The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘from-the-ground’

Yammer, the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month.

The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing.

Before working at Yammer, Adam Pisoni served in senior engineering roles at Geni and Shopzilla and co-founded and was CTO at Cnation. The company says Pisoni played an instrumental role in building Yammer’s communication platform from the ground up, adding that is now in use by over 60,000 companies and organizations (including TechCrunch).

David Satterwhite, who recently joined as executive vice president of sales, began his career in sales at Oracle and then held multiple roles at Clarify. Satterwhite went on to lead worldwide sales at NightFire Software, @Road, and newScale, before making the jump to Yammer earlier this year.

Finally, Steve Apfelberg served as the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Callidus Software before joining Yammer as VP of Marketing in October 2009. Prior to Callidus, he held senior roles at Siebel, Remedy, and Oracle. He’ll be working with Jon Grall, who recently joined Yammer as Senior Manager of Product Marketing after a brief stint as Product Lead at Dropbox.

Yammer has seen solid growth since winning the 2008 edition of our TechCrunch50 Conference, and with close to $15 million in venture capital and a slew seasoned SaaS executives at the helm, the startup is well-positioned to sign up more customers and grow to profitability in the next year or two. We’ll be monitoring them closely along the way, and not just when they go down.

We reported about a motorized knee being developed at Tsukuba University in Japan just yesterday. That and HAL-5, the famous robot suit that lets paralyzed people walk through brain signal control and which was developed at the same university, seem to be just the beginning of the way to merge man and machine.

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Robo Muscle Suit: Japan continues to work on fully motorized humans (video)

Le Web organizer Loïc Le Meur interviewed one of the guests he invited to come speak at the conference, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley.

The pair talked YouTube’s product strategy but also Hurley’s recent personal investment in the new U.S. Formula One Racing team USGPE (previously US F1).

Loïc Le Meur: what is this with you investing in an F1 racing team?

Chad Hurley: it’s an opportunity I came across, and I’d been wanting to do something related to sports, I just couldn’t decided which one. I really wanted to see how I could apply my knowledge in the video space to sports. I feel like I’ve made a good investment, and it’s also a nice hobby.

How does one convince Chad Hurley to invest in their company?

Well I’m not investing in many companies, I just wanted to see things shaken up in totally different market, something you can build from the ground up.

How much did you invest and how did it come about?

I can’t get into details, but it sure is an expensive sport. We connected, I was interested, that was it. I have many passions but I like to get involved deeply, so angel investing isn’t really my thing. Like, and this is not widely known, I started this company called Hlaska, an apparel and wallet store. Totally random, but I enjoy it. We’ve opened a retail outlet in San Francisco and we’re opening another store in San Jose soon.

How much time is left for YouTube?

The projects we talked about are ongoing, but make no mistake: all my time goes to online video and YouTube in particular. We’ve come a long way with the company, you know, we have big audience with people watching over a billion videos a day and uploading over 24 hours of content every minute. It’s impossible to keep up with it, but I try. I basically watch videos online all day long.

Can you share YouTube revenues?

Google obviously doesn’t let me disclose that information. Very roughly though: revenues are going up, while costs are coming down. We’re in a great position, even in this economic environment. But I can’t get into the details.

How did you get the idea for YouTube?

Everyone must know this story by now. We essentially wanted to make video easy to deal with, for ourselves. Simplify the process, not making people think about things a lot, let us take care of the background stuff like the encoding etc. We associated a brand with it, offered tools and made it easy for people to share videos. The network effect took care of the rest.

So what’s next for the service?

We want people to do more with online video on YouTube, of course. What we’re very focused on right now is content discovery technology and how to make the finding great videos easier for users, based on their profile and past usage.

Do you have tips on how to make videos more viral?

Well, if you punch me in the face right now, I can assure you it would spread quickly. But seriously, there’s no magic recipe, but there are ingredients that works, clearly. We want to give everyone the same fair chance to be seen and get discovered.

Do you consider YouTube to be social software?

To a degree, but we also leverage existing social services like Twitter, OpenSocial, etc. We’re still at core a video platform. Subscribing to videos and sharing them is social activity of course, and we’re continuing to tweak the process. But I wouldn’t call us a social destination per se, more of a video-centric destination with a social layer on top.

Also worth pointing out: we’re big on partners, big or small, we want to see them succeed. We’re pleased to see some of our top users, although only a handful, earn over a million dollars a year using YouTube. We aim to continue to innovate and cater to our partners even better.

Is mobile important, and what’s going on in that area at YouTube?

Yes, it’s definitely a key part of our strategy. We’re pleased with the mobile content consumption side of the equation, but I’ll be the first to acknowledge that we need to work on making uploading through mobile devices far better.

