Pageflakes, an Ajax home page service that is headquartered in Germany, is preparing to launch a major user interface change in the next day or two. I interviewed co-founder and CEO Christoph Janz and head designer Jeremy Baines about the new launch – you can listen to the podcast at TalkCrunch.
A big part of the launch will be promotion of Pageflake’s recently added “publish” feature, where users can create pages with contact information, to-do lists, family pictures, etc. and either publish the content publicly, or share with a few friends. The site is also being completely redesigned (see screen shot below provided by company – sorry for the teaser).
Pageflakes has taken a low profile approach when discussing numbers compared to their primary competitor, Netvibes. While Netvibes (which launched their own redesign a few days ago) has publicized their $15 million venture round as well as user growth (first 1 million and then more recently, 5 million), Pageflakes has not released user numbers or the size of their BenchMark financing.
Regardless of the different marketing approaches of these companies, both are building a large and valuable user base and both have enough funding for the short and medium term. That’s good, because neither have generated any revenue yet. Given the extremely low burn rates of these and other new web startups, they have a while yet to figure out the best way to monetize their audience.
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