BricaBox Archive

The next juicy episode of nextNYers is live. This time, Meghan speaks with newly-launched BricaBox and its CEO Nate Westhimer. We covered the BricaBox launch earlier this month. Nate discusses BricaBox technology, competitors and funding. Three takeaways are:

• Provides a powerful web publishing platform that’s easy enough for everyone
• Estimated value at launch is between $1M and $5M
• Plans to open up to outside developers in 6 months

Nate Westhimer, founder of NYC-based startup BricaBox, has a review of his time in Las Vegas from the exhibitor perspective. You can also read my recap of the event from an attendee/speaker perspective.

An excerpt, "In a nutshell, it’s my take that the exhibitors were a bit shortchanged and nickel-and-dimed, but that going to the conference was overall a good decision for us, and that I will go back next year… hopefully as a speaker, since we do offer a unique perspective on the future of personal web publishing. Anyway, it’s my suggestion that if conference staff wants to see any of the same exhibitors again, they should offer deep discounts in recognition of us propping up this first try. And also let me be clear: this first try was a success, even considering some headliners backed out. I just think that the people who propped it up should be recognized next year. I would also suggest that Las Vegas is a bad place for this. A better populated city would draw the ‘real users’ exhibitors are really looking for."

I like Vegas for this event as it seems to be a more social event and so coming to a "fun" city like Vegas makes sense. Though I absolutely understand Nate’s point in that if it was in NYC, tons more would have come for free expo passes. If we look at SXSW, which is also a social event, there is no expo hall.

It will be interesting to speak to some of the other exhibitors to see if they are in agreement with Nate’s comments.

A new NY-based startup launched in Alpha mode today. Named BricaBox, their goal is to bring a new and innovative publishing platform to the Web. In this morning’s BlogWorldExpo keynote, Matt Mullenweg said we still have a ways to go to create the perfect publishing platform. Is BricaBox a step closer?

So far what I have seen is many directories and lists on Bricabox including a company directory, a quick bites directory, etc. Where applicable it can pull in info from Technorati and Compete. It has a wiki-like function so that anyone can edit the information in the directory – this is something many of the large directory sites need. 

"BricaBox takes blogging and wikis to the next level", says CEO Nate Westhimer. I guess to me BricaBox makes blogging and wikis smarter by adding in additional items that by default wikis don’t have. If you think of a local eats wiki, it’s usually text and pictures. BricaBox can add maps on-the-fly with directions, and links to other reviews. It’s richer than a standard tool.

I think they need to work on the look – it just looks so super-geeky and has no mainstream appeal. Perhaps they are working on that as they move through the alpha stage but it’s important to think about who they are targeting. Below is a video I captured today at BlogWorldExpo. (the audio is not great so turn up your speakers).