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StartUp Camp: Video Interview With WebCanvas

You may have heard about bands discovering a fan base (or vice versa) on MySpace or YouTube; or about the launch of some new Web TV show on YouTube which makes its way onto regular television because of its popularity (to some degree, South Park is a great example). Now, thanks to fun startup WebCanvas, artists can have the same opportunity. The WebCanvas presentation at Startup Camp last week in London was impressive in its creativity. But these guys, who finished second in Camp voting for best Startup, have some work to do in several areas.

The most impressive part of this site, built entirely in Ajax, is that it's theoretically infinite. You can move around, enter a coordinate, watch others, find vacant spaces, share a space with a friend, upload images, doodle, or even create real art on the Web. Antonio Lopes of WebCanvas said that while Facebook has Graffiti, it isn't really mainstream. He's getting big interest in Asia, possibly because tablets are more popular there.

Last week, WebCanvas added some social networking tie-ins, letting people vote on different pieces of art. This is a helpful start toward something useful. After all, anything with an infinite space is going to be hard to navigate. While you can enter coordinates, it doesn't exactly welcome the casual browsing and doing so doesn't yield much beyond random doodling.

That might be a fun time distraction, or even a place for remote friends to frolic, but if this site plans to also be a destination for aspiring artists, there will have to be ways to easily find good work. The few pieces I did see seemed to have been defaced -- another problem the company will have to deal with. Lopes said he is thinking about the trade-off of revision control and openness. He said he'd really like this to be a Wikipedia style endeavor. What I'd really like to see is tagging of artwork so that I can easily search it based on style, artist, group, topic, mood.

Another problem is business model. My first thought was this was something akin to the Million Dollar Home Page, but Lopes says that he doesn't quite know the business model yet. It might involve selling pixels, selling advertising or some other form of sponsorship, but the company isn't committing to a strategy for now except to make people happy. How very Web 2.0.

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