Web 2.0 Summit

The Web 2.0 Summit is currently underway in San Francisco. According to their website, the summit "...focuses on emerging business and technology developments that utilize the web as a platform...". Here at ZCubes, that is a big part of the concept behind the product. Since I was unable to register for the event, I have been following Richard MacManus' Read/WriteWeb blog for information about the proceedings of the summit. Thanks to Richard for providing excellent coverage of the summit.

One of his posts that really interested me was about Mary Meeker's (from Morgan Stanley) presentation about the current and projected future states of the internet. The slides from the presentation are also available online. A few things in the presentation that caught my eye were:

• Watch where the younger generation goes
• Community/User generated content(UGC)/Personalization are the key...

At ZCubes, one of our biggest goals is to provide users with the freedom to shape their web experience and content as desired. We know of sites like Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube that allow posting of UGC related to specific content (photos, video etc.) as well as MySpace obviously that provides a platform to create personal pages. However, these sites can be fairly rigid in their structure as far as content management is concerned. Hence, users especially younger ones, frequently look for HTML code snippets and other ways to try and stand out in the crowd. Most often, this approach does not go far in their attempt to personalize and can also be difficult for a lot of them. Also, since these sites are typically focused on or get associated with a particular functionality (social networking, photo management, amateur videos etc), all the user postings to those sites get associated with that functionality. At ZCubes, our goal is to remove these hindrances to personalization and customization by making it easy by providing simple drag-drop based utilities. Additionally, the focus is to allow the users to create different profiles (e.g. work, home, school, fun etc) and use the platform for different tasks associated with those profiles (e.g. create portals, academic work, manage work/home content etc).

The first external Beta has been released and we need a lot of feedback about usability and functionality related issues. We are continuously working on improving the product but realize that what users want/don't want as well as like/dislike is most important. So, please feel free to check the website and use the platform. We would love to hear back from you.