Omnisio - YC applicant - looking for feedback
Since you guys are great at providing feedback for alpha stage apps I wanted to throw ours out there.
http://www.omnisio.com/communitynext/funding-panel
http://www.omnisio.com/communitynext/where-ive-been
Those are two pages of content within our site. We're still closed to the public, so you wont find them linked from the main page.
Basically we are building a platform that will change the way people learn online. The examples above are only a very tiny subset of what we will offer, but show a couple of interesting ways of presenting conference sessions. The content is courtesy of the great Community Next conference earlier this month on the Facebook Platform.
All feedback is welcome - the more brutal the better :)
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13 comments
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Still, well-designed site, and useful content.
I found what it does but maybe the message in the wrong spot or too wordy?
- sitename No
- tagline not that I could find
- about, yes but a bit vague
So refine the message, Reduce the text. Eg: http://www.omnisio.com/images/about_us_blurb.gif
"... We will help 'everyday experts' of all levels of expertise to easily collaborate and publish their content online. ..." ~ http://www.omnisio.com/about
Will it work? ... Yes because learning is open-ended. Is it focused enough and meet a need? Thats an ongoing problem. Nice work. See Greenspun for advice, hints ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/
It's much easier to remove text and is something that an editor would probably suggest. I really like the idea you have ... demonstration through video - very effective. Reminds me a lot of say Google ( http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=genre%3Aeducational+so... ) or Yahoos ( http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/ ) video collections on technology & software.
I've got a question for you Ryan. When you decided to develop your app did you specifically try to be general in learning or focus in one specific area? The reason I ask is that the service can be made to cover all areas but at the risk of dilution in making what users want. The other extreme is you tailor you app to such a small market you don't get enough users.
How did you make this decision?
Yes my claim is very bold and ambiguous :) Conference videos are just the first niche we decided to focus on, but ultimately we will provide tools for representing a wide variety of information online, and corresponding tools for people to very easily create professional looking tutorials.
But still, what does it do? Can you summarize in a sentence without using abstractions?
The thing that struck me as really useful was the way you could use the slides to get an overview of and jump around inside a presentation. For me, that looks like a killer feature that could make me want to watch presentation videos through your viewer.
Except that the thumbnails of the slides are just too small to actually read. To make them useful for me for scanning the presentation without watching it all, I believe they would have to be big enough that the text is legible.
The content you have there seems to work very nicely. Nice usable details, like when you move you mouse over the thumbnails of the slides.
Sorry about the lack of brutality. ;)
Have you done a decent competitive analysis? I am not familiar with this space, but from what I know there are plenty of players.
Unusably slow on Safari 3.0.3 on my PowerBook G4.
In regards to the slowness - the old PowerBooks ran flash horrendously. This has now been rectified with the Intel macs - I can remember how badly flash used to run on my old powerbook, but since getting a MacBook Pro it's much better. Of course our player hasn't gone through the rigorous optimizing we have in store for it (it's just early days yet!).
Thanks for the feedback.