Robert Scoble: I like the fact that you’re starting to stream big events live on YouTube. Are there any plans to enable users to do live video broadcasting on YouTube at some point in the future?

We see the value of that functionality for our average user, but it’s not our focus, because frankly we have our hands full running YouTube the way it is. If we ever move into the live broadcasting space, it’ll most likely be through partnerships and integration of third-party services rather than us launching new features.

We definitely want to do more live event streaming though, possibly make it a monthly occasion.

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This morning at Under the Radar, former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan are taking the stage to unveil SimpleGeo, their new infrastructure for location based services. We’ve been following the company over the last few months and uncovered some basic details earlier, but this marks the first time the founders are talking about the company in public.

SimpleGeo is akin to an ‘Amazon Web Services’ for location: developers looking to integrate location based services (LBS) can plug into some simple APIs and SimpleGeo will do most of the legwork for them. The startup originated as a gaming company, but after spending four months building out their location platform, Stump and Galligan realized they had stumbled across an opportunity: location is soon going to become an expected feature in many applications, and there’s no reason developers should have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to include the feature. SimpleGeo is looking to do it for them.

I spoke with Galligan last night, who says that one of the ways SimpleGeo could help spur radical change in location based services has to do with real-time (incidentally, he’ll be speaking at our Real-Time CrunchUp tomorrow). Galligan says that the technologies currently used to process real-time data can’t cope with the rapid read/write operations required as a LBS scales. In other words, these technologies simply weren’t built with real time in mind (he says this is one reason why companies like Foursquare have partitioned their users by city). SimpleGeo, Galligan says, was built from the ground up to support real-time on a much broader scale.

SimpleGeo is currently in a private beta (you can apply to join from a form on their homepage), with plans to roll out broadly early next year. The service will be available for free to apps just getting started, and paid packages will kick in as they hit scale (the more API calls you use the more you’ll pay).

For more details, check out the slides below.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

In a couple of hours, Google is going to share more details about its upcoming operating system Chrome OS at an event in Mountain View that will most likely be covered from start to finish by TechCrunch writers (and then some) as well as a slew of other media outlets. Jolicloud, that other OS for netbooks that is completely built for people who live and work on the Web from the ground up, has in the meantime been running fine on my own netbook for the past couple of months.

So in light of the upcoming GOOG buzz, Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim got in touch with me to share some of the things he and his team have been working on. Since the subject lies rather close to the premise of John Gruber’s great The OS Opportunity blog post, it’s worth reading that before continuation.

Done? ok.

Krim realizes full well that he’s going to have to tell a pretty compelling story to get people to pay attention to what Jolicloud is building, considering the appeal Google has in terms of branding and its history of putting stuff out there that are impressive on a technological level. Even if Google’s OS proves to be ‘good enough’, it’ll be tough for Jolicloud to compete with. But it certainly helps a lot to have a great product that’s unique in its own regards, and the Jolicloud OS is definitely worth a look if you agree that the Web is “the most important software platform in the world today”, as Gruber puts it.

Jolicloud is currently a bit of a drag to install because it involves putting the installer on a USB stick and try to get it up and running that way for every type of netbook out there. The release of Jolicloud Express, however, is going to change all that: you’ll be able to simply download the system from the startup’s website, install and run it alongside whatever else you have as OS on your netbook (usually Windows XP or 7). It will keep the Windows partition and data safe, so you can always switch back to Windows, but if you’re anything like me chances are you won’t. Jolicloud Express will be introduced at the Le Web conference in December.

Jolicloud’s Pre-Beta release, which is currently going out to testers and will be the new upgrade for all users next week, will support native resolution for Intel Atom z500-series netbooks (including the Dell Mini 10, Mini 12, the Acer Aspire One 751, Asus EeePC 1101 and many more) with the GMA500 chipset. I’d explain why that’s a rather big deal, but Jolicloud’s Adam McDaniel blogged about the how and why much more eloquently and in much more detail than I ever could. (McDaniel, by the way, is the guy who cooked up EeePC support for Ubuntu and built the Array Linux kernel.)

Biggest plus of Poulsbo (GMA 500 codename) support: compatibility with 720p HD video.

Jolicloud will be debuting something else at Le Web next month: their new HTML5 launcher that was built in collaboration with several key Mozilla developers. The main goal is to give people a way to synchronize as many netbooks as they want with their Jolicloud account, including preferences, installed apps, and so on.

The team is also constantly finetuning the user interface to give users the best possible user experience on a relatively small screen, something as a user I can only acknowledge and applaud. Among other things, Jolicloud is working on implementation of the Activity Streams standard, which essentially means social networking activity will become an integral part of the operating system rather than something bolted on top.

Also in the labs: the idea of providing a Jolicloud-powered netbook with a custom Twitter account, enabling users to converse and interact with their streams even if they’re not actually in front of their computers.

