iBloks is one of the most bizarre offerings released this year. The new desktop application is being called a "3D multimedia slideshow tool" - it allows you to combine photos, videos and music into an odd media mashup that you can send to your friends. Last week, the company announced it had raised $3 million in VC funding from Maveron - on top of a $500K angel round. It's Windows-only for now, and they're keen to point out that iBloks is the first XP application to demonstrate Vista's WinFX presentation layer technology (translation: purdy graphics).
So what does it do? Well, each iBlok starts with a "mod" - a basic element that you can customize. For example, you can begin with an animated "dancing man" figure made from a number of gray squares. You can then drag photos and videos from a library and drop them on to the squares - if you drag a video, it will play repeatedly on the surface of the square. You can also add music to the mod, and make the character dance. Other mods include a sudoku game, TicTacToe and an animated loveheart. To confuse things even further, they've thrown in Mix Master, a music mixing tool.
iBloks also wants you to share you media - finished iBloks can be passed around using email and IM, uploaded to the iBloks site or posted to MySpace, Tagworld or Typepad. They have a business model, too: they want you to buy new mods, music and themes from the iBloks Shop. Buying 20 songs from eMusic, for instance, will cost $9.99.
The question is: why? Why the heck would anyone want to create these things in the first place? And why would I want to download yet another piece of software that has virtually no utility? The fact that it's nigh impossible to explain the concept is also a concern: how do you sell someone on your product if you can't even communicate what it does?
I'm not just skeptical about this one: I'm totally bamboozled.
