Soluto – Promising Anti-Frustration Software

I signed up for the private alpha of Soluto and was finally emailed with an invite code yesterday. Soluto promises to create “anti-frustration software” – software that helps PC users fix their computers’ endless problems via automation and the wisdom of the crowd:

Soluto’s mission is to bring an end to PC user frustration. Many of us are frustrated by slow, stalling and unresponsive PCs. Soluto is developing a free application that makes PCs work best for their users. It dives deep into the Windows core and reveals what’s really causing each user’s particular PC frustrations and, based on collective user wisdom, recommends the best solutions.
To be honest, when I signed up for the alpha, I was quite skeptical of that claim, like a couple of other people on a related TechCrunch’s post on Soluto’s venture funding. There are countless shareware on the internet claiming to help people tune up their PCs, solving booting slowness, fixing registry corruption and removing unwanted processes. My experience with this software is that you still need to be a reasonably tech-savvy person to really use them well and the tune up process almost invariably requires going on popular tech support forums and looking for people with similar problems and seeing how them have solved them. It turns out that Soluto’s difference is by making that process effortless by building the mass of users’ experiences into the software’s proposed solutions for your PC’s ailments.

I installed Soluto and the Soluto software gets into the problem fixing mode right away by showing me a list of issues and potential fixes for each of them.

The whole process was intuitive and truly “calming”, if not “anti-frustrating”. It reminds me very much of the first time I used Xobni (again, when they were in closed beta) and how exciting it was to see how the software can solve my email issues and its future potential (with data in the cloud, synching across multiple email clients and devices).

I can see a lot more for Soluto to grow into – for example, instead of trying to get individual users to install the software, they can dramatically expand their reach by partnering with managed services providers who are managing thousands of PCs at corporations, dental offices and consultancies, who are already using similar PC management tools such as Kaseya, LogMeIn. However, Soluto is more of a complement to all those tools, which are focused on more on the remote management and monitoring capabilities, rather than the self-directed problem solving capabilities Soluto has.

Moreover, Soluto can partner with other hybrid desktop/cloud application usage tracking tools such as RescueTime or Wakoopa, or the leading crowd-sourced support platform GetSatisfaction.

Data on application usage, issues and problem fixes are incredibly important to users, IT managers and software and services vendors. These companies, by partnering together and sharing these data (of course, with reasonable privacy measures), have the ability to accelerate the application support cycle radically and thus truly help eliminate software frustrations for everyone.

I am excited to follow Soluto’s growth, especially with the recent row of venture capital financing by Bessemer Venture Partners. I think there are still more opportunities for companies with similar strategies in the PC management sector, and if you know of anyone looking for investors, please let me know!