Evidently, Google Chrome OS is going to get all the buzz today, and however well-deserved it’s worth noting that there are startups already working on the next generation of operating systems that can already be installed and tested on netbooks today. Even if Jolicloud never achieves the success the Paris-based team – which is now 12 people strong – and its high-profile investors are hoping for, I think that’s admirable and worth highlighting.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Site redesigns always take longer than expected. But in the case of manufacturing marketplace MFG.com, a major overhaul of its site ended up taking three years. “The whole team has felt as though we were hand-cuffed for the past three years and couldn’t execute on all the great ideas,” MFG.com founder and CEO Mitch Free tells me.

But now those cuffs are off. Last night, MFG.com opened up its brand new site, redesigned from the ground up. MFG.com is a surprisingly successful B2B marketplace for sourcing manufactured parts, with more than $600 million in outstanding requests for quotes on the site (which is up from $50 million less than two years ago). Jeff Bezos and the German Samwer brothers are investors, as is Fidelity Ventures.

When Free launched the site way back in 2000, he built it on ColdFusion because it was fast and cheap. It’s amazing the site lasted so long on such outmoded technology, given its growth. Only now does it finally have a modern architecture, built on Java and designed to scale. The new architecture will now also be able to support third-party developers via APIs, which companies can also use to integarte MFG.com into their existing business and ERP systems.

Most of the changes to the site are on the backend. MFG.com finally integrates its 2006 acquisition of Sourcingparts.com, which will allow Free to to pursue a Salesforce.com-like strategy in the supplier relationship marketing (SRM) industry, and tie that to his marketplace. Instead of selling SRM software to manufacturers for $100,000 a pop, he is offering the same software over the Web on a much cheaper subscription basis.

The new site also now supports multiple languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese) and 50 different currencies. The big growth market for MFG.com over the past few years has been China, connecting global product companies with Chinese manufacturers. Now with local languages and currencies, Free wants to go after the internal Chinese-to-Chinese market as well. “Previously,” says Free, “the MFG.com platform was only in English and we were only attractive to Chinese companies who were fluent in English and export oriented. We anticipate a significant amount of China to China business to begin happening on the platform that is virtually non-existent today.” Watch out, Alibaba.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

There is a lot of chatter about TweetMeme’s rather robust growth to over 18 million unique monthly visitors on Compete.com. That puts them ahead of well known sites like LinkedIn and gmail.com with 15 million and 9 million visitors, respectively, on the service). In fact, Tweetmeme currently sits as the 68th largest site on the Internet, according to Compete.

What does TweetMeme do? They offer other sites a “retweet” button that makes it easy for readers to send story links to Twitter. We use it on all our sites, you can see it on the top right of this post. They also have analytics around tweets sent via the service, and a home page that shows the most retweeted Tweets at any given time. It competes with Digg, TechMeme, Google News and other news aggregators to show breaking news.

But is TweetMeme really so big? The short answer is no.

Comscore tracks 721,000 worldwide monthly unique visitors to TweetMeme. Quantcast says the number is more like 2.4 million. Google Trends barely registers TweetMeme against URL shortener service Bit.ly, which is similar to TweetMeme in some ways.

We believe Compete is simply counting all those javascript widgets that sites like us include on their stories. Which means it’s basically aggregating all of the traffic stats from sites that use TweetMeme. Not so useful.

Why This Matters

Everyone is trying to take real time Twitter data and massage it into a useful, filtered news stream. Bit.ly has a new product on the way called Bit.ly Now. Digg is rebuilding the service from the ground up to take advantage of Twitter data in figuring out what’s hot sooner.

If TweetMeme is really drawing that much traffic, it puts them ahead of Bit.ly and near Digg in total traffic. And that makes them a third contender in an already crowded space.

In the upcoming war between Bit.ly and Digg (and maybe TweetMeme), what matters, besides access to Twitter’s data flow, is the total traffic base to start things off. The ability to index and categorize links on the fly is also important, and all of these companies are working on ways to properly analyze data in milliseconds, which is hard to do properly at scale.

A lot is going to happen in this space in the near future.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Oh, netbooks . Doug loves ‘em, but I’m still not convinced of their vitalness. Is it neat to see a tiny little computer zip around the Internet?

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Yup, the Acer Aspire One AOD250 dual boots Windows XP and Android, all right

Keeping your home theater (or “living room” as my wife calls it,) clean and uncluttered can be a real pain if you have a decent sound system.

The rest is here: 
How to hide that subwoofer in the corner of the room

Sony may be coming out with a motion controller of its own, but that’s apparently not soon enough for accessory maker Blaze, which will be putting one out before that. And this one is so familiar to the Wiimote that I’m wondering how long the knockoff is going to stay on the market

See more here:
Another Wiimote for the PS3? You’re kidding me