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Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Divvio: The real deal?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A new startup launched today has the potential to gain a lot of attention in the online industry, should the product live up to its promises.
Divvio, the brainchild of telecom pioneer Hossein Eslambolchi, reportedly will find audio and video automatically, creating personalized multimedia channels based upon a user’s preferences and online habits. Baseball fans, for example, could have a dynamically updated channel of clips on a favorite team pulled from multiple sources each time they signed on.
The big challenge for Divvio - aside from whether its technology will work as advertised - is whether users will have the patience to stick with it through its growing pains. The engine that recommends content was not available at launch today. Divvio will only crawl a portion of the Web to start and its technology will need time to learn user preferences. It doesn’t work yet with mobile.
Divvio officials told Business Week last week the product will probably only find 10 percent of what a user wants initially, but figure it will grow to 60 percent by year’s end.
Why should Divvio be taken seriously? Eslambolchi was the leader who overhauled AT&Ts aging voice and data networks, turning the company around.
Amid the clutter of Web 2.0 startups, Divvio may be one to watch.
