For a lot of the time my co-founder Rod and I have been working on KlickFu, we have often had the feeling the area of the business we have been focusing on–enhancing the experience working with the Windows desktop–is maybe not the coolest part of the industry. Yes, Windows 7 is an excellent product and has been quite successful for Microsoft, however, for the past year, many of my fellow startup founders have been focused mainly on building new apps for Facebook or iPhone/iPad or Android. Of course, this makes total sense, since these areas are evolving rapidly and many successful new businesses have been launched in the past few years.
Candidly, it has been fun working in an area that is a bit off the beaten path. (One of these days, I will write a post about the pros and cons of zigging while most others are zagging.) And while someday, we will look seriously at how KlickFu can be adapted and evolved for mobile and tablets (and have built in some hooks for doing so), for now, we are totally focused on building and perfecting the core KlickFu experience, which is aimed directly at users clicking and dragging on the OS desktop, while sitting at a desk using a mouse or a trackpad… i.e., old school.
So it was a nice surprise this week when Google confirmed they are acquiring BumpTop, which makes a nice 3D environment for managing and working with desktop content. (You can download their free version for a more days,here.) While it is true Google is discontinuing BumpTop’s main product, it is probably a fairly safe bet they will be incorporating some of the gestures or concepts into Chrome OS or Android, or both. Also, while some of the implementations may be for mobile, some of them may also be for tablets or even laptop/desktop computers.
As you will start to see (soon!), KlickFu is quite different from BumpTop–for the most part, we are not looking to replace the functionality of Windows Explorer or other systems for managing desktop content, rather we want to create new experiences to complement and enhance these features in ways that are fun and useful for users. However, it is great to see others working in the space, and also to see the validation from a leader like Google that concepts from the traditional desktop can be extended and merged to mobile and tablets and maybe other new platforms. Of course, we hope to make a contribution in this area as well.
Congrats to BumpTop and best of luck at Google. We look forward to joining you and hopefully others, working to make what was once almost old, new again.
