Summer YC startup launches: Versionate's Wiki End Run Around Google Docs | Hacker News Reader

Summer YC startup launches: Versionate's Wiki End Run Around Google Docs

techcrunch.com

26 pointsimmad31 comments

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...

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.

It's an indirect assault.

Yeah. I think PG might have changed his stance a little by backing these guys.

I should justify my comments -- I only spent 2 minutes on versionate and plan to come back to try more.

"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...

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.

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.

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 :-)

Suffering may (or may not) be good for people, but that doesn't mean it's the job of designers to supply it. Especially not the designers of something like Versionate. Versionate is a tool, and tools should be self-effacing.

Plus, most people are already way over their lifetime allowance for software-induced suffering.

meeting people, going places, doing work, and through unavoidable suffering

Rather odd summary of the holocaust experience. I'm really not sure if it's a good model for web design though.

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

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.

This is exactly the kind of comment that drags down reddit (and digg and slashdot). If you disagree with something, refute it instead of just calling names.

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.

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

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".

Great Logo!!!

Ubuntu inverse with an additional family member.

True, didn't notice that. Actually now is the first time I took a closer look at the ubuntu logo and recognized it as abstract people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

its faster to give it a try than read its blog

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

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

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

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

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

butts glued to chair. no pager :)

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