First//Look: Pownce (alpha)

The newest venture from Silicon Valley entrepreneur Kevin Rose (Digg CEO, Revision3, etc.) is the much hyped Pownce. To date it's been billed as everything from a Twitter killer to an email and instant messenger replacement. I Pownce here (Thanks to Jim Kukral for the invite).

The product is still in Alpha (meaning it's fairly unstable and in active development), but let's take a first look.

[Feed readers please click through to the post to see the video.]

Items of note on Pownce (alpha):

• Not overly impressive at this point, but shows strong potential as a communications platform
  
• Not a Twitter-killer until mobile hooks are put into place
  
• Easy to put contacts into groups to streamline communication
  
• Reliability will improve as the product goes into beta and then launches
  
• Nice use of Adobe's AIR framework to make install easy and application response good
  
• Enhanced messaging makes communicating easily
  

I'll follow Pownce as it moves into beta (mostly stable, minimum active development) to see how it unfolds. Look for new communications tools to emerge along this line in the next 6 months as more people try to invent the killer app.

If you know of a site or service you'd like to see me review let me know by email or in the comments here.

Related videos for marketers:

• Twitter for marketers
  
• Second Life for marketers
  

Technorati Tags:
innovation, interactive marketing, Twitter, Web2.0, Techno//Marketer, Matt Dickman, Pownce, alpha, Adobe AIR, Kevin Rose

Comments

[Gavin Heaton]

Beautiful, Matt. Now can you do one on Bougie? You will find it under your bed ;)

[Matt Dickman]

Gavin -- Thank you for the comment and for posting on it. I love that you find it useful. Bougie was a very interesting experiment in web2.0 buzz wasn't it?

[JibberJobber Guy]

Matt, this is awesome - I've read about Pownce on TC and a few tweets but wasn't quite sure what it was... this video really helps.

How about a review of my site, JibberJobber.com? It launched last year (May 2006) - you can think of it is a personal CRM with a huge emphasis on career stuff. It is, afaik, the first personal empowerment tool for me to use in career management, job search, network management (aside from the traditional CRM tools), and more.

Jason Alba
CEO - http://www.JibberJobber.com
:: self-serve career management ::

[CK]

You surprised me TWICE (!) in one week...I love this series (and love the name ;-). I'm telling you, with all the new "stuff" hitting our radars everyday, I can't see how these segments wouldn't save us time. Not sure if pownce is right for me but now I know what it is, what it offers and, equally important, what it doesn't.

Thanks...Happy 4th. And thanks so much for your help earlier today!

[Valeria Maltoni]

Matt:

This series is prime work and a small taste of your skill and understanding of the marketing landscape for technology.

[Matt Dickman]

JibberJobberGuy -- Thanks for the comment, I'm glad you found value in this. I'll take your site into consideration for a future post.

CK -- Glad you liked the post. This is an exciting new series for me to be able to share some of these invite only sites with others. Pownce is still so new that we'll have to wait for the beta to get a bigger picture.

Valeria -- Thank you for that compliment. It means a lot to me coming from you.