News Articles

Red Herring | October 16, 2006

Social Climber
Networking site Glide’s Donald Leka is out to challenge Google, Microsoft, and Adobe.

When TransMedia CEO Donald Leka first set up Glide Effortless (www.glidedigital.com) in December, his New York City–based company joined an already crowded field of social networking startups.

But Mr. Leka isn’t out to make Glide the next MySpace. He built the service into a place where people could store and share their documents, blogs, photos, music, videos, contacts and other files. All this can be accessed from Mac’s, PC’s, and a growing array of smart phones—while keeping all the files synchronized. TransMedia also added links to online music services like The Orchard. To stem the nefarious behavior that occurs on many anonymous social networks, Glide asked each user to provide a mobile phone number.

TransMedia soon took the Glide site several steps further, adding a web based word processor, Glide Write, and a web-based calendar, Glide Calendar, challenging Google’s own calendar and the word processor the company inherited when it acquired Writely. The angel funded company is also taking aim at Microsoft by developing web-based versions of presentation graphics and project-planning software that will challenge Microsoft products like Power Point and Project. These features will be available in October. Plus, TransMedia is readying an online image-editing suite that will challenge Adobe Systems. That also will debut in October, along with a new user interface for the second generation of the service, to be called Glide 2.0. By the third quarter of next year, the company even plans to introduce its own operating system, so PCs and mobile devices can boot up by running Glide. The company faces a boatload of rivals, not only the usual suspects like MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, and Friendster, but also storage-oriented start-ups like Fabrik. Mr. Leka’s answer is to develop his own twists on social networking. Red Herring recently caught up with Mr. Leka in New York. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow:

Q: How is Glide Effortless trying to set itself apart from all the other social networks that have popped up?

A: Ours is a rights based and identity-based environment. We enable people to control how they share their photos, music, videos, and documents. We also enable companies that want to make their content available for people to share in social networking communities to control the rights to their content as well. So record labels can control their content, and individuals control the rights to their own content.

Q: How many users do you have?

A: We’ve exceeded 200,000 users on Glide. Whenever we do a product announcement, we see spikes.

Q: Do you have any venture funding?

A: The company launched on September7, 2001. We started in a very down period for the Internet. I guess you could call it the ‘internet nuclear winter’ period. We’ve been funded entirely to this point by sweat equity and angel investment. I believe we’ve raised $4 million in angel investment.

Q: Have most of your users so far been consumers or business people?

A: In terms of consumer users, we’re seeing people heavily using the photo environments. We know people definitely are doing a lot of web sites and blogs, whereas a lot of the road warriors and business types are using it for secure sharing of documents. We now have families using it as well, because we offer child accounts that can be administered by the parents. Businesses are also using it, including a couple of major companies in the music industry. ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers] is a customer of ours. Univision Communications is a customer. New York University is also using the platform. And we’ll soon be announcing another major University and some big business clients as well.