Jeff Zaretsky, Vice President of Business Development of KickApps.com and I had lunch today and I got to see KickApps's offices on West 38th Street. I wrote about KickApps - Social Media tools on Demand a few weeks ago - which got Jeff's attention and he invited me over to see his company.
For one thing - the energy in KickApps.com's office is great - and buzzing - more and more new people are being hired every week - and I got the impression this company is going to grow much larger and more successful - that's a gut feeling - I can't prove it one way or the other.
The decor of KickApps office is wonderful and deliberate; Krista Watterworth of HGTV's Save My Bath decorated the KickApps office. I don't know if she also decorated the bathrooms but she did a great job with everything I saw of their office suite. I took a photo or two but it came out blurry or else I'd post the photos here.
KickApps has about 40 employees and last week they added 3 more, just to show how fast they are growing.
KickApps, Ning and Magnify.net are all in the same market of supplying social media tools you can use to build your own social network from - they're are more similarities than differences though KickApps lets you build widgets onto existing pages while Magnify builds a page for you and hosts it on their site.
At the end of the day, the companies that make it easy and attractive to deploy Social Networks will succeed - and all 3 competitors are trying to do that but it appears that KickApps might have the edge.
Jeff and I talked about several new ideas and we both agreed that for many businesses the jump from KickApps tools and Widgets to application in each companies websites is not always easy - each business is different and some, like my architect client, Alan Mascord, would require some thought to figure out what to build and how to build it. This is a layer of support that all the Social Media vendors lack, at least, it looks that way to me.
We also discussed how the term "affiliate" for a site owner using KickApps can be misleading and I challenged them to come up with a better term.
I'll come back to KickApps.com for a visit in a couple of months - I want to hear how KickApps will develop a layer of services to help site owners build social networks based on what their business does.
I'd write more, but my eyes are closing and it's time for bed. All in all, I had a great lunch with Jeff Zaretsky; glad I came by.
