Entries from the 'San Francisco' category
Sun and Joyent Partner For Free Social App Hosting
Sun and Joyent are announcing today a program to offer 12 months of free hosting for Facebook and OpenSocial applications. Using Sun’s servers running OpenSolaris, powering Joyent Accelerators virtual servers, a social application can be prepared to cope with rapid scaling if they become an overnight success. Free hosting is quite compatible with the monetization difficulty of Facebook applications; quite hard. Hopefully within 12 months, you’ll either figure out how to monetize the app, or have convinced your Grandma to fund you.
Sun’s business model has traditionally been selling servers, so it’s good to see them supporting cloud hosting. Increasingly, “the cloud” is proving itself more cost effective and efficient alternative to server ownership. Further, their recent open sourcing of Solaris into OpenSolaris makes it a viable option for developers who would normally pass on it for a free, capable Linux distribution.
In support of this program, Sun and Joyent are holding a training tour that will hit San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Vancouver, among others. Er, they don’t seem to have dates posted yet, but I’ll update this post when I see them, and post to the Techvibes event calendar.
Vancouver’s NowPublic Buys Valley’s Truemors
It’s not every day that you hear of a Canadian startup buying a Silicon Valley startup, but today is that day. Via the AFP comes word that Vancouver citizen-journalism site NowPublic purchased rumor-mill Truemors for an undisclosed sum. In addition to acquiring another user-generated content site, NowPublic also gains Guy Kawasaki, former Apple evangelist (an actual job title) turned author and venture capitalist, who started Truemors and is a respected voiced among Valley VCs. Kawasaki will become the chair of NowPublic’s advisory board.
If you’re curious about what Truemors is about, you’re out of luck for the moment since the site appears to be down and redirecting to NowPublic. Update: I’ve been told that Truemors should be back up, pending DNS refresh.
NowPublic should find great value in this acquisition if they can smoothly integrate Truemors’ rumor reporting with their own crowd-powered media. Co-founder Len Brody claims that this acquisition makes them the “largest user-generated news website in the world”, with more than 100,000 contributors. I dug this last comment from Brody in the AFP article, defining his view of what NowPublic is:
Brody shuns the label “citizen journalist,” saying it is tantamount to branding someone a “citizen dentist.”
“The truth is journalism is an art form,” Brody said. “Calling someone a citizen journalist just doesn’t make sense. What we are is an army of eyes and ears to witness what is going on and work with journalists.”
Structure 08 sheds light on Cloud Computing
Rajan Sodhi is a Techvibes Guest Contributor.
Just got back from the Structure 08 conference hosted by GigaOM and headline sponsored by my company, Vancouver-based PEER 1. The sold out event was a tremendous success with over 600 people in attendance representing companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and VMWare. A third of the conference room was allocated to media alone.
Making the decision to sponsor Structure 08 was an easy one. It is so rare to have a room full of the brightest minds discussing and debating the latest technology impacting IT infrastructure. “Cloud Computing” was by far the topic of the day, a buzz term that seems to encompass anything related to virtualization or on-demand scalable web hosting, which is sometimes, well, cloudy.
The line up of speakers included Jonathan Yarmis of AMR Research, Mendel Rosenblum of VMWare, and a heated discussion that included panelists from Google, AT&T, GigaSpaces, Mosso, Joyent, and XCalibre.
For me, the highlight of the day was a dynamic keynote delivered by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. He introduced himself to a highly engaged audience as the “system administrator for a small book shop in Seattle.” He then went on to discuss the genesis of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which includes Amazon S3 storage, EC2, and SQS. Using their client Animoto as a case study, a company that has intensive hosting needs but has no server infrastructure. They had 25,000 customers prior to launching a Facebook app that soon had them signing up 25,000 customers an hour. The instantaneous scalability of their hosting needs being satisfied by a cloud computing solution without requiring the purchase of servers is something he is very proud of. “What this cloud computing does, one of the biggest lessons to take home today, is moving infrastructure from a capital expense to a variable cost model,” said Werner. If you ever get a chance to listen in on a keynote or session by Werner, I highly recommend it.
