[Posted on April 3, 2006 - 3:10 PM]
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DiggGibu Thomas, CEO of Sharpcast, was surprised by the negative rating VC Ratings gave his company. After the company announced $13.5 million in second round funding from Sigma Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Selby Venture Partners, I questioned its ability to build barriers to entry and whether a startup will be able to capture the market they're going after.
Thomas does not lack ambition. And the product --which is being launched for the first time today-- is useful and easy to use. However, I still question whether Sharpcast will be able to be the company that can capitalize on people's desire to sync their mobile phone, desktop and web-based files. Judge for yourself by watching the video below. — Joshua Jaffe
Hey Josh,
I want to clarify that the product is being only made available via an invitation-only alpha at this point. Anyone is welcome to sign up on our website, which gives you the best odds of having early access to the product until we have a public launch later this spring.
Also, to elaborate on the question of why what we do is hard, it is the same reason why a Blackberry/Exchange push experience for email is hard. We are enabling that same experience for consumer media, so you have one view of your data that transparently stays up-to-date regardless of whether you are on your desktop, mobile device or the web. The resulting experience allows you never again have to worry about tedious web uploads, clunky mobile web browsers, managing multiple collections of your data and manual backups.
Thanks for your time!