The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Quick Pitch: Percolate bubbles up relevant content for you to comment on.
Genius Idea: Re-imagining the blog and what it means to be a publisher.
Content creation abounds on the web, whether it be on blogs, Facebook, Twitter or via other self-publishing tools. Still, James Gross and Noah Brier, co-founders of private alpha startup Percolate, believe that the barrier to create content is too high for most people.
It’s fitting, then, that the Percolate product is designed to streamline the flow between what we consume on the web and what we produce.
The application is structured into a two-pane dashboard that presents the user with content “percolating” — or bubbling up in popularity — from sources such as Google Reader and Twitter in a right-hard pane called the “The Brew.”
The Brew is meant to be your muse, a place to peruse hot stories and get inspired to add your own commentary. Here you can tag a post as “interesting,” “win,” “awesome,” “fail” or make up a tag of your own, and add a comment in the process. In so doing, as Gross sees it, you become self-publisher with as little friction imaginable.
To the left of The Brew is the second “What’s Percolating” pane. This is where Percolate-published stories from the folks you follow will appear.
Ultimately, Gross sees Percolate as the next big evolution of the blog. Twitter first transformed blogging by shrinking the big empty box, he says. Now Percolate is taking the box away completely.
It’s an ambitious mission, no question, but Gross and Brier may be able to pull it off. For starters, Percolate in its current form is just an early-stage, 1.0 product. Its pane design hints at a not-too-distant mobile future where users will able to browse and create content with their fingers in touch-driven environments.
Percolate’s primary flaw is that the intended experience does not automatically manifest itself to new users. “Just like Twitter, until you start to follow other people, it doesn’t make any sense,” Gross admits.
Gross and team hope to address the on-boarding obstacle in the months ahead. The bootstrapped startup also plans to announce that five Fortune 500 businesses are licensing its API, at a cost, some time in August. API license fees will be the startup’s moneymaker, as Gross sees huge opportunity in helping brands figure out how to create content and become better publishers in their social channels.
Percolate is still mid-brew, but 500 Mashable readers can get private beta access to the product now.
Image courtesy of Flickr, pkhamre
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark</p>
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
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