

Summer YC startup launches: Versionate's Wiki End Run Around Google Docs - immad
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/11/versionates-wiki-end-run-around-google-docs

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ivankirigin
I've started to use Google Docs a lot. Trying Versionate, for text there is
little advantage of either. GDocs seem a bit more peppy.

I was reading a Paul Graham interview from a while ago:
[http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/02/an-interview-with-vc-
pa...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/02/an-interview-with-vc-paul-graham-
of-ycombinator/)

Here is an interesting quote: " I wouldn't advise competing with Google in
things they're good at. So what is Google good at? As a first approximation,
making things their own developers use at work. So they'll do a better job on
an online calendar than a video sharing site, for example, because their
employees are probably not supposed to be sitting watching videos at work. "

He goes on to mention Google's size, which is probably another factor here.

It would be interesting to hear more about what folks at Y-Combinator think
about this direct assault on a growing Google service.

~~~
pg
It's an indirect assault.

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bootload
_"If you have an unhappy customer on the Internet, he doesn't tell his six
friends, he tells his 6,000 friends"_

I like the data export (even with the free version). It's a nice touch. why?
it's my observation that users don't care about the software they use as much
as they do about their data. so reading this makes me think they are in the
right mindset ~ [http://blog.versionate.com/2007/04/07/export-your-data-at-
an...](http://blog.versionate.com/2007/04/07/export-your-data-at-any-time/)

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dbosson
After watching the screencast I got some good insight into what Versionate can
do [the features], but I still don't know how it will improve my life [the
benefits].

I think you should really stress the benefits and tell people why it is so
important to have their files online.

Peace of Mind. You never have to worry about losing important files when your
computer crashes.

Instant access to your files from anywhere. If you forget your computer or
flash drive at home [no need to worry] your files are online and you can get
them when you arrive at work.

I think some simple comments like this could really help.

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jgamman
i for one am completely anal about version control. i work in engineering
offices and version control of, for instance detailed design drawings, is
extremely important - most things worth building with actual steel have quite
a few zeros after them and you NEVER want to have a conversation half way
through the build that starts with "i'm using v3.4.3.5 which one are you
using?". most CAD software for instance has version control as the entry
point, not at the end. when i did a stint in an office environment i was
appalled at their version control (it's on the CFO's hard drive and he just
re-saves it as a new version - not neccesarily date driven...) and was in a
meeting with their multi-million budget review when two VP's discovered they
were reporting actuals vs budget from two different versions (not sure if one
or both were wrong...). what problem/value does versionate give to customers?
IMHO an unbelievable amount - centralised storage (even on your own server), a
weblink that only has the currently released best version, the ability to
import/export - these are all Very Good Things. I really hope you guys do
well. Oh and btw, i love the pricing scheme.

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Alex3917
There seems to be this new crop of ridiculously overdesigned websites
recently. Versionate, Docstoc, iscrybe, etc. I'm not sure how I feel about it.

I was reading Viktor Frankel's holocaust memoir recently. He makes the claim
that people find meaning in their lives through meeting people, going places,
doing work, and through unavoidable suffering.

I think he's right. And sometimes I think that web designers would do well to
add a little unavoidable suffering.

Some of these new websites seem user centric to the point of being obsequious.
It's kind of like when a guy is following around a girl and constantly doing
nice things for her. You'd think it would be cool, but it gets kind of creepy
after a while.

The concept is solid and the technology is brilliant. It just makes me a
little uncomfortable for some reason.

/least useful criticism ever :-)

~~~
marcury
indeed. you have absolutely no argument whatsoever. please take the psuedo-
intellectual crap back to reddit.

please cease (ooh, rhyme) the horrible analogies and abstractions as well.

p.s. how on earth does a document management app make you feel uncomfortable?
please step outside of your sheltered world and take a stroll

~~~
natrius
You seem to have noticed that discussions are far better on news.yc than they
are on reddit, but you clearly haven't figured out why. Most people who decide
to comment make sure their comments actually add to the discussion, which the
grandparent poster did, even if you disagree with him. You, however, didn't.

Don't leave, just post smarter.

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Tichy
Great Logo!!!

The beginning of the screencast made me think, about the "folders as you would
expect on your desktop": actually a lot of people don't really understand
folders and files. They just press "save" in word, which then uses the first
few words of the document as filename. If the document disappers from "recent
documents" in words, these users have trouble recovering their documents...
Just a thought - it definitely seems to be more targeted at cooperations, on
the other hand, maybe a lot of users would benefit from an iTunes/GMail way of
organising the documents (ie just keep them in a flat list and tag them)?

Versioning documents is another thing that people have lots of trouble with,
so versionate definitely offers something new and worthwhile in that respect.

~~~
koolmoe
I would think that the average user in the target market for this app knows a
little something about filesystems.

~~~
Tichy
As I said, corporations will probably now. It was just a thought - why limit
yourself to corporations? Who is the target audience anyway? Somehow that
famous sentence comes to mind: "we estimate the global demand for computers to
three machines".

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gleb
Very impressive. When did you guy start to work on this?

Suggestion -- Quicktime plugin is not universally installed, and you target
audience is not just Apple users (see your Google Analytics report). Use
Flash.

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mxh
This may be a silly question, but it's something that's bothered me ever since
Scribd launched: How do you handle all the file format conversions?

It seems to be that you couldn't be wrangling all those formats yourself, as
many are undocumented, and/or hideously complex, and you've got to do a lot
more work than simply reading the files, and not much time to do it. So, are
there some off-the-shelf components to do this work (with reasonable license
terms), or is the problem easier than it seems?

I'm most interested in the MSFT formats, which seem the trickiest.

~~~
natrius
My first guess would be Abiword. In the course of putting together an open
source word processor that can handle a couple of different closed file
formats, they've spun off their code into libraries. The wvWare library
handles Word files. <http://abiword.com/projects/>

As far as I know, the whole Abiword project is GPL, though that shouldn't
matter much for server-side code, unless you're letting your customers host
the service themselves, like Versionate seems to be planning on doing... I
guess you could just pipe the output from a thin wrapper around the library to
the rest of your code.

~~~
martin
It could be done this way, but frankly, Abiword's Word importer isn't very
good. OpenOffice's, while not perfect, is much better. Unfortunately, unlike
Abiword, OOo doesn't come with a nice command-line utility for doing those
conversions. OOo has a VBA-esque language that allows you to automate tasks
like that, but it's a lot more suitable for more "interactive" purposes than
as part of another app's backend.

Another thing to note is that some of Scribd's backend is written in C#. Maybe
if your app is Windows based, there are Office API calls that let you do stuff
like this. Just a guess, though.

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budu3
It looks like YC has a soft spot for services that bring desktop apps to the
web. Snipshot,zenter, kiko, jamglue, buxfer.

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hello_moto
I used JotSpot before and nobody in my previous office like the editor because
it's very clunky. The auto-save and all that were really an annoyance than a
lifesaver.

When I read (via their blog) that Versionate is doing similar thing.. I don't
know if I should give it a try...

~~~
immad
its faster to give it a try than read its blog

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jsjenkins168
The title of this and the Techcrunch article are misleading.. Does this
service wrap Google Docs via the pubic API? (is there even one?)

~~~
davidz
No, this does not depend on Google Docs. I believe the article is saying this
is likely a competitor to Google Docs.

~~~
immad
I changed the title so that it makes more sense and is more flattering than tc
probably intended :)

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drusenko
very cool... much much improved since the last time I played with it!

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luxiou
sweet, congrats guys! -- who's on pager duty? ;)

~~~
davidz
butts glued to chair. no pager :)

