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Posts Tagged ‘Clone’

Microsoft Caught With Hand in Plurk’s Cookie Jar?

This morning, we got news that Microsoft had unequivocally ripped off design and code from marginally successful microblogging service Plurk.

Now, we’re seeing reports – and seeing for ourselves on the Microsoft website – that the knockoff site has been unceremoniously ganked from the tubes. Did a major corporation get caught red-handed stealing intellectual property from a startup? Say it ain’t so! More interestingly, is the site’s removal an admission of guilt? And are these side-by-side source code screenshots incriminating or what?

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We received an email from a Plurk co-founder Amir Salihefendic this morning calling MSN China’s Juku an obvious counterfeit. The proof is in the pudding. And the screenshots. And the source code:

Currently, the Microsoft microblog site reads something along the lines of “We regret to inform you that the service is temporarily not available due to system maintenance. Please visit the site again later. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Perhaps they ought to be apologizing to Plurk for the inconvenience.

“We were absolutely shocked and outraged,” wrote Plurk rep Dave Thompson, “when we first saw with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft’s new offering had with Plurk…

“We’re still in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of wilfully plagiarizing a young and innovative upstart’s work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms.”

Microsoft has issued this press release that passes the buck on to an unnamed third-party contractor. Is it likely that the Microsoft executives in charge of producing the microblog were a) unaware of Plurk’s existence and design to the extent that they wouldn’t recognize a clone as such and b) that they didn’t simply point at Plurk and tell their vendors to “make us one of those”?

Having had some experience in both startup development processes and corporate application deployment, I personally know very well that a (literally) criminal amount of IP theft goes on every day in Silicon Valley and around the world. Most of the time, the offending parties are operating under the belief that they won’t get caught. And a great deal of the time, they’re not caught.

We must, however, applaud Microsoft’s taking the site down to investigate the matter rather than being defensive or litigious. Still, the software giant should be accepting more accountability for the attempted theft that was conducted in its name and under the auspices of its brand.

What do you think? Who is to blame in this situation? Cast your vote below, and tell us what you really think in the comments.

How Do You See the MSFT/Plurk Situation?(polls)

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Cloning or theft? Ars explores game design with Jenova Chen

The video game clone has been around since the dawn of the medium, as developers attempted to build on the ideas of others… or maybe they were just ripping them off. It’s a sticky situation. Most developers understandably don’t want to discuss it, but the subject keeps coming up. This is thanks in no small part part to the popularity of platforms like the iPhone, Facebook, and other digital delivery outlets where being first to the market is often a primary factor in success. The result is a proliferation of games that both look and play very similarly, if not identically, and plenty of titles that have been forced to change or else be taken off the market. But what exactly defines a clone? Is there a fine line that separates theft from inspiration? Ars investigates, and thatgamecompany’s Jenova Chen provides his own take on the issue.

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Yahoo! Releases YQL-Powered Meme API

Yahoo! Meme, a rich-media microblog that originally started as a Portuguese-only web app and has since expanded to Spanish and English language versions, is often mistakenly called a Twitter clone.

However, in stark contrast to the 140-character wunder-app, Meme has proven in the months since its release to be a much better platform for multimedia sharing and cross-platform content curation. Now, the Tumblr/Twitter/Posterous hybrid is offering an API built on top of YQL, Yahoo!’s query language that we covered back in May, when we were impressed with its power, versatility, and uniqueness. The Yahoo! team has already used the API to develop a version of Meme for smartphones.

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According to the Yahoo! Developer Network post announcing the release, “Developers can use this open API to create new applications based on Meme as well as easily create mashups with other products through YQL.”

As an example of what YQL allows developers to do, Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brooks told us in May, “YQL… allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo!’s servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small.” Also from our May coverage:

According to Yahoo! Chief Technologist Sam Pullara, the idea behind YQL (launched in October 2008) was to create an agnostic query language similar to SQL, a language familiar to most developers, and let developers use that language to use the Internet as a huge database. “If you make it universally and simply accessible so every application developer doesn’t have to learn every API, it’s be easier for developers to create apps from the data users have taken so much time to make available on the Internet.”

