, recycling and more. In India, I am not very sure how many people gave it a thought, unless forced to.

Having reviewed a number of technology start-ups and been put off by the lack of creativity in the Indian Start-up Landscape, with every other concept  hinging around Internet and I.T, I finally found an interesting start-up called Greenobin.

Greenobin’s tag line reads “Complete Recycling Services to India”. Greenobin provides a complete range of independent recycling and waste management services for commercial customers and local authorities. They aim to reach a “Near Zero Landfill”.

Services provided by Greenobin:

1. Office Recycling: This includes recycling services for all office stationery like paper, newspapers, vending cups, magazines etc. Greenobin goes on to provide you with a complete audit of your waste management process. Quantifying the performance is important and hence they seem to help you keep track of how much you recycled.
2. Security Shredding: Through this they ensure that  none of your confidential yet waste documents get into your competitors hands. Greenobin provides you with Certificates of Destruction to confirm safe destruction.
3. Staff Training: Trains your staff on waste management and recycling.
4. Secure Containers: Confidential sacks and Lockable bins from Greenobin do the job for you.
5. Recycling Bins:Greenobin provides you with various types of bins for different purposes. They have different bins for paper, vending cups and table tops.

Their complete process of waste and recycling management called GORP can be explored here. Some interesting facts about recycling and waste management have been provided on their website, here. You can get in touch with them,here. They have a lot more stuff on their website. Don’t forget to check it out.Follow them on twitter. Their facebook group can be seen here.They also have an orkut community which is accessible here.

It is absolutely fantastic to see an Indian company opting for a highly diverse and interesting field. We see a lot of potential in the field. We will try and bring an interview with the Greenobin team on microreviews very soon.

The microreviews team extends its best wishes to the Greenobin team, in all its future ventures.

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* the image has been taken from the Greenobin site.

Inkfruit – democratic designing

Introduction: Inkfruit was the latest addition to the already buzzing pool of online portals for customised T-shirt and other merchandise printing.

History: Formed by Kashyap Dalal and Navneet Rai in December 2007. Kashyap and Navneet are former batchmates from the 2002 IITB batch.

What do they do? – They get your designs and slogans printed on T-shirts and other merchandise like caps, mugs, posters etc. Inkfruit focuses primarily on T-shirts.

How do they do? – They get designs online from its users, and get them printed through vendors. The T-shirts are then sold online and through stores. The business is divided almost 50-50 between the online and offline channels. One quarter of the online business comes from overseas.

Who else does this? – There are a lot of companies which have been around for quite some time now, and have been doing pretty good business. A few to name are Myntra, Dilsebol, Pringoo, Xtees, etc.

How is Inkfruit different? – Inkfruit has the idea of being the democratic company which has all its designs created and voted by its users. Other companies do not have this level of customization. The older players allow you to customize only to the level of your name or some slogan being printed. Also, collection of Inkfruit designs was good as compared to others.

Revenue: With almost 5000 T-shirts being sold every month, and an average price of Rs. 220 per shirt, the net revenue comes to about Rs. 11,00,000 per month. Thats pretty good! They are planning to push up the sales to almost 15000 T-shirts by the end of FY 2009-10. They are also planning to foray into collared T-shirt printing.

Thumbs up for Inkfruit:

• Collection of designs is really good. The idea of being democratic has really clicked, and now Inkfruit probably has one of the best collection amongst all the players in this domain.
• Working equally hard on the offline front really highlights their deep understanding of the Indian market and mentality.
• T-shirt and printing quality is good.

Thumbs down for Inkfruit:

• I faced some login issues. Their login popup was not working properly on Google Chrome. Next thing, it does not allow me to login with my credentials even after I verified my login details from the email they sent.
• Femme collection was very small. Probably they are missing out on a large section of the customers.
• Total dependency on democratic designers. They might run out of good designs if the outsourced designers do not come up with good designs regularly. Microreviews recommends that they should hire some full time designers, given that they are looking to treble their sales in the next six months.

Overall Rating: 8/10

Bing – Visual Search

BING! I am sure each one of us has noticed, if not tried, its latest offering – the visual search . Its Microsoft’s  tribute to the Chinese  proverb  ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’. It took a long time for us to review the Visual Search thing, but here it goes. We have something to say about Bing Visual search which is expected to be available at http://www.bing.com/visualsearch, sometime soon. At present, all you get to see is a disappointing error page.

