The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘engineering’

The problem with all of these people who are walking out the door at MySpace isn’t so much the number of them, because MySpace is trying to replace them by hiring more people. It’s the fact that the best people are leaving, and taking a lot of the knowledge base with them.

Three star senior employees left to go to cross-town startup Gravity, we reported earlier this week. And tonight we’ve heard that Jeff Webber, the engineering director that oversees the email, instant messaging and other “communications” platforms for MySpace, resigned earlier this week as well to join a startup. He’s been at MySpace for nearly three years and was one of the star engineers and leaders, says one source.

Other recent departures – VP and General Manager of Mobile John Faith, SVP User Experience Katie Geminder and most of her team. And of course CEO Owen Van Natta. And lots more as well, only a few of which we’ve reported.

The company has no direction, says everyone we talk to at MySpace except the top execs, and internal politics are the only thing that seem to matter. Ambitious new projects like Remaking MySpace have been thrown away just because the wrong exec supported it. Anyone who actually wants to build products has left or is looking for a new job, say many, many sources.

If you’re a MySpace employee and feel differently, please contact us anonymously. Because right now all we see is a ton of fluff and absurdity coming from the top, and massive morale problems at the middle management ranks.

The title of this post is actually a recent quote from a (now former) MySpace employee, and it seems to be accurate. They say a company has to hit rock bottom before it can even think about rebuilding into something new. If that’s the case, the time to start rebuilding is, apparently, right about now. But in our opinion MySpace has no chance at all until it is free of the News Corp. death grip.

Tonight, Google is hosting one of their Campfire One events at their headquarters in Mountain View, CA. They’re using the event to launch their new Google Apps Marketplace. This is the app store that business applications can use to reach the more than 25 million people and 2 million business that use Google Apps for their domains.

Below, find our live notes.

Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering

• Two million businesses have “gone Google”
• 25 million users.
• Everything you need is now in the cloud for businesses
• Tonight we’re launching the new Google Apps Marketplace
• It’s great for developers – who get access to these 25 million users instantly
• It’s also great for users.
• It’s simple to integrate.
• Build your app. And you don’t have to use App Engine. You can use whatever you want.
• And you can sell your app in the Marketplace.
• What does Google ask in return? A one-time fee of $100. And a low 20% rev share.
• Over 50 launch partners.

David Glazer, Engineering Director

• I want to walk you through the “how” now – build, integrate, and sell.
• Google Apps now has a large and growing number of extension points (we’ll be adding more over time)
• there is a central management system
• Universal integration to Google Apps navigation system.
• We use OpenID to manage authentication. Single sign-on.
• And we use OAuth for secure access to data. The OAuth grant of trust is built into the Marketplace.

• We have a complete manifest.
• Time for a demo. Here’s a developer showing off a “hello world” application.
• Easy step-by-step process to get your application in the Marketplace.

• It might take a couple of days for the app to show up in the Marketplace when you submit it.
• A domain admin simply then clicks the “Add it now” button.
• Then just three clicks left – 1) agree to terms of service 2) grant data access (such as to your calendar) 3) enable the app
• You can even see it in the apps drop down if you’re in, say, Gmail.

• Here’s Intuit now showing how to take a real app – for payroll – to show how easy it is to itegrate.
• Intuit is the largest payroll provider in the nation.
• We usually serve small companies, many are less than 20 employees.
• Another demo, this time from Atlassian – a software development company
• You can easily embed your information inside of Gmail.

• The thing I’m most excited about is the studio activity bar.
• With this, Google Talk can be used for instant collaboration.
• All of this is available today. In fact it’s being used by 40 developers in a bus traveling from SF to SXSW in Austin, TX.

• Another demo, Manymoon – a social productivity app.
• We used open standards to convert free users to paid users.
• Everything you’ve seen so far will be live later tonight – for this next demo, it will be coming soon.
• Gmail contextual gadgets – like when a YouTube video is embedded in Gmails – soon third-parties will be able to use this.

• Here’s a demo from Appirio.

When Google announced the Nexus One at an event early last month, one journalist asked, “Why doesn’t this have multi-touch? When is it going to get multi-touch?” Andy Rubin, VP of Engineering at Google, said, “It’s something we’re looking into

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Google Nexus One gets OTA update, multi-touch goodness

Oh I like this very much. Very much indeed. The Mantys (or “MANTYS” as the company shouts) is a personal motorized golf cart that’s steered simply by shifting your weight

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Mantys is part motorized scooter, part golf cart, and a pinch of Segway

MySpace has cut three senior tech executives from its staff, we’ve learned. We’re hearing that those affected are VP of Media & Entertainment Technology Kevin Freund, VP of Engineering Lucas Buck (who writes on his LinkedIn page that he was one of the original programmers who built MySpace), and VP of Engineering Sheetal Patel.

We’ve confirmed that those individuals are no longer with the company. MySpace provided the following statement:

“Our intent is to foster an environment of innovation and nimbleness that is centered on our user and our product. Today we’ve realigned our technology team against specific product lines to make it more efficient and allow us to bring new experiences to our users faster.”

We’re hearing that the cuts are part of a restructuring of technology and product that’s being conducted by Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn and Chief Technology Officer Alex Maghen. Both are still fairly new to the company — Hirschhorn joined last April as part of the massive MySpace top management reshuffle, and Maghen joined in September. Hirschhorn, in particular, has made no secret of his desire to kill off products that no longer fit with MySpace’s core strategy.

