Intel launches a company-ranking site: CoolSW
Tomorrow, Intel is launching a Web site that lets people rank the most compelling software business ideas. — Called CoolSW (it stands for "cool software"), the site looks much like Digg, the popular site that lets users rank technology-oriented news …
Context & Ripple Effects
CoolSW lands in the middle of a 2007 wave of crowd-ranking sites: Wize.com launched product-ranking search back in January, and Digg itself spent September adding friend-finding and revamped profiles to hold its audience. The Digg mechanic is now being ported from news to products to, with Intel's site, business ideas themselves.
For Intel specifically, this is one more software-facing move in a busy autumn: the company had just announced the LessWatts.org open-source power effort and was pushing its Moorestown-based mobile Internet device pitch. A chipmaker building a community site about software ideas signals it wants a direct read on which workloads — and which startups — the ecosystem cares about.
First-order effects
- Founders get a new, low-gatekeeping visibility channel where peer votes rather than press or VC introductions decide which software ideas surface.
- Intel gains a live, crowdsourced map of what software ideas the market finds compelling — signal it can use to steer a silicon roadmap that depends on future workloads.
Second-order effects
- Digg-style voting spreads further beyond news aggregation into verticals — products at Wize, business ideas at CoolSW — forcing each new entrant to differentiate on community quality rather than the mechanic itself.
- Vote-driven rankings become a cheap scouting layer, and if investors and acquirers treat them as deal-flow filters, early attention shifts toward whoever ranks well there.
Third-order effects
- If component makers keep building software-community properties, the line between hardware vendor and ecosystem curator keeps eroding — Intel positioning itself as a platform voice, not just a silicon supplier.
- Crowd signals as a market interface remain unproven at this scale; recent analysis found Digg homepage hit counts a poor indicator of actual site popularity, so ranking sites may need better mechanisms than raw vote totals to be trusted as discovery layers.
The trend: Crowd-voting mechanics are migrating from news aggregation into vertical discovery layers, and component makers like Intel are adopting them to read the software ecosystem they depend on.