The event illustrates just how great of a connecter Om Malik is. I first met Om in a brief encounter at last year’s Office 2.0 and knew quickly that he was someone we needed to get involved with. After coming on as a junior sponsor at his NewTeeVee event last November and seeing first-hand the caliber of audience he drew, I was convinced. Structure 08 was a tremendous success and I’m already looking forward to Structure 09. I hope to see you there.
Flickr Founders Vancouver Bound?
Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington is reporting that Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are leaving Yahoo. Fake & Butterfield and their seven employees moved from Vancouver to Silicon Valley in 2005 after Yahoo acquired Flickr for a reported $30 million.
Photo sharing site Flickr is one of the leading lights of Yahoo - but cofounders (and husband/wife team) Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield won’t be around to keep driving the product forward. They are both joining the mass exodus of executives from the company.
From what we hear, neither has imminent plans to work on any new projects, but I suspect we haven’t heard the last from either of them.
Should be interesting to see where they end up - revisiting a Inc.com co-interview from December 2006 leads you to believe that they’re now finally free to do it all over again.
Butterfield: We shouldn’t have sold when we did, but you don’t know that until after the fact. And it’s not like we have some tragic life story. We’re on the cover of Time magazine and the cover of Newsweek. Reid Hoffman [an early investor in Flickr] said, “You can always do it again. And the amount of money that you’ll make on this will change your life in a way that…”
Fake: “…you’ll be able to be entrepreneurs the rest of your lives.”
Alberta Tech Roadtrip to Menlo Park
The Alberta Government is taking their Tech Show on the road and hosting a seminar on technology commercialization and cross border partnerships in Menlo Park next week.
Over the past two decades Alberta has invested significant resources in its education system, research infrastructure and people to create a diversified knowledge-based economy, based on the foundation of the oil and gas and agriculture sectors. The objective is to foster a culture of innovation, generate new ideas and approaches, attract leading thinkers and create value.
This luncheon, with a keynote speech by the Honourable Doug Horner, will provide investors, researchers and companies an introduction to new government initiatives in technology commercialization and to business and partnership opportunities in Alberta.
Presenters include Consul General of San Francisco Marc LePage, The Honourable Doug Horner, Minister, Alberta Advanced Education and Technology, Shawn Abbott, Managing Partner of iNovia Capital, and Steve Slupsky, Co-Founder and CEO of Scanimetrics Inc.
If you’re going to be in Silicon Valley on Thursday, June 19th and would like to attend this luncheon event, be sure to register online with event code ‘SRI’.
Live Current Communicates Name Change
Communicate.com announced this morning that it is now operating as Live Current Media Inc. pending shareholder approval later this year. Also announced today was a definitive agreement to acquire Auctomatic - an early stage start-up funded primarily by Y Combinator LLC.
Auctomatic has developed e-commerce technology and tools that enable sellers to easily transact online through sites such as eBay. The acquisition of Auctomatic will jump-start Live Current’s technology and product development capabilities. All individuals from Auctomatic will be joining Live Current in Vancouver in connection with the proposed acquisition, including founders Kulveer Taggar, Harjeet Taggar and Patrick Collison.
It looks like the new team will be blogging about their plans with long-time Communicate.com blogger Adam Rabiner kicking it off this morning followed by CEO Geoff Hampson. With the new team in place, Live Current will focus on building its premium properties into engaging destination sites - monetized through advertising revenue and e-commerce.
Live Current’s focus will be to integrate all aspects of the ways in which consumers interact with the Internet today, including mobile, into these DestinationHubs(TM), enabling users to discover more and get closer to the information they are passionate about in their daily lives. The company will focus initially on building these DestinationHubs(TM) within the categories of travel, sports and health & beauty.
Disclosure: Techvibes Media Inc. Directors Boris Wertz and Geoffrey Hampson are also Directors of Live Current Media Inc.
Fusing Digital Media Start-ups with Cash
New Media BC’s digital media venture forum kicked off today with a State of the Nation Address by President Kenton Low and a Meet the Investors Panel.
Cleverly named Fusion as it aims to fuse the needs of digital media companies (money) with the needs of investment professional (start-ups worthy of money).
