Quick, what does Toronto have which Silicon Valley doesn't ? How about not one, but two competing startups in the live-blogging space - CoverItLive and ScribbleLive. Both have great products and both have been in the news quite a bit over the past year, but CoverItLive has pulled way ahead of its local competitor.
CoverItLive had its (in)famous outage at the MacWorld last year, but then recovered after that and recently raised $1.2 million in seed funding from investors including Paul Kedrosky. It has been used by various national media outlets, among other mainstream publishers/bloggers/etc and more recently I noticed Globe and Mail live-blogged the Oscars on their website using CoverItLive's product. They have a three member team, and the seed funding would give them some room to grow, though given their success to date, it is surprising that they raised such a small amount. A Series-A round of $5-$10 million atleast would have seemed more suitable in their case. In anycase, CoverItLive has a great product being used widely, and is one of the hottest startups in town.
On the other hand, there is the bootstrapped ScribbleLive, which with its two-member team shot into the limelight last year at the Mesh conference when it got blogged about on TechCrunch. Earlier on the key difference between the two products was that CoverItLive's product could be embedded in webpages, while ScribbleLive required the live bloggers to use its website. But now, ScribbleLive has closed that gap and also offers an embed option.
Feature parity to some extent doesn't seem to be enough though, as looking at the unique monthly visitor charts, it is clear that CoverItLive has pulled way ahead, with 1.5 million unique visitors in Jan, compared to ScribbleLive's 15k. Seems like unfortunately a shake-out is due in Toronto's nascent live-blogging space.
Since its release in late 2007, CoveritLive has been used by thousands of writers to engage millions of readers around the world. It has been well... [more]
ScribbleLive is the next gen of live blogging and it’s happening right now. Broadcasters, publishers, educators, corporations, social groups,... [more]
Before you write us (ScribbleLive) off completely, you have to factor in our whitelabel sites (http://www.scribblelive.com/Enterprise.aspx). Most of them don't use scribblelive.com URLs, so those Compete graphs are way off ;) We also have an API that lets our customers put our liveblogs on mobile devices, etc. so none of those stats are recorded either. So the gap is closer than you might think. As we like to say, "If we’re doing our job, search engines find you, not us."
@Jonathan: Thanks for stopping by and great to hear that the competition might be closer than it seems! :)
Since CoverItLive offers an embedded product; which Compete can't track; and ScribbleLive's white-label usage can't be tracked by Compete either; isn't it the same scenario for both of you then ? CoverItLive's actual stats might be much higher than what Compete is showing, and likewise for ScribbleLive's. I'm trying to understand the relative difference here. Alexa, Compete, all show CoverItLive being larger several orders of magnitude than ScribbleLive.
As far as I know, Compete does track iframe embeds that CIL uses and gets a 2nd hit when users have to click-through to see the liveblog.
We have an iframe product too (that doesn't require a click-through to see the liveblog), but our heavy users use our Wordpress crossposting that doesn't use an iframe (which enhances their SEO e.g. http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/02/09/live-at-the-amazon-kindle-event/) and whitelabels.
@Jonathan: Hmm...Compete definitely doesn't look like a reliable measure of your stats then. Thanks for pointing that out.
From a Canadian perspective, I find it great that this debate is happening right here between two local startups on which has the upper edge. For the time being it looks like it is CoverItLive, but you are right, the data is not quite there to write you off completely either :)
There's also lots more than stats too in comparing our offerings ;) But from the Canadian side, glad to be out there in the market with CIL and wish them all the best!
My first impressions of CIL weren't great, nor were my first impressions of ScribbleLive.
I have been using CIL for a while now, and rather successfully I must add, but to be fair I should give another look at ScribbleLive.
I plan on using SL for coverage of Mass (US) High School hockey championships this weekend - we play that sport down here too. :) Go Catholic Memorial (alma mater of Chris Nilan) shooting for championship banner #25 I believe - one more than the Habs, eh? Bo Saxberg
Varun Mathur
Varun Mathur is the Techvibes Community Manager in Toronto, focused on covering local tech startups, news and events. He is also a Co-founder and Product Manager at Zytran, a Toronto-based web startup which developed and launched Alertle.com - a personal news aggregator (Alertle's version 1.0 got widespread global coverage, with reviews written about it...[more]
