Interview: Goowy.com's CEO talks about the webtop's new features and receiving financing (not to mention free tickets) from Mark Cuban.Remember way back in 2005, when Web 2.0 was the hottest buzzword and companies were
falling all over themselves to make AJAX desktops? While most of those companies offered similar features—inbound RSS feeds, drag-and-drop modules—a company named Goowy offered users something different.
Instead of building an AJAX start page, Goowy developed a Flash-based "webtop" that offered e-mail, video games, and robust customization options for power users. The goal, said CEO Alex Bard, was to design a Web-based system that wouldn't just be a start page, but an immersive online environment.
That strategy seems to have paid off so far. Goowy, which has less than 10 employees, boasts about 100,000 active users. And on April 25, Goowy announced a new feature set, and said that it received a first round of funding from investors led by Mark Cuban. The amount of funding was not disclosed.
We caught up with Alex Bard to talk with him about Goowy's new features and their funding. An edited version of that conversation appears below.
We talked at the end of last year when I did an article on AJAX homepages. So what's changed with Goowy since then?
There have been significant changes. We rolled out integrated instant messaging, so you can go to Goowy and put in your Yahoo, or your MSN or your AOL account and message everybody online, all with one buddy list. We've added virtual file storage, one gig of storage, and we've made some major enhancements to mail. Plus we've got a whole new look and feel.
How has the homepage and webtop market changed since last year, if at all?
It hasn't changed dramatically. There are still a lot of AJAX homepages and start pages. They're all basically doing the same thing, which is aggregating other information for you. But not a lot of people have gotten into the webtop space. What start pages do, they give you a start page but they don't give you application functionality. For example, they can give you a feed to your top five e-mails in Gmail, but when you click through, you have to read your mail in Gmail. We're more of an operating environment.
How's Goowy planning to make money in this space?
It's like a pyramid, right, with multiple layers. First, there's advertising in the content itself. Then you've got premium services, which we'll be rolling out in the next 30 to 60 days, where you'll be able to increase your storage and turn off advertisements, among other things. Then there's the transaction model. Through these mini apps that we offer you can connect to Flickr and eBay and other sites, and whenever you use one of our apps to pay for a service, we get a cut of that.
Down the road, because of the way Goowy is architected, there are a lot of rich media advertising opportunities we can expose. We could build a skin around it, like for the Superman movie coming out or the new Batman movie coming out. There are a lot of specific branding opportunities.
So tell me about this Cuban investment.
Well, we closed the investment at the end of last year, but we didn't want to announce it until we were ready with the product updates. We decided to go with him because, well, you can see it, right? He's just a very passionate, very motivated, very out-of-the-box kind of guy. Plus, not only do we have meetings with him, but we also get free tickets to the games.
So besides seeing you courtside, what should we expect from Goowy in the near future?
We're going to be opening up our APIs. We've been tinkering with that. We've had a lot of people ask us about that, but we want to make sure we have a very stable product before we open it up.
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