The Investors Panel was moderated by Mixpo’s Ron Stevens and included local VCs Steven Hnatiuk of Yaletown Venture Partners, Michael Kubik of Telus Ventures, Tanner Philp of BC Advantage Funds, and Sam Znaimer of Ventures West as well as a couple from out of town: John Borchers of Crescendo Ventures (Palo Alto) and Jason Bross of Argon Venture Partners (Calgary). All six VCs described their interest in digital media although their investment experience was limited. Borchers reiterated that the digital media ecosystem is still young and investments will come in time.
Kubik’s Telus Ventures is in a unique position as the strategic venture investment arm of telecommunications firm Telus. They partner with high potential, privately-held companies that offer unique technologies and innovative products that will accelerate growth initiatives within the “Telus Machine”. Kubik specifically mentioned three companies in their portfolio that might be of interest to the largely Pacific Northwest audience: Seattle’s Widevine Technologies and Ruckus Wireless as well as home grown Vision Critical (how do I get on the Telus customer panel???).
Apple Recovery with Absolute Software
Absolute Software is already a Vancouver success story for its innovative laptop security and theft management software, and it was on hand at Macworld showcasing products such as Computrace Lojack for Macintosh, which silently connects a computer to Absolute’s monitoring centre once it connects to the internet.
“It’s less the laptop than the data you have in that laptop,” Senior Director Stephen Midgley said. “Creative people, like Mac users, have lots of valuable data. They’re also more mobile and have multiple clients,” Midgley said. He added the new Macbook Air would likely be another target for laptop thieves.
Absolute’s approach is two-fold. Not only does the software contact the company if a laptop is stolen, but Absolute then does all the legal and investigative work to recover the laptop.
“Our main value is the physical recovery team. Law enforcement love us because we do the investigative work. And all the user has to do is call and get a case ID, and we do the rest,” Midgley said.
With much of Apple’s computer sales focused on highly-coveted laptops used in urban areas, anti-theft protection will continue to be an important consideration for many Mac users, as well as other laptop owners.
Macworld keynote leaves Canadian users wanting
Macworld 2008 saw Apple starting the new year bringing out four new products that wowed the audience at CEO Steve Jobs keynote speech this morning. But despite the enthusiasm in California, only a couple of Apple new gadgets and services will be of benefit to Canadian Apple fans.
The big product of the show was the Macbook Air, an incredibly thin and light new laptop with a full-size 13.3 inch screen, an 80 gig hard drive (with the option of a 64 gig solid state drive), and a mousepad that uses many of the same multi-touch gestures of the iPod Touch and iPhone. The Macbook Air also uses 802.11n, but gets rid of an optical drive, instead opting for a potentially unwieldy “remote disc” feature that lets users install software via another computer’s drive. While the Air is a triumph of ergonomics and engineering, it remains to be sen if Apple’s innovations are a little ahead of the current state of laptop computing.
Not surprisingly, there was no indication that the iPhone is coming north of the U.S. border anytime soon, so the new features (including maps with location, webclips, screen customization, and multiple SMS) aren’t of much use to us. A new set of software, including mail, maps, stocks, notes and weather will be added to the iPod Touch (at a cost of $20) for existing users, which Canadians will be able to use.
Apple also introduced Time Capsule, an Airport Extreme station with a built-in hard drive which backs up via Leopard’s Time Machine feature. Time Capsule will be available in 500 gig and 1 terabyte models.
The other big announcement was the introduction of iTunes movie rentals, along with a revamped Apple TV that lets users who don’t even have a computer rent movies from the iTunes movie store right on their television. While Apple plans to roll out international support for movie rentals quite soon, Canadian users don’t even have the option of buying movies yet, so don’t hold your breath.
Techvibes goes to Macworld
In addition to being a Techvibes blogger, I’m also a Mac fanatic, but I’ve never been to Macworld, the biggest Apple event of the year… until now. From January 14th to the 18th I’ll be roaming the halls of the Moscone Centre in downtown San Francisco, and I’ll be covering both the big events and the Canadian side of Macintosh for Techvibes. That’s where you, our readers, can get involved. Give me a heads-up if you or your company is headed to Macworld, and I’ll try to arrange a profile or interview from the show floor.
