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Overheard

September 18, 2007

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Kerpoof at TechCrunch 40 tomorrow

September 17, 2007

The TechCrunch 40 conference is underway and TechCrunch is liveblogging it.

I’ve been acting as an occasional advisor for Apictura for almost a year now, which makes the very fun site Kerpoof.com. I was pumped a while back when Krista told me that Kerpoof was selected for the TechCrunch 20 conference (before it was renamed to the TechCrunch 40).

I had understood that I was not allowed to blog which Boulder company had made it in to the TechCrunch 40 until they presented. But since TechCrunch 40 has now made the list public, I decided I wouldn’t wait. Congrats to Krista and her team at Kerpoof.com for being in the TechCrunch Twenty, um, Forty. Good luck tomorrow - we’re cheering for you!

It looks like the new Kerpoof will be unveiled tomorrow morning during the presentation. They’ve come a long way since I first covered them here. I’ve seen the new stuff and I think you’ll be impressed. If you’re reading this on Monday the 17th, remember to check back on the new Kerpoof on the 18th or later. If you have kids from 7-12 years old, you’ll want to tip them off as well.

If anyone is on site at the conference, please comment on this post and let us know how she does on Tuesday morning. I’m expecting it to be great.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Congrats to the LivePitch winners

March 2, 2007

Congrats to today’s LivePitch audience favorite, Chaperon, and to the investor panel favorite Livengood Engineering. Each company received $500 cash and $500 in legal services from HRO. Thanks also to Silicon Valley Bank for sponsoring the event, as well as to the other companies who also did a great job presenting - Kerpoof.com, Magic Home Entertainment, and Torii Medical.

The guys from FundingUniverse.com did a great job of putting this event together in only about 10 days. We had about 50 people in the audience, and each person got $100 in “funny money” to distribute to their favorite companies after the pitches. This was kind of a neat way to go, because it got the audience talking up close and personal with the entrepreneurs.

In the end, it was a good networking event and seemed to live up to the spirit of EntrepreneurshipWeek USA. Hopefully FundingUniverse.com will come back to Colorado in the near future and hold another event, maybe with a bit more time to plan for it.

Thanks also to everyone who came out to check this out. I hope the networking and the experience was worthwhile.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups | 7 Comments 

Kerpoof - slick dynamic coloring for kids

February 6, 2007

Kerpoof.comKerpoof is a new Boulder company that recently launched a neat new product that lets kids create, color, print, and share within a browser, and it’s very cool.

“Kerpoof is all about having fun, discovering things, and being creative.” -Kerpoof.com

The first time I played with Kerpoof was about 4 or 5 months ago, I think. Jim Pollock of CTEK introduced me to Krista Marks, one of several Xilinx refugees who went on to become founders of Kerpoof. I got her initial “pitch” at that time, and it was immediately obvious that Kerpoof was just plain cool. It uses Ajax technology to provide a desktop-like living coloring book experience. You pick a scene, drag items into the scene, save it, print it, share it, etc. The scene is actually dynamic - for example, dropping a moon onto the scene alters the whole image to be set at night.

Back then, Krista told me that the goal was to create an advertising supported destination site where kids could come and start having fun in three seconds. Advertising to kids is is both tricky and touchy - you can’t just throw up a banner ad and expect it to have some impact. Krista had an interesting business model in mind called ‘immersive advertising‘. In this model, the kids actually play with the ads. Imagine, for example, a soda bottle that can be placed in the scene and manipulated. In Krista’s model, advertisers would pay for such placement.

My initial reaction was that although Kerpoof could become a destination site with large national-brand advertisers vying for placement, I felt that Kerpoof would have an easier time selling specific sponsors who would be interested in providing Kerpoof on their own web site in a white-label fashion.

It looks like Kerpoof is following both paths with their early customers, perhaps trying to nail the model in the best way possible - by experimenting and listening to customers. One such early customer is the Butterfly Pavillion, which has placed a ‘Play Kerpoof’ button on it’s home page. If you click on it, you can interact with a scene designed to reinforce the Butterfly Pavillion’s brand and image.

I had my 5 year old play with this a while back on his “hand-me-down” iMac (no way he’s getting his hands on the MacBook Pro). At that time, it was just too slow for him and he got easily frustrated. That was probably largely due to the fact that he was on a pretty old and slow machine. But I think lots of kids are using hand me down machines that aren’t going to do a great job of handling the latest, coolest Ajax tricks. When I tried it again this week on that same machine, it was much faster than it was a few months ago, but still lagged at times, essentially ignoring my requests. This will only continue to get better with time as the software gets quicker and machines get faster, but in the short term may still prove to be a big challenge for Kerpoof especially with younger, less patient kids (yes, like mine!).

Kids aged 5-14 are invited to participate in a drawing content using Kerpoof. Kerpoof has partnered with Boulder-based Kidz Magazine as part of an initial marketing launch for Kerpoof. Not a bad way to get exposure initial exposure to millions of kids.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |