Seedfund has invested $1 million in Bangalore based Lifeblob reports Incubator.
Lifeblob was showcased at Proto.in in July, and though I’d missed the presentation, I did have a 45 minute conversation with one of the founders – Rakesh Rajan – about the service and how they intend to monetize it. To be honest, I wasn’t very convinced about the viability of the service and its use-case; obviously the investors must have had access to more information and plans. There does appear to be an exit route, though:
Lifeblob essentially aggregates a users life putting together a time-line via photos and blog posts. They’re also allowing users to receive user content from other sources like Flickr. Now what’s interesting is that updates are tagged and may be shared between users – for example, a bunch of friends who update their Lifeblob with details of their Udaipur trip can be connected via their timelines and updates, making it easier to go through the trip later. A public timeline for Udaipur can also reveal updates from tags from other users. Take a look at the timeline for Delhi. This is one element that I think they can monetize – in the form of user reviews, photos and inputs for travel, but for this, their interface will have to be made more reader friendly, as well as advertiser friendly. The interface, though it allows users to move across timelines easily, is not very reader friendly, and take a long time to load. A lot of people were raving about that interface at Proto, but I see it more as a hindrance to content discovery.
The other interesting element, which I discovered today while going through Lifeblob’s blog is trends. An exit could be available via companies that want to acquire user data for delivering advertising – given the kind of information, the connections, and the tags that users are sharing about themselves on Lifeblob. Imagine this integrated into Google’s already burgeoning database on users. For this, Lifeblob will have to achieve a fairly large userbase, and go beyond India – which I was told they’re already planning to do. For that, $1 million may not be sufficient.
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3 Comments until now.
While I congratulate the lifeblob team for building up an application which has an impressive interface (but possibly not the easiest to grasp on immediate viewing), Nikhil – I do agree that its a little bit more difficult to understand how exactly they’re going to monetize this site other than advertising for the time being.
VentureBeat recently reviewd lifeblob and they were less than flattering. Check out the post here: http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/14/google-backed-seedfund-injects-1-million-into-lifeblob-but-this-start-up-may-be-doa/
The other issue is that I’m not entirely sure that an application such as this warrants a standalone platform. Likely users of a site such as this are already on social networks such as Facebook – and pretty well entrenched. Given that FB already has applications such as events – surely integration with it – and leveraging information that users have already fed into FB would make more sense.
Gautam Kshatriya
gautam.kshatriya@moneyvidya.com
http://www.moneyvidya.com
Nikhil – thanks for your coverage of lifeblob. I would love to catch up with you sometime to understand your point of view on the service, but I think you have some valid points in this post:
a) I agree with you that the interface could be made more reader friendly. We have feedback from our users and we are working on it – expect to see some major enhancements shortly.
b) An advertiser friendly interface will certainly become important down the line, but is not our priority at the moment. At this point, we are solely focussed on addressing the needs of our users.
Also, currently the web interface is the only channel for consumption of information at lifeblob and we are working on making the service available through other channels like mobile – that will allow us to reach a wider audience. As I see it, lifecasting services have only scraped the tip of the iceberg and there is a lot of exciting stuff to come – stay tuned for more !!
@gautam – Our value proposition is very different from that of facebook and the complexity of a service like lifeblob would be hard to manage as an application on facebook. That said, I do agree with you that integration with existing platforms like FB and OpenSocial makes a lot of sense and we have plans to do that.
Hi Pranav,
will respond to this in a bit. was looking for your card, in fact, before this went up so we could have a chat; couldn’t find it. my co-ordinates: nikhil AT medianama DOT com and +91-981o31oo53.
best,
nikhil