Cricket360 Aims for Niche Cricket Audience
Niche portals can fare well if the subject matter is engaging to a large enough group of interested individuals. Cricket360 is an India based community site that aims to allow cricket fans to create profiles, instant message, live video chat and catch up on the latest news.
The founders say they are going to differentiate themselves by “going beyond providing the regular historical and real-time statistical data and news and information like other sports portals.” Which presumably means they are aiming to create content themselves as well as hoping for user-generated content through their cricket-specific social network. What remains to be seen is whether cricket360 can lure enough dedicated cricket fans to interact and create interesting cricket based content on their site, rather than their own blog or social network. Taking a look at the company’s site, it looks like they are planning on creating multiple sports based portals, which may be where the value lies for this business.
Wobook allows anyone to create professional ebooks
France based Wobook allows users to publish their own ebooks. Noone has really managed to bring ebooks to the mainstream in a profitable and intuitive way yet, so this could be one to watch. Wobook allows users to upload PDFs, Word documents and Powerpoint files to be transformed into ebooks, which are then hosted by Wobook. You can then embed them on Facebook, a blog or wherever you like.
As ever, the major barrier to a service like this is getting the userbase to upload quality content that people actually want to read. The phrase “everyone has at least one book within them” doesn’t necessarily mean they are actually good. A quick browse of the service’s frontpage yields some interesting results, Orson Welles’ 1984 in Spanish, a racy lingerie calendar and a tourist guide to Brussels in French. It would be interesting to see how they work out what ebooks to display to whom, as currently their homepage is a bit eclectic.
Hab.La Free Onsite Chat
Hab.la allows site owners to chat with their visitors using the Jabber IM client or GTalk. It’s free, which is always attractive for startups. The tool allows continuous chat even when the user leaves the site and moves on somewhere else.
A handy little tool that might be disruptive in the current marketplace if they can beef up the functionality to support features like multiple chat operators, to appeal to larger e-commerce stores and the like who often have teams of chat operators. They might even consider allowing users to chat to other users browsing the same page and develop some powerful social bookmarking tools to create a kind of real time chat version of stumbleupon.