Our Blue Ocean

I love Nintendo. I vividly remember the Christmas of 1988 (I was 6), when my grandparents bought an NES for my brother and me. This week's Fortune Magazine has an interesting article about Nintendo, and how they came back from trailing Microsoft and Sony with mediocre Gamecube sales in 2001 to trouncing them with phenomenal sales of the DS in 2004 and the Wii in 2006. Nintendo has sold two Wiis for every Xbox 360 and four for every PlayStaion3.

What's interesting to me in the article is the approach that Nintendo took when creating the Wii. CEO, Satoru Iwata explains "We are not competing against Sony or Microsoft. We are battling the indifference of people who have no interest in video games". He goes on to explain that they are creating a blue ocean (new markets) rather than enter the red ocean (bloody competition). The article gives another examples of a company that created a blue ocean. There's always been coffee, but Starbucks gave us the coffee experience.

I think that for a startup to be successful, it too must create a blue ocean. At MadKast we think that we are creating a new approach to sharing blog articles. Some could argue that it's really a red ocean since there are several other companies that provide a subset of our functionality; however, I think that our approach is revolutionary enough to call it a blue ocean. Current blog sharing widgets like addthis target hard-core technology people since these people are the only ones that really use social bookmarking tools. Sharethis allows users to easily email a blog post; however, it doesn't provide the blogger with any analytics on what is being shared and a user has to enter in the email address of the person they want to share with, their own email address, and their name every time they send an article.

We hope to expand blog sharing to include people who have no interest in technology. They want an easy, convenient, and standard way to share a blog post using more standard mediums like email, instant messenger, and text message. Of course, for those technology people, we'll include all the social bookmarking sites as well. And of course, we'll provide the blogger with detailed analytics of what is being shared.

More on MadKast to Pique Your Interest!

We thought we'd fill you in on a few more details about MadKast's progress. Almost all of the underlying technology has already been created. We have internal prototypes of our all-in-one, “sharing panel” and will hopefully have a hush-hush pre-beta release to our closest colleagues and friends most likely during the second half of next week. Tony Restuccia (at right), our CTO, is doing an amazing job writing the code that will power MadKast’s incredibly powerful and useful technology.

Though we can’t tell you too many specific details about the product just yet – so as to not tempt our potential competitors – here's a general overview of what MadKast will allow you to do once it’s fully up and running: you’re on a blog and you find a posting you’d like to share with someone you know. All you’ll have to do is click on the MadKast logo (shown next to the title of any blog post) and click on a friend or acquaintance and choose the method of sending (every conceivable way you could imagine!) and – viola – you’ve shared it! Piece of cake.

More soon, so stay tuned…..

What's MadKast?!

We are launching something fresh, revolutionary and it’s going to completely change the way you read, interact with, and share blog posts. It’s called madKast. For a little background, the Zemble team has been involved with a program called TechStars for about a month now and here we’ve had unprecedented access to incredible mentors and advisors. The fruit of this relationship is an almost-completely new product we’ve created. The only reason why it’s not completely new is because a lot of the underlying ideas and technology come from our experience with our text messaging and social network site, Zemble.com.

You know how almost every blog you go to has a completely different and disparate way to allow you to share their content with your friends? Some will let you e-mail a blog post to a friend; some, if you search for a few minutes, will let you share your content; other sites won’t let you share their content at all -- unless you copy and paste the link of the post into an e-mail sent specifically to a friend. Our mission here at madKast is to completely streamline and revolutionize the way any reader of a blog can share posts they find interesting, fascinating, maddening, (and any other reason you might want to share a blog post with someone you know) with other people.

Suffice to say, the way you might have tried to share content on the web will become immediately obselete as soon as madKast launches. For both publishers and readers, no more searching all over a blog to figure out how to share its content with other people; and no more being overwhelmed with all of these potential sharing and bookmarking buttons: digg; del.ici.ous; Google reader, etc.

Keep tuned to madKast a lot over the next few days and weeks as we roll out the best way for you to interact with blogs.

- The madKast team