Google has an unfortunate history of buying companies — and then running them into the ground. Sometimes, this leads to a bit of ill-will between the Internet giant and the companies’ founders. We saw a perfect example of this when Dodgeball’s founders (including current Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley) quit Google in a huff. Today, the co-founder of another acquisition, Panoramio, is out as well, but he insists the company is happy under Google.

In a post today on the Panoramio blog, co-founder Eduardo Manchón, says that after four and a half years working on the service, it’s time to leave. Google acquired Panoramio in mid-2007 and Manchón has been there ever since, running the service. He notes that, “Acquisitions can be complicated, and the private nightmare of a founder is the site not surviving the process, but after some time Panoramio feels very comfortable at Google.”

Panoramio has certainly gained a lot of exposure thanks to Google. It’s heavily featured not only in Google Earth, but also in Google Maps. The service claims to have over 20 million high quality photos in Google’s databases, which makes it much smaller than Flickr, Facebook, or even Google’s own Picasa, but the difference is that all Panoramio photos are geolocated, which makes them very useful for Google’s mapping projects. Under Google, the Panoramio photo collection has growth from about 2 million to this 20 million number.

Manchón’s exit seems to more closely mirror that of Jyri Engeström, the co-founder of Jaiku, who left Google last October. Even though Jaiku was another service Google managed to run into the ground, Engeström claimed that he enjoyed his time at Google but simply wanted to make new meaningful products. This is similar to Manchón’s stated reason for leaving, which is to join the “new hyperlocal Q&A site Askaro.com,” he writes to us.

Another Googler, Gerard Sanz, formerly of the Blogger team, will take over running the Panoramio community.

The Star Trek wetsuit finally lets you couple your love for Star Trek with your love for SCUBA. No longer must you be shackled in a plain, boring wetsuit when you make your dives. Now you can wear a stylish suit that demonstrates your geek cred to all your diving buddies

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Star Trek wetsuit lets you boldly go where few have gone before

The reports from a few days ago that the Jajah deal with O2 closed at $200 million were correct. Telefónica Europe (aka O2) just announced that it bought Jajah for 145 million Euros ($207 million) in an all-cash deal.

Jajah, which provides Internet calling services and thus competes with Skype, was on the block since at least November (which TechCrunch was first to report on), following Google’s purchase of much-smaller Gizmo5.

Jajah has 15 million subscribers and has served up more than 1 billion VoIP calls.

Jajah will continue to operate under its own brand. The sale was not a happy affair for everyone involved, however. The deal was largely driven by Jajah’s investors, particularly Sequoia. We hear CTO Amichay Oren has left the company because he and his engineering team in Israel didn’t get treated the same as their counterparts in the U.S. In these types of deals, not everyone ends up winning. Jajah turned out not to be the next $1 billion company in Sequoia’s portfolio.

Given the fact that it raised $33 million in total capital, a $200 million exit is a decent outcome.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Autodesk, the developer of software design applications, has acquired PlanPlatform, a competing company. According to reports, Autodesk shelled out between $20-$30 million for the Israeli startup. Autodesk, a publicly traded company, provides software design applications for a variety of industries, including Architecture, Engineering, Media and Entertainment.

PlanPlatform, formerly known as Visual Tao, develops SaaS that provides engineers with two-dimensional and three-dimensional software drafting tools. The startup recently $4.3 million, with Sequoia Capital leading the round. Autodesk has acquired a number of companies, including Algor, SoftImage and 3D Geo.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

At Google’s news event today, the search giant revealed a multitude of new technologies and strategies they are exploring to ramp up search. Google emphasized the significance of mobile search within its strategy, unveiling a multitude of new features that help users search on the go. The three main areas that Google’s mobile strategy is focused on are Voice, Location, and Sight.

Voice

Google’s VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra revealed that Google’s mobile app will be enhanced to take in-depth search queries by voice and then show more accurate results. And Google is launching support for additional languages besides English, including Mandarin and Japanese. The other component to this technology is the ability to translate voice technologies on the go.

Location

Gundotra said today that location will be “a first class component of all the products” Google develops. Google.com’s new mobile homepage will now include customized search suggestions based on location. You’ll also be able to incorporate location with product search, with the new mobile technology providing inventory feeds of local stores. So if you do a search for a Canon camera, you could get results first from the stores that have the camera in stock closest to your current location.

Also, a “Near Me Now” feature on the Google Mobile homepage will show you nearby restaurants, coffee shops, Bars, ATMS, similar to what Yelp offers users with its mobile applications. Google’s new version of Mobile Maps for Android will include this technology.

Sight

Google demoed a brand new product set to launch in Google Labs: Google Goggles, which is an attempt at visual search via mobile phones.

The example that Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra showed on stage involved taking a picture of a particular bottle of wine. When he ran it through Google Goggles, the result showed that the particular bottle has a hint of apricots. You also will be able to use Goggles to look up things such as CD covers and bar codes (this is likely similar to the popular Android app ShopSavvy). For text, Google Goggles uses optical character recognition (OCR) to try and read things like labels to aid the search.

Real-Time Search

This morning, Google launched its real-time search offering, which will work on both Android devices and iPhones immediately. Google says there are over a billion realtime documents a day that it will be looking at. This includes tweets, blog posts, and also information from sources like MySpace and Facebook.

Honestly, the push towards location-based search is not surprising at all, but it should be interesting to see if the new technology encroaches upon a space where companies like Yelp make their living. As we wrote earlier today, Goggles takes a huge leap forward in the field of visual search. Of course, rounding out Google’s offerings with real-time technology makes its mobile product significantly more powerful.

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