Although YQL looks a lot like SQL, it treats the info on the web as a virtual table that developers can manipulate in a standardized way, regardless of the API that data came from. Developers only had to know how to use YQL to quickly create simple mashups.

Interested developers can check out the Meme documentation. The API, the site says, “is intended for developers who are familiar with RESTful Web services.” In addition to offering superior support for multimedia content and simple access through YQL, Meme also has an excellent built-in repost function, an asymmetrical friendship model, and OAuth compliance.

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The Founders Institute’s Adeo Ressi on his plans to leave no entrepreneur behind

Adeo Ressi is best known as the founding member of TheFunded, the site where entrepreneurs can rate venture capitalists. Earlier this year, he got into the startup training business, with the launch of the Founders Institute. It’s not just a clone better-known incubator Y Combinator, — Ressi targets founders far earlier in the process, before they’ve even come up with an idea, and the institute also introduced a new funding model, where investors in one company actually get shares in all the companies.

The Founders Institute just graduated its first class, with 66 people creating 54 companies — that’s more than any incubator I know of. I interviewed Ressi about the institute, his methods for predicting startup success, and about his plans to expand The Founders Institute geographically.

VentureBeat: Where did the idea for The Founders Institute come from?

Adeo Ressi: TheFunded takes about 200 CEO applications per day and as many as 80 or 90 percent of those applications are not really qualified to be contributing members of the community. They have a badly formed business or they’re not very sophisticated. So, I was looking for ways to help CEOs build better businesses — you know, I was thinking of making TheFunded Lite, which would be the lower-end version of the site, for up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

I realized that’s not only denigrating, but I’m not sure that it would really be helpful. I thought, what you really need to do is have a training program to help these founders build better companies. That got me thinking, well, how do you build a world-class training program? Thinking through that led to The Founders Institute.

VB: How close do you feel you came to achieving your goals for the first class?

AR: Well, the vision of the whole institute is to launch 1,000 companies a year. I set out with a macroeconomic goal, which was to help get us out of recession and go back to innovation by forming hundreds of companies in different geographies. Of course, when you model it out, you have to assume failure. You have to assume that not everyone who applies will get in, and you have to assume some people who get in won’t graduate, and you have to assume some people who graduate will fail. The model calls for maybe two companies out of 50 being wildly successful.

What’s interesting is, my whole mindset shifted when the sessions started. The rallying cry of the whole program is now, “Leave no founder behind!” If you go into the program assuming a failure rate, it would be like teaching a high school class and saying, “Well, you know a lot of my kids are going to be drug addicts. I can’t do anything about it.” You want to enter with belief and the vision that 100 percent will be successful. My view is, I will not stop at anything until 100 percent of everyone who finishes the program is successful. I don’t see failure as an option or an acceptable outcome.

VB: Well, how do you go about implementing that belief?

AR: This is one of the most interesting things. I’m a firm believer in testing, and not standardized testing in the classic sense. I had a researcher develop a blended personality, aptitude, and intelligence quotient test. It’s in five parts and each part tests all three of the desired metrics. It takes candidates about an hour to finish. All of the applicants had to take the test.

With this test, with greater accuracy than 95 percent of published social science research, we can predict the following two things: First, the quality of the idea that you will develop in the program — we don’t actually ask you for the idea when you apply, because everybody knows as an entrepreneur, your idea will change. And the second thing is how you will perform at building your business during the four months of the program, which we think is a proxy for how you will perform building your business. Some famous entrepreneurs have asked me to take the test.

VB: Wait, so how do you quantify idea quality? Or success at building a business?

AR: We tried to measure idea quality and of course performance, objectively, using a numeric scale. I’