#45: Services for Digital Lifestyle

November 17, 2005 By

On Wednesday afternoon I spent a bunch of time with ePlatform’s CEO, Ramana Kovi. He called me up and told me that now that we’re interested in services that I might be interested in seeing what his team has been building for the past few years.

And, wow, does he have a ton of services. More than 70 at last count.

He’s run away from the Web 2.0 look that other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are going with, though. He’s built a services portal (he calls it an integrated digital lifestyle service) and made it look similar to Outlook 2003. Why do that? Cause he says he noticed that most of his target users use Outlook and in his testing they were more comfortable with a set of services that look like Microsoft’s offerings. Smart, although I think it could use some more polish.

It’s in alpha testing right now, he expects to release a beta within weeks. I’ll let you know when it’s out. I played with several of the services and they were well done. He tells me that his team has been working on this for years and has written about 20 million lines of .NET code to build this set of services and the host container for them.

Definitely another Silicon Valley company to watch.

Filed Under: Blog Tips, entrepreneurs, Web
  • anon

    “20 million lines” ? You’re on crack. It takes a decade for a big team to write that. And that commensurates to an entire OS code. The only way to achieve this otherwise is to reuse a lot of open source code. But even, it means there is so much code it cannot be tested in months or even years. I don’t buy this, at all.

    “of .NET code” ? ah ah! even better.

  • anon

    “20 million lines” ? You’re on crack. It takes a decade for a big team to write that. And that commensurates to an entire OS code. The only way to achieve this otherwise is to reuse a lot of open source code. But even, it means there is so much code it cannot be tested in months or even years. I don’t buy this, at all.

    “of .NET code” ? ah ah! even better.

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ scobleizer

    His company has been working on this stuff for seven years. He has a sizeable team working on it. Is he telling the truth? I don’t see why he would lie, but he’s certainly done more in services than anyone else I’ve seen except for maybe the big three.

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ scobleizer

    His company has been working on this stuff for seven years. He has a sizeable team working on it. Is he telling the truth? I don’t see why he would lie, but he’s certainly done more in services than anyone else I’ve seen except for maybe the big three.

  • Carlos

    I’m sure Microsoft’s lawyers would be happy to hear that a competitor is illegally swiping the look and feel of one of MS’s websites or applications. In fact, they can get downright litigious in these situations. Robert, you should inform them immediately to avoid being named as an accomplice in copyright theft. Microsoft spends a lot of money in coming up with designs for their websites & applications, and you are tacitly supporting a competitor stealing from Microsoft’s intellectual property.

  • Carlos

    I’m sure Microsoft’s lawyers would be happy to hear that a competitor is illegally swiping the look and feel of one of MS’s websites or applications. In fact, they can get downright litigious in these situations. Robert, you should inform them immediately to avoid being named as an accomplice in copyright theft. Microsoft spends a lot of money in coming up with designs for their websites & applications, and you are tacitly supporting a competitor stealing from Microsoft’s intellectual property.

  • carnival of souls

    If I remember properly they had something with CRM and web services at the beginning…

  • carnival of souls

    If I remember properly they had something with CRM and web services at the beginning…

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  • Christopher Coulter

    20 million lines does seem like a good deal, beyond human reach.

  • Christopher Coulter

    20 million lines does seem like a good deal, beyond human reach.

  • james

    I don’t get it.

    Their website is just a splash page in safari,with an image of their services and 1 link to contact them.

    On firefox (mac) it’s a blank page.

    Do I need to fire up windows to see their sevices/

  • james

    I don’t get it.

    Their website is just a splash page in safari,with an image of their services and 1 link to contact them.

    On firefox (mac) it’s a blank page.

    Do I need to fire up windows to see their sevices/

  • http://www.sodaguru.com/ Lorenz

    This looks a lot like what Glide (http://www.glidedigital.com/glideallmedia/default.htm) is coming out with, sans the fancy graphics. It’ll be interesting to see if consumers are ready to trust a start-up with managing all their online activities in exchange for the convenience of having it all in one place.

  • http://www.sodaguru.com Lorenz

    This looks a lot like what Glide (http://www.glidedigital.com/glideallmedia/default.htm) is coming out with, sans the fancy graphics. It’ll be interesting to see if consumers are ready to trust a start-up with managing all their online activities in exchange for the convenience of having it all in one place.

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  • S.

    It seems like ePlatform has officially shut down…

  • S.

    It seems like ePlatform has officially shut down…