This has been happening right since the day Bing declared Visual Search, live, during its presentation. I tried it a couple of times before  I finally tweeted to the Bing team about the same. No surprises from Microsoft again.!! It took them over a week to respond, mentioning the problem.  All that I needed to do was  change my country preference in Bing to US. To cut the long story short, Bing Visual Search has been released in the US only. You can change your country preference by clicking on the country name on the Bing Homepage.

It was only so far that I had to go to get the Bing Visual Search to work. However, for me it was one step further. I was on Linux and Bing Visual Search needs Silverlight installed as a pre-requisite. I found a developmental release for the same but couldn’t  get it to work quickly enough. So, I switched to my brother’s machine, to write about Bing. This happened to be a Windows Machine with Silverlight installed.

After successfully crossing all hurdles, I was ready to dissect  Microsoft’s answer to Google. 

Time to check out Bing Visual Search then. So I thought of  visually searching Laptop only to realize that I couldn’t. Right now only, a limited no of featured galleries are provided by Visual Search Galleries Beta. Not allowing this setback to bog me down, I went on to  search for Digital Cameras . Voila! The Bing team gets its first round of applause from the people who were around me for providing a Visual Treat in their Visual Search.

The results were  pretty impressive with a number of links like, “most popular on Bing”, “highest megapixel”  on the left hand side of the page. Filters like “megapixel”, “optical zoom”, brand etc are extremely useful additions to a search engine, atleast usability wise. At the end of it all you do get your  prized camera, with its pricing, reviews and related information, all under one roof.

So Whats the verdict?

First the pros :

• A Visual  treat to say the least. You will get to hear at-least a couple of wows if you check it out in a group of three.
• The concept is brilliant. Microsoft is not attacking Google in its forte, it seems. They are trying to provide a better overall searching experience. And should this be added here – Bing is the fastest growing search engine.
  
• Getting so much information about the camera of your choice stacked together is a nice experience.

Now the cons :

• Available only for the US. You need to change your country of preference to US.
• Limited number of galleries. Bing needs to add up a lot more galleries very soon, else someone like me will consider it a one time visual experience.
• Comparison between two products, which come up in the same search result, didn’t seem possible. A suggestion from my side to the Bing team.
• SilverLight for Linux ( A demand from my side).
• Sometimes Bing Visual Search seems like  the product comparison sites with a few extra features added  and a couple of existing features removed.

Overall, for me Bing Visual Search is a breath of fresh air in a Google dominated search industry. Good competition may mean better search experience for people like us.

Finally, the microreviews team wishes the Bing Team the very best in its future endeavours.  Hope you guys take Visual search to the next level, where, for atleast a certain number of search based tasks Bing is the first name.

Crowd Fusion- "The last CMS"??

As I write this post on my wordpress mu based site, I am already thinking whether I need to move to CrowdFusion. My first look take on it, even if it is half as good as it claims to be, it is here to stay.

So, What is Crowd Fusion?

A CMS.  An intelligent CMS. All the time in the world as we talk about WEB 2.0 we keep moving towards WEB 3.0. An intelligent Web. CrowdFusion takes the CMS queue forward in this WEB 3.0 direction.

What is there in Crowd Fusion?

Crowd Fusion happens to be a platform which will enable content management, database managment and social features with their implementation of  blogs, wikis and other stuff in an unified platform. “Unified” seems to be the buzzword these days.

Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are pretty good. What is the need for Crowd Fusion then?

More and more content based sites seem to be creating a structured database of products or topics they write on. They want to link their sites’ internal content to engage the user, and even update themselves and the content with something else happening around the web on related stuff. People go on to find stuff using their feeds and provide links the way I do. Crowd Fusions seems to have the right solution for a complex problem. Weblogs co-creator Brian Alvey describes Crowd Fusion as “the last [content management system] you’ll ever use.” A bold claim. I don’t believe that it will be the last but I hope Crowd Fusion is a big step forward.

