Google-backed SeedFund injects $1 million into Lifeblob, but this start-up may be DOA

Venture Beat — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:03:05 -0700

updated
Today, SeedFund, an Indian VC firm backed with Google cash, announced a $1 million investment in Lifeblob, a Bangalore-based lifecasting company whose awkward name just about says it all.

Lifeblob is a kind of digital diary that maps the media you share and thoughts you write onto a timeline. You can adjust the scale of this timeline to reflect the history of your online life in increments ranging from every day to a somewhat ambitious 100 years. Each entry appears as a “blob” that you can click on to expand. Sound a bit confusing? Take a look for yourself:

Lifeblob joins an increasing number of start-ups doing variations on this theme. These include Dandelife, Dipity, AllofMe and, in some ways, Plurk. Of the batch, Dipity and AllofMe are the most similar.

The key difference is that Lifeblob allows you to tag each entry with friends and events and inserts overlapping entries from other people’s timelines into your own. In concept, this means that if the VentureBeat team goes to dinner and everyone shares photos and comments about it, we get to memorialize the points in time and space where our lives intersect. In practice, it means an overwhelming degree of visual clutter that is difficult to understand.

Both Dipity and AllofMe have designed cleaner, more navigable interfaces and Dipity has implemented a number of applications for the concept that are arguably more compelling than lifecasting. For example, Dipity allows users to create historical timelines that other users can then edit and expand, which can result in awesome visualizations of the history of internet memes or virtual worlds. It’s easy to see how this could evolve into a great tool for visual search.

Considering how fast Dipity continues to add appealing features and the overall superiority of its execution, it’s hard to see Lifeblob as anything but an also-ran, despite a few extra “social” bells and whistles. That being said, $1 million goes a long way in Bangalore, and the company will have time to change the game plan.

The company, which has been in beta for months, opened up to the public today.

[Update: A blog called Pluggdin broke the news about the SeedFund investment. It also mentions several other investments by SeedFund, including Printo, RedBus, Agencyfaqs, Carwale, and notes that SeedFund is looking to raise another $30M fund.]