By Jimmy Rogers (@me)
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Last week we talked about Betterment, the “new age” investing site, which won TechCrunch’s “Best Startup in NY” award. This week we’ll talk about the overall “Best Startup” winner at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Their name is Soluto and they sell themselves as “anti-frustration software.” Then again, “selling themselves” probably isn’t the best way to describe the Israeli startup, because their software and service are totally FREE! The price alone makes me inclined to give them a higher rating.
Essentially Soluto aims to solve one of the problems that plagues all computer users: poor computer performance. If you’ve ever been working on your laptop and experienced lagging, crashing, freezing, or generally buggy software, you’re a candidate for Soluto. They also (at this stage in their development) focus a lot on your boot cycle, more on that later.
When you first open Soluto, which has a client interface as well as a background running tool, the app is pretty sparse. It is also Windows-only for the moment. The client is primarily dedicated to analyzing and optimizing your boot. After your first restart, the client will begin visually recording each program that started in boot and display this data in a graphical interface. It’s a very nifty feature because it’s easy to remove unwanted items from your boot, but, unlike other boot optimization apps, it also gives you the option to “Delay” items. The Delay feature places the item on hold until your computer has some idle time and THEN launches the app. This shortens your boot but keeps semi-important background processes a part of your system.
After several boots you can click on the history tab for a thorough graph of changes made to your system and how long each boot took. If the boot optimizer was the only function of Soluto, it would already be a great app. That being said, the long-term goals of the startup rest more heavily on what they call the “PC Genome.”
In an email conversation, Orit Balicer Tsur, the Marketing Director for Soluto, explained the idea to me:
“The PC Genome is a huge knowledgebase of PC frustration data, built automatically through the usage of Soluto software. Its objective and statistical information, gathered and analyzed by Soluto, is also editable by the community.”
That last part, the “editable” part, is really neat. Whenever a program comes up in the client that does not register with any pre-existing record, you have the option to add the background info yourself. It’s a wiki-style editor so it’s easy to change erroneous information. If you are adding new info, a style guide pops up right along-side to help you craft your entry.
Only time will tell whether or not their project to map the PC Genome will be successful. If Soluto catches on with enough users, software manufacturers might start paying attention to the data generated. It would be certainly better than those reports that Windows sends to Microsoft after a crash! If you’d like to help map the aforementioned genome, you can check a little option in the quick launch contextual menu to participate in “ongoing frustration research” (which, as far as I can tell from Orit’s email, is a distributed computing network).
Overall, I think Soluto is a great app and while I’m not yet convinced of the PC Genome project’s future success, the boot configuration tool is easy to use and more user friendly because of the handy wiki information. Go over and grab it today!
Have thoughts on Soluto? Share them below in the comments…we’d love to hear what you’re thinking!