information about what they actually do. Here's the email interview I did with him. Enjoy:Hello. My name is Alex Bard and I am the co-founder, President and CEO of goowy media, inc. where I am primarily responsible for the corporate vision, product strategy, and marketing / business development initiatives.
goowy is an innovative product company focused on creating consumer based web applications that help you manage your digital lifestyle. We currently offer 2 products, the goowy webtop (www.goowy.com ) and yourminis (www.yourminis.com).
The goowy webtop offers you a set of fresh tools for managing your digital lifestyle, including email, contacts, calendar, file storage, integrated instant messaging, minis and games.
Yourminis is a personalized start page that lets you check your email, see the weather, read news, subscribe to rss, watch youtube videos, search the web, look at flickr photos, save bookmarks and more all from one place.
Prior to starting goowy I was part of the early / founding team of two other internet startups. In 1996 I was at eShare technologies where we developed chat, bulletin board and customer service software for some of the internet's largest portals including Lycos, Geocities, and AOL. The company grew from 6 people to over 100 in a few years and ultimately sold in 1999 to a public company.
After eShare, I was one of the co-founders of a company called eAssist Global Solutions, where we developed internet based customers service solutions. The company grew from 6 people to over 300 but unfortunately ran into difficult times in the dot bomb era. eAssist was sold in 2004. I then took some time off to think about what to do next and came up with the idea for goowy with some of the other co-founders.
We added minis or mini applications into the goowy webtop late last year. We received very positive feedback on the product and decided to roll it out as a stand alone application called yourminis – referring to "your minis". We though the name fit the concept very well.
3. What about actual implementation: development, team, financing, etc.?
Goowy has been in development for 2 years now and live for a little over a year. Yourminis was released last week and is an extension of the original goowy webtop. From a financing perspective Mark Cuban is an investor in the company and has been very supportive of what we are doing. You can see a recent post he did on the yourminis release here http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/11/15/check-out-my-mini.
We have a very talented small team of developers who have been able to do some incredible things with Flash and turning our vision into a real product that many people use all over the world as part of their daily digital life.
4. What got you interested in making this Internet/Web 2.0 service ?
My partners and I have always been entrepeneurial and grew up with the Internet starting in the mid 90s. Our history is rooted in developing web based communication applications. We have a passion for creating dynamic web applications that improve peoples lives - goowy and yourminis are an extension of that thinking and passion.
5. There are a few competitors out there like yourminis. How does your service differ from them?
Yourminis is unique 3 ways, experience, access and publishing.
1. Experience – we provide a more multimedia, experience for managing a dashboard of minis. We give offer you an immersive environment where you can personalize the experience to any degree.
2. Access - Users can choose how to access your minis. You can access it as a personalized start page inside of the browser, or as a browser plugin for firefox, ie, and flock, which gives you added 1-click features and a heads up display, and in the near future as a desktop client.
3. Publishing - We believe we have a much better way to publish content. You can publish it as an entire tab or as individual minis that you can add to your personal pages. Take a look at a few examples of published pages - www.yourminis.com/coldplay and www.yourminis.com/gearsofwar. We are also releasing a community around published tabs so that you can rate, find and comment on tabs.
4. Mind to share how many users do you have right now and how much traffic does the site get?
The goowy webtop (www.goowy.com) has had over 500,000 people log in and use the application and we are a top 20,000 site. Yourminis is a new offering but the traffic has been great and we are a top 10,000 in our first week of release.
5. Do you have any new features in the pipeline ?
We are working on a few key features including a community for discovering and sharing published tabs - think youtube but with tabs for search, ratings, comments and more. We are also working on releasing public APIs that will allow developers to build widgets onto the yourminis platform. In addition we have a lot of really cool widgets in development.
Comment Preview