Tonight we’re going to take a look at Review Basics by Sharpstyle Lab. It’s a product that provides designers and other professionals with a space to collaboratively edit everything from websites to videos, leaving comments and making annotations on a virtual whiteboard.

To learn a little bit more about the product I sat down with Tim Shih, VP of Sales and Marketing at SharpStyle.

SharpStyle

Founded in 2005, SharpStyle Labs, Inc. is a boutique software product development firm with a specific focus on building Rich Internet Applications. We use our expertise in interface design, software usability, and code development to help our customers reach new levels of productivity, data mining, and business intelligence in areas of social networking, collaboration, communications, and market research. Our mission is to utilize our collective talent and experience to build the most creative and innovative tools on the market for our customers.

About Review Basics

Tell me about Review Basics, what was the problem you were trying to solve?

ReviewBasics is a feedback gathering platform which allows professionals across many industries to exchange ideas, gather thoughts, and review various types of creative, interactive, motion, and written content. ReviewBasics takes a familiar, paper-based content review process and brings it online. Designers, photographers, writers, consultants, analysts, and other business professionals use ReviewBasics to gather feedback and opinion from their peers to improve their work product.

Community Building

A system like this relies on community members who are deeply interested in what often amounts to niche products (reviewing the design of a Coke bottle, for instance). What are you doing to attract these users to the network and encourage them to post reviews?

ReviewBasics provides marketing research professionals the tools they need to effectively gather qualitative feedback on print ads, video commercials, packaging concepts, and other visual stimuli. For creative and design solutions, we help web/print designers, photographers, and arts professionals collect feedback and speed up delivery of their creative assets. ReviewBasics also brings video and interactive content review tools to film and video professionals, flash designers, and video enthusiasts.

Premium Content

Tell us about some of the premium content that you are going to add to encourage users to pay for the service? Other than premium accounts, are you planning to use another method to monetize the service?

Premium features we plan to add include larger storage, branding, SSL, more project management options, and additional mark-up tools. ReviewBasics also offers customized enterprise solutions that fit specific needs.

The Burning Question

I try to ask all of the entrepreneurs that I interview this. As entrepreneurs, do you have any advice for people who have an idea but just don’t know where to start or how to get it off the ground?

It’s very hard, if not impossible, for one person to start a business. You need a few people that compliment each other: technology, business, customer service, etc. The advice is to find people that compliment your strengths and that you would enjoy working with. Relevant experience in starting a business, building a product, getting funding, etc also helps.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Review Basics is a product that works well in its specific niche, designers and creatives working at a very high level in a particular product. For the average consumer there aren’t many times when being able to annotate a picture or video would be useful. The products biggest strength is that once you get the hang of it, it is quite powerful. The video editing especially would be perfect for a team that needs to make frame by frame corrections from across the globe.

This leads to the major flaw in the platform. Between the long load times and the interface that is at first confusing, you sometimes wonder whether there was a cleaner method to accomplish the same goal. If you are an artist, consultant or professional with a non-local team you should really give Review Basics a try. If you want to learn more about the product, visit their site.

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