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"Some claim Pownce, a well-publicized social Web service, to be an unfortunate case of too-little-too-late. There are those who find it to be all but a copycat of the Twitter medium - albeit with the added bonus of a nifty file sharing component as well as the oh-so-enticing option to befriend Web 2.0 micro-celebrity, Kevin Rose \u2013 and thus see it as something not altogether irresistible. People can do without, it seems.\nGranted, it is a pretty solid system that helps its users do some basic things that the average social networker enjoys doing these days with regularity. But, at the end of the day, its predecessor in the networking industry makes those connections, too. And, well, Twitter\u2019s got a whole heckuva lotta users already, so\u2026why bother going elsewhere to gorge on the wide world of public (and private) Web chatter?\nWell, who knows. Maybe it\u2019s just one of those mysteriously simple decisions everyone of us makes some time or other if only because we can, and because we want to. In any case, Pownce is nonetheless a presence in the social sector, and since it\u2019s inching ever more closely towards its official public debut (slated for January 22), we thought it\u2019d be fitting to share with you some pre-launch information gleaned from one of the startup\u2019s founders, Leah Culver, in an interview published by Tech Confidential earlier in the week.\nCulver, if you weren\u2019t aware already, is a Bay Area resident who nabbed her first fifteen minutes of fame during her employ at the custom fabrication house Instructables through an advertising exercise in which she arranged to have a number of companies based (mostly) in Silicon Valley pay to inscribe their respective logos on a new Apple MacBook Pro. Through the arrangement, Culver effectively obtained a free laptop computer - which, according to widespread consensus, she needed dearly \u2013 and a significant amount of publicity, to boot.\nNow she\u2019s got her sights almost exclusively on the development of Pownce, which, all things considered, is a fairly young thing. A project described as a micro-blogging utility, Pownce had its first public outing (through an invite-only process, a stage in which it remains to this day) back in the early summer of 2007. It was then described as a potential \u201CTwitter-killer.\u201D\nSeveral months later, it would no longer be touted (by the tech punditocracy, anyhow) as such. Following months of incremental updates and alterations, the brand has diminished in its appeal. The Culver-Rose experiment, once a fairly frequent topic of discussion in the blogosphere, no longer commands a particularly noteworthy spotlight. It lagged. It lagged some more.\nBut according to Culver, the team behind the project are not tossing in the towel whatsoever. They see that, through the delivery of a new, \u201Cmore complete API,\u201D expected to be presented around the time the official public release of Pownce and its Adobe AIR-compatible device, the concept can proceed to expand and evolve into a robust communication platform \u2013 and they very clearly believe it will.\nCulver states that, \u201Cmore bonus features for\u2026pro accounts in the next year,\u201D a sign that the company\u2019s tiered business model \u2013 in which it offers both free and paid-for subscription options \u2013 will continue to remain in play. The Pownce co-founder claims that the operation sells \u201Cquite a few pro accounts.\u201D\nWe must say, in spite of Pownce\u2019s showing a rather erratic and lackluster growth history, one thing above all that we\u2019ll give its creators some credit for is their ability to run more or less on their own steam. In closing out her interview with Tech Confidential, Culver claimed that, \u201Cto date, Pownce is self-funded.\u201D\nThough the company is of course open to the idea of working some good ol\u2019 venture capital into the equation if need be."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/01/05/leah-culver-pownce-co-founder-talks-future-of-platform-pre-launch/>