Lately, many curation products have been announced. Scoble mentioned Curated.by, Storify, Keepstream and Bag The Web. More recently, Robin Good did a really thorough analysis, including comparison tables, covering about 20 tools. And here we are, developing a product to help professionals aggregate content. Should we give up now and go home?

Not really. These are the reasons we really want to push forward with Bundlr:

There are many problems to tackle

Scoble started with 7 needs. Now Robin added more 25! And there are probably more with further research. The thing is, content curation is becoming a term too broad to define a single tool. Most out there are trying to solve only a set of those needs, targeting specific niches. And so is Bundlr. We’re focusing on making content aggregation simple and useful. (We already found that curation isn’t the best term to explain Bundlr to potential costumers.)

It’s a big market and no tool has yet achieved significant adoption

And I don’t expect one to become a standart, like some asked. The market for information professionals is large and heterogeneous, even if you count only professional bloggers and journalists. And it’s undeveloped so far.

No proven business model

Advertising on curated pages, sponsored streams, freemium, are some business models being tried out. It still isn’t clear what works best. Therefore, there’s room for innovation.

So, all the news around this market have only incresed our excitement for building Bundlr. But they’re also a warning: that we should focus more on the feeback we’re getting from potential costumers and less on the competition. Now, back to work.

Had a great time at FOWA London. It was a great oportunity to present Bundlr to new people and to do more general networking. We had the chance to talk with people like Josh Williams, Ryan Singer and Jason Calacanis, and profit from their valuable feedback. The venue was great and, surprisingly (it’s England after all), also the food.

While I’m catching up with the videos of the talks I didn’t attend, TEDxCoimbra is already this Saturday. If you’re also going, don’t forget to say hi :)

After reading this article on Hacker News I got curious about PickFu. It’s a service that allows you to ask a single A/B question to hundreds of persons, through Amazon Mechanical Turk.

It has several shortcomings though:

• The sample is skewed both geographically (USA/India) and in genre (more females)
• The sample is probably not related to your desired audience
• Your paying them, so expect more sympathetic answers
• Many answer as quickly as they can, without valuable feedback

Having that in mind, we decided to try it anyway. Since we launched an introduction page for Bundlr recently, we asked 50 persons whether they understood the information on the home page.

Overall, the results were 76% positive (sympathetic as I said :P). But the comments were the valuable result. Some examples of negative comments mentioning specific aspects we have to improve:

• Don’t know what a bundle is or where I would share a bundle.
• I have no idea what content curation is. Sounds like you are bundling something together.
• This is some complex stuff. I better description with illustrations is required for me.

And even the positive comments were insightful:

• It was very clear, I just question how it’s different from Stumble Upon etc
• I understood the concept and it was fine for “coming soon,” but some ideas on what the bundles could be used for or why the service exists would be nice.
• Sounds nice to have it all saved in one bundle instead of continuously doing one at a time.
• At least, I think I understand it. But what does a bundle look like? How is it ordered?

I won’t recommende acting soleny upon this kind of feedback, but it’s certainly interesting and gaves us a few toughts on how to better present our concept in the future. For only $5. We’ll probably use it again in following iterations.

Excited about going to FOWA London. New business cards ready, some great early contacts made and awesome talks to attend to.

If you’re also going, let’s meet up!