National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo

scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here.

The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

From Venture Beat:

The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they’re available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others.

scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced.

Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the “driving.”

scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options.

It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard.

Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you’ve bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files.

Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas.

Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you’re doing? What other tools to you use?

Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium

Filed under: Funding, Patrons and Users, Resources