Google-backed SeedFund injects $1 million into Lifeblob, but this start-up may be DOA

August 14, 2008 | Dan Kaplan | Comments |

updated
Today, SeedFund, an Indian VC firm backed with Google cash, announced a $1 million investment in Lifeblob, a Bangalore-based lifecasting company whose awkward name just about says it all.

Lifeblob is a kind of digital diary that maps the media you share and thoughts you write onto a timeline. You can adjust the scale of this timeline to reflect the history of your online life in increments ranging from every day to a somewhat ambitious 100 years. Each entry appears as a “blob” that you can click on to expand. Sound a bit confusing? Take a look for yourself:

Lifeblob joins an increasing number of start-ups doing variations on this theme. These include Dandelife, Dipity, AllofMe and, in some ways, Plurk. Of the batch, Dipity and AllofMe are the most similar.

The key difference is that Lifeblob allows you to tag each entry with friends and events and inserts overlapping entries from other people’s timelines into your own. In concept, this means that if the VentureBeat team goes to dinner and everyone shares photos and comments about it, we get to memorialize the points in time and space where our lives intersect. In practice, it means an overwhelming degree of visual clutter that is difficult to understand.

Both Dipity and AllofMe have designed cleaner, more navigable interfaces and Dipity has implemented a number of applications for the concept that are arguably more compelling than lifecasting. For example, Dipity allows users to create historical timelines that other users can then edit and expand, which can result in awesome visualizations of the history of internet memes or virtual worlds. It’s easy to see how this could evolve into a great tool for visual search.

Considering how fast Dipity continues to add appealing features and the overall superiority of its execution, it’s hard to see Lifeblob as anything but an also-ran, despite a few extra “social” bells and whistles. That being said, $1 million goes a long way in Bangalore, and the company will have time to change the game plan.

The company, which has been in beta for months, opened up to the public today.

[Update: Mint broke the news about the Lifeblob announcement. Also Pluggdin mentions several other investments by SeedFund, including Printo, RedBus, Agencyfaqs, Carwale, and notes that SeedFund is looking to raise another $30M fund.]

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About the Author, Dan Kaplan

Once upon a time, Dan considered himself a magazine journalist with dreams of "The New Yorker" and a couple of well-reviewed but only mildly successful books. Then one day, life, as it is known to do, decided it was time for rebirth. Like so many things before it, this rebirth was conceived on a mostly-empty plane to Reno. Now, instead of magazine writing, Dan would plunge into the world of New Media and write for Matt Marshall's blog.

It's funny how it goes.

  • Dan - thanks for covering us on VentureBeat. However, I am really surprised that you marked it as doa because all the lifecasting services combined, only form a tip of the iceberg - there is a lot more exciting stuff to come and there is plenty of room for innovation.

    The concept of lifeblob is really simple: Every moment of your life can be looked upon as a piece of your life, shared with people, places and things around you at that point in time. And we allow people to capture those moments and view them from different perspectives. If you look at the big picture, lifeblob is like a huge mesh of timelines that are interconnected through the posts that are made on them and we allow you to either walk on one timeline to view its progression in time, or use a post as a bridge to jump from one timeline to another thereby meeting interesting people and discovering interesting content.

    This concept has some very interesting implications:

    a) For starters, imagine all your friends and family posting stuff on their timelines - the stuff that is relevant to you automatically pops up on your timeline and also becomes a part of it.
    b) As you add to your personal diary, you automatically contribute to several others thereby collaboratively building interesting stories. This is great for parents who want to capture their child growing up or for conferences that want to capture their progression over time.
    c) You get to view your life from various perspectives and in various contexts - personally, I love to see the portions of my life that I have spent with my friends in Austin vs in India.
    d) You get to discover what else is going on in a particular context - I visit my previous company Trilogy’s timeline to see updates about Trilogy for example.
    e) It becomes a great tool for sharing stories in general about any theme or topic. You can also embed your timeline and showcase your story.

    As for the issue of clutter that you mention, we have solutions to deal with it and you will see them in action real soon. Your comments inspire us to make lifeblob better - stay tuned for more !!
  • If you can make the interface terrific, the concept becomes more interesting. I'll keep my eye on Lifeblob, and feel free to keep me posted on significant developments.
  • edhardy622
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