How fast can you build a Website? How fast could you do it with just a mobile phone?
That’s the beauty of Zapd, which sees fast and easy Website creation as the solution for creating an online presence for practically any purpose: classified ads, vacation properties, or special events like weddings or birthday parties.
The “instant,” fill-in-the-blank Website crafter is being spearheaded by Kelly Smith, the creative force behind Inked.com, an early prototype for buying and selling graphic design. Zapd also boasts the investor muscle of a cadre of noteworthy Seattle investors including former Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, former Zillow.com CEO Rich Barton; former AtomFilm CEO Mika Salmi; Second Avenue Partners’ Nick Hanauer and Mike Slade; and former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford, among others.
According to Smith, Zapd is different because nobody has “ever let you make a styled Web site from a phone before.” “It’s just never been done,” he added. For example, using an iPhone, you can either choose from one of the 210 Web site themes available or take a photo and use that to create a Web site in a matter of minutes, and share it via email and Twitter. “The goal with Zapd” says Smith, “is to create an easy-to-use Web publishing tool “without coding, computers, ethernet cords or designers.”
At present, the free app is just available on the iPhone but Android is on the way. Themes are broken into various categories, such as World Travel, Poster Art, Wedding Day and Newborn Joy. Check it out in this video. [24×7]
Zuck’s Seattle Visit Outlines Facebook Trajectory
Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was in Seattle last week to brief this new engineering troops here on where Facebook is heading. The observations were surprising.
For one thing, Zuckerberg sees the Web’s social infrastructure as having reached an inflection point. It is social infrastructure that is now being taken more seriously.
Zukerberg foresees a trend of new apps predicated on the fact that over 90 percent of their users are already part of a social network and have easy access to their friends and can easily share with them. “The next 5 years are going to be about all the crazy things you can do now that all those people are connected, and I think it’s going to be cool,” Zuck told the crowd of Seattle developers.
“We find that every year on average, the amount of stuff that a person is sharing will about double,” said the social network founder. “And it’s different things each year. So one day, let’s say you’re sharing 5 things a day right now. Maybe you post a status update and you like two things and you write a comment, then statistically if this trend continues, then that means that next year you’re probably going to be sharing 10 things, and the year after that you’ll be sharing 20 things a day and the year after that 40. And the way that the exponential math works out, is that 5 years from now, if that stays true, then people will be sharing 32 times as much stuff as they are today. And 10 years from now they’ll be sharing 1024 times as many things — maybe not exactly 1,024 but 1,000 times more things as you are today.”
“You can kind of project out intuitively what the world is going to have to look like at that point to get to that. And what are some of the trends that are driving that, one of them is that there’s all these apps that are going to be developed that are social that you can kind of already seeing that are giving people new ways to share things.”
“Mobile is another huge trend, with users connecting to social networks at all times, not just in front of their computers. In fact one of the recent rumors about Facebook losing active users was due to an internal Facebook bug that miscounted mobile-only users, which are becoming more common.”
Listen to an audio clip of Zuckerberg’s comments here. [24×7]
