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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

My picks for the ones that will be successful from the idea only, without looking at the bios of the founders or the websites:

- Notifo

- Zencoder (If they drop their prices. Those prices are horrendous for the REAL market they are targeting)

- Nowmov (with name change)

- Crocodoc (will sell, but will not have too many users)

- Gamador

- Cardpool

- Chromaom

- Answerly

- Zenedy

- Data Marketplace

- 140Bets

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IMHO, Etacts is clearly the best.

I'm hoping that Crocodoc does well because I have a need for their product in a few projects I'm working on. I think there's a need for an alternative to Print2Flash which is pretty much abandoned as near as I can tell. They seem to just collect payments and not respond to emails. They don't really compete with them exactly now but if they did that could be good for them.

I'm a co-founder at crocodoc, and would be interested to hear your reasoning behind your "will sell, but will not have too many users" comment. It sounds like you have a specific niche market in mind that you think crocodoc will gain traction in to the exclusion of others?

It's just difficult to explain, innit? I'm trying to imagine explaining exactly what crocodoc is to the misses and it's unclear. Usually, when there is this lack of clarity, it will tend to appeal to geeks or people who already want something like that, and not just everyone.

That's what I mean - it will be big within the crowd of people who take time to understand it, but the other people just won't get it.

re Zencoder: thanks for the mostly kind words. We've run a lot of numbers of a few hundred thousand files on representative websites, and we chose that pricing model because it was (1) pretty competitive relative to other options, and (2) it aligns incentives with our customers well.

But we'd love your input, so if you don't mind, I just shot you an email.

There's definitely some cool applications for this that I hope you get into. For instance, providing format templates, i.e.:

- encode multiple resolutions for silverlight's smoothhd streaming and generate the metadata file (http://www.cmstream.net/ used to provide an opensource way to do this but they pulled the src for some reason -- I have a src snapshot if you want)

- encode mp4/ogv for use with html5 video players like sublime (http://jilion.com/sublime/video)

- support mp3/ogg for html5 audio

- support imaging (like autorotating batches of images based on exif)

Pricing does seem a tad expensive. 6cents/minute versus ~9cents/hour for EC2. I'd probably be more likely to build my own solution just because it's cheaper.

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