Geni Clone Made With Flex
Thu, 2007-11-29 13:00 — mikepotter
TechCrunch has a story on a Geni clone that launched recently that is quickly becoming more popular than Geni itself. The new site is available online at itsourtree.com for those of us who speak English, translated from the original site in German.
Its interesting to note the slant that TechCrunch took for this story and the response from the Sven Schmid, the co-founder of Verwandt.de. Nick Gonzalez was quick to mention the fact that they appear to have cloned the UI from Geni, and a few of commenters were pretty harsh on Sven's company. But I think Sven is bang on when he says in his comments "It is our belief it is all about execution. We must deliver a compelling user experience."
That's business these days on the Internet. If you have a successful idea, you can be sure that dozens of companies will try and copy you. With frameworks available to rapidly develop applications, with services from Amazon so your data and site is always available, its harder than ever to maintain a competitive edge. In the past the competitive edge in software came from proprietary formats. These days its from the user experience, and the resulting network effects of more visitors. Which I think is what Sven is saying.
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Comments
It´s all about execution
Hi Mike!
Full disclosure: I am the co-founder of verwandt.de/ itsourtree.com.
Appreciate your post (found it via Technorati). But I also consider Nick´s reporting to be very fair. As the topic itself is very emotional (the first Techcrunch regarding us generated way more than 100 comments), I can understand the other perspective as well.
However, I wrote back then that it will be all about exection - not only about creating the innovative interface. It is about building a community, localizing very well, meeting customer needs, getting the word out etc.
To give you some examples: We have different comic avatars for different markets. We have different versions for Portugal and Brazil. We have different profil fields for different countries.
It would be sad for us consumers out there having only an option. Monopolies suck. Competition and markets drive economies. And yes, the cost for buildung a web service have come down. And yes, we live in global world.
We are now growing very well in Mexico. To be honest: I never ever expected to be the first player in Mexico. We weren´t even the first player in Germany. But hey, Apple did NOT invent the MP3 player ;-)
Best, Sven
www.itsourtree.com