Scrybe, the online/offline calendar and organizer, has closed their series A round of financing from Adobe Systems Incorporated and LMKR. In what is becoming an annoying trend, the company is not disclosing the size of the round. You’ll probably recognize the company from the somewhat viral product demo that swept the blogosphere last October. Since then they’ve been through a private and public beta. Scrybe is a Flash-based organizational and productivity tool that works both online and offline. It consists of multiple calendar management, to do lists, web clip bookmarklet, contact list (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Outlook importing), and The system operates offline by caching your changes and then uploading when the system reconnects. Zimbra and Google Gears provide similar online/offline products. The driving principle behind the application is usability. Scrybe’s main selling point is that the application retains the context of the data that you’re working with by “zooming” instead of flipping to the data. One example is the calendar. The cells of the calendar expand and contract as you edit a week, day, or hour more closely while still showing the details of the surrounding days. See the extended video below for more details. → Read More
There were a bunch of product demos today at Adobe’s Engage event, but there were a few that stood out and should have a big impact on the startup world. They also happened to be some of the best demos of the day. Virtual Ubiquity – Rick Treitman demoed their word processor application, BuzzWord, which was built entirely in Flex 2 and looks like it could be a direct competitor to Google Docs. The team focused heavily on making sure pagination and typeography were first class, something Flash has been bad at. They’ve created a great UI around the document workflow and have features like ruler tooltips when embedding assets that help people work with their documents. They are focusing on the collaborative document space so that users can be designated as reviewers, read-only, or actual authors and discuss the document. They are aiming for a public beta later this summer. Scrybe – Faizan Budar presented Scrybe and showed the features that were in the video that generated so much buzz. He demoed all three major features live and made a point of saying that everything in the video is now working in the application. He showed off the calendar portion of the application, which has a great UI, the “PaperVision” which allows you to print your information into special pocket size chunks, and the option to save content to your Scrybe account from any website. The user interface is clean, useful, and it all works offline. They’ve opened up the beta to a limited number of people and hope to open it up to the general public after their next round of features are complete. yourminis – Alex Bard, the CEO of Goowy Media , demoed what yourminis is working on. A lot of it has been covered by TechCrunch, but they really dug into Apollo and the API that they plan to release next week. With Apollo, they are building out a widget platform that will touch the web, embeddable properties, and the desktop. Alex took a yourmini widget and dragged it to the desktop straight from the browser which made for a poweful demo. Their API is going to enable developers to create their own widgets on the yourminis platform. They built a Twitter widget using the API that is great, so I think content providers are going to be excited about the freedom that the API → Read More
Scrybe, the online/offline calendar and organizer with the awesome YouTube demo video we wrote about earlier this month, has launched into beta tonight. We’ve kicked the tires and can report that the parts of the service available now do deliver as advertised (see video again below). Accounts are being opened slowly but hopefully Scrybe won’t leave too many disappointed in the short term. It’s impressive and we hope that the full functionality comes online soon. For some people this will be very important: it’s not Ajax or Java – it’s Flash. Flash continues its march towards world domination, if it’s not there already. The basic idea is that the application can be worked with in a browser offline and automatically syncs up whenever you get back online. You can copy and paste list items from Word and Excel documents into Scrybe. There’s a whole lot of smooth zooming in and out and many things can be moved by drag and drop. The UI is almost as smooth as the demo makes it appear, though it would be nice if things shifted or resized to fit the browser window. A number of features have not yet launched, most notably the bookmarks, the global times display and data export. (Correction: global times have in fact been implemented.) Just a few hours into launch, though, the company has proven that it can bring to market a very fluid, multi-feature product that bridges the online/offline gap very nicely. → Read More
Jason Clarke found a great new startup today called Scrybe. It hasn’t launched yet, but they’re using YouTube to showcase the product (see video below). More companies should do this – it gives the company a way to show everyone exactly what their product is all about and control the messaging during the crucial pre-launch stage. Scrybe looks to be a unique online calendar application that works just fine when you’re offline, too. Just open the site in the browser as if you were online – the app will sync the next time you are online. The calendar view auto-expands and minimizes depending on what you are looking at. It also allows seemless cut and paste and integration with Office documents, as well as a way to bookmark and grab content from websites. They’ve even thought through proper printing of calendars, to-do lists and other content (this feature reminds me of possibly the least technically advanced startup we’ve covered). The online/offline functionality is what I like best about this product. This is something we discussed around email applications a few weeks ago, and is part of the promise of Adobe’s upcoming Apollo platform. This is definitely a startup to watch. Look for a launch this month. → Read More
