Hubub

The social community is a pretty glamorous field for today's would-be entrepreneurs in the valley and elsewhere. It's quite intriguingly interesting to analyze what triggers the entrepreneur's interest in creating new social communities when there are already existing giants like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Although each ones vision and mission are different, the intend of creating a social world and "making the world a better place" cliche seems to be never change. What is more interesting is the fact that VCs' are still willing to invest million's of bucks in those nascent start-ups, while kind of sends me a news that there is still potential in those sectors.

Hubub (launched late last year), is another company filling the space in the social market place. The intention of Hubub is to become a social community that provides a vibrant environment for discussion, debate and expression on topics that matter most to "you". Although there are other forms of social communities which helps us be socially active, Hubub is exclusively for discussion, debate and conversations on topics. Hubub provides you the ability to create topic (private/public), follow topics, participate in public debates and conversations, create polls, invite people to participate in the debate, etc. However, in my point of view Hubub still lacks a lot to reach to a point where it can boast of delivering a significantly important social community service. The areas of development can be broadly classified into 3 categories:

• UX design: UX is an extremely important area which still requires a lot of work. Currently, it doesn't provide the ability to browse the posts based on categories.  

• Login: I understand the fact that Hubub provides multiple options for users to sign-in, like FB, Linkedin, Google, etc. But this should only be an option when the user is new and wants to sign-up. It becomes increasing difficult for people who juggle with multiple google accounts when the UI asks you to select a login every time. For registered users, he/she just needs to have a login option. In short the point is, the difference between sign-up/Login has not been realized. 

• Overwhelming options: Once you end up creating your topic of discussion. Hubub provides with with a zillion options like share, like, follow, invite, poll, add image, add video, etc etc on one screen which feels overwhelming. I just stared at my screen and didn't know how exactly to proceed. 
  

 That said, these are things which can be fixed and enhanced in few meaningful iterations. It has generated $8.5 million in Series A round of funding, which means we can expect them to bring in some experts on specific fields to fix those issue right up. The tough part here is to understand how Hubub is going to be promoted to become a potential viable social community.

There are variants in social discussions and polling platform in the form of Facebook, Google+, etc. The next interesting thing is to see if Hubub wants to remain as a discussion/debate/polling community operating on its own or become a part of an already existing huge social platform like Facebook, Google+, etc. It might be a little too early to talk about potential acquisition/ acqui-hire considering the fact that the user traffic in Hubub is not especially significant.
 

Google Drive vs MSFT Skydrive

Cloud storage has become an inevitable aspect for almost every individual. Considering the fact that there are various options available these day, it's pretty tedious to decide which option is best.

After analyzing both the cloud services for quite a while, an honest opinion is that, you can't really zero in to one as the best service. Let's compare Google Drive vs Microsoft's Skydrive here.

To compare both the services, I have considered 3 yardsticks to measure the accountability of each.



Editing:

When we start storing documents in cloud, we don't just store and share but we do consider editing them and expect it to hassle-free and non-tedious process. Google Drive and Microsoft's Skydrive both obviously provide the option of editing the documents. But Skydrive allows editing in the native format of the document but Drive expects you to convert the document to convert it into an intermediate format and then edit it. Since, Microsoft office is a clean solution for office uses, Skydrive provides a clean solution.

In my opinion Microsoft's Skydrive takes a top notch edge over Google Drive

Accessibility:

Accessibility is another important aspect which expect out of a cloud storage system. Both Google and Microsoft provide excellent options to share files. Google includes Drive perfectly to fit in its already existing strong ecosystem. Files sharing is extremely easy to friends and other who have a google account and use any other their product. However, editing can be possible only when the files is in Google format. Skydrive, allows you to share files with anyone even with someone who doesn't have a Skydrive account and editing can be done in a very intuitive manner.

Skydirve again scores over Google Drive

Syncing with Desktop Apps:

Drive and Skydrive have separate apps which would enable syncing with the cloud, however, Drive provides the ability to sync based on the folder that you would like to sync which is not available in Skydrive
 Besides that, Skydrive offers only 7GB of memory to its new users but Google offer 15 GB to its new users.

Points to Google Drive in this segment

Microsoft Skydrive scores 2-1 over Google Drive and is a definite WIN "especially" for people who make a living doing presentations and compiling documents.

Though Box and Dropbox has developed a huge fan following with the unique features, Skydrive is still worth a try. As a matter of fact having an additional free cloud-storage is always a benefit.