It seems to have a integrated feed system which keeps you updated about the stuff you write on your website, putting their excerpts in your post, with links to them (the way we do it) and even provide related posts online about the same. The face that it has a plugin architecture means it is extensible. Also, the fact that it has already been opensourced means it should not struggle to get developers.

Revenue Model?

A big question here. They say, they like the MySQL model (scaling, hosting etc) a lot. Lets hope it works for them.

How do you get it?

It is in public beta. Check it out here. If you want to see a sample site made with crowd fusion try this site. I registered for their Beta program and so can others.

So What else do we want?

A big question is if they have built tools to import wordpress, drupal etc based sites on the go. I feel that will be important, because to get people create stuff from the scratch may not work. This can be taken as a piece of advise from my side to the Crowd Fusion team.

Best of luck to the CrowdFusion team from the Microreviews team.

http://www.obsessable.com/

FluidHTML – Markup for Flash- What does it mean for HTML guys?

Few years back, I was working with a guy who was brilliant at flash and after seeing him work on Flash, I felt nervous. I thought I could never compete with this guy in creating a RIA (Rich Internet Application). I bought myself a flash bible, only to never use it as I read about the problems of flash.

So What are problems with flash?

• It is far too difficult for a not so artistic guy like me to work on Flash.
• I realised Flash based web applications are not crawled by search engines and my site would not exactly be an adobe or google, backed for direct traffic for it.

So What did I do?

• I chucked the idea of learning flash.
• I had to live with CSS and JavaScript to create all the magic. Although they were never comparable to the flash applications.
• I had to wait for HTML 5 to be cooler and IE to render it correctly.!!  A distant dream I must say.

So What is the solution?

Actually I didnot have one at that point in time but having seen FluidHTML’s presentation at TechCrunch50, I guess times are changing. FluidHTML claims and seems to have come up with a markup for  Flash.

What does markup for flash mean?

With an HTML like structuring, FluidHTML allows web developers to create dynamic and rich media sites with relative ease. And there are no compatibility issues with major browsers. Also since it is markup, crawlers can read it and the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) problem seems to get resolved.

So How does FluidHTML do it?

They use an interpreter FHTML.SWF,– which reads the FluidHtml markup served on browser pages, and then renders the layout, effects, behaviours and instructions in the markup. Sounds cool.

Are there any server side dependencies?

No, there are none. Java, DotNet, PHP, Ruby, Python – FluidHTML caters to them all.

What does it mean for the HTML guys?

Extend your knowledge and add some tags to the ones you know and build better web apps. A media player tag seems so very cool to me. Are we getting into the real WEB 2.0 or what? HTML guys need not unlearn stuff. Just that they learn more and create better.

Anything else that the HTML guys get?

A liquid layout engine with more flexibility than CSS. People need to figure this out.

Is it extendable?

Yes to a great extent. Core FluidHTML kernel cannot be extended by the developers, the effects and animations, buttons, sliders, style sheets, and layouts can be shared publicly (According to their website that is). Developers can extend FluidHTML to make their own modules. In development mode it is free with some marking done. When you go live, just buy an annual license. To read the intricacies of FluidHTML check out their about page.

Who does FluidHTML compete with?

Anybody’s guess. Microsoft and Adobe.

And Who comes out with it?

FHTML Inc. founded in March 2009. You can visit their website at fluidhtml.com. Follow them at Twitter. Email them at michael@fluidhtml.com.

Drop in to their headquarters at: 1050 Winter Street, Suite 1000, Waltham, MA, 02451, DNK.

CEO Michael Collete

Founder Jim Kremens

Do check their TechCrunch50 presentation here.

So Whats the verdict?

• Works for me.
• Flex, Silverlight and Flash, they all need to be compiled. Fhtml, like HTML, does not need to be compiled.
• A boon for the flash people who will have their content searchable now (if they switch to Fhtml that is, and that means business for FHTML Inc).
• FHTML inc is a stratup. How they are able to engage more developers is to be seen.They’re looking for $1 to $2 million in funding by October.
• The competitors are big and probably evil. Maybe  they are too big, may even sue me!!!
• Can Fhtml be light enough? Their own site wasnt really that light. Important factor that is. We even have a facebook lite now 🙂

Overall, best of luck from the microreviews team to the FHTML team. Well done guys.