ITerating launches wiki for software
ITerating.com, a New York company, has launched the first Wiki-based directory of software.
It covers open source, commercial and hosted software.
It’s early, and isn’t exactly jam-packed with reviews yet. But then it only opened in January, and tomorrow makes its launch announcement. It says it has about 10,000 uniques so far this month.
It has raised a $350,000 angel round from Larry Augustin, founder of VA Software, parent company of open source repository site Sourceforge.net, and Brian Roberts, former Corporate Vice President of Corporate Development at Microsoft. We played around on it, and it looks useful. It has a simple profile page for each software, and a helpful matrix function, so you can say, compare the features of Blogger and WordPress blog software (see image below; WordPress, of course, wins hands down). ITerating includes reviews, ratings, and articles. It uses Semantic Web tools (including RDF) to combine user edits with Web service feeds from other sites.
There’s nothing like it, as far as we know. Sourcelabs has SWIK, which is for open source software only. Founder Nicolas Vandenberghe says he hopes to make money from advertising (sponsored links from vendors) and from lead generation fees. Realistic? The software market is worth about $300 billion, Vandenberghe notes — and about a third of that, or about $100 billion, is now spent on sales and marketing. Sourceforge, a site that lets developers manage open source software projects, gets 30 million unique visitors a month — and Vandenberghe says he aims for a similar sized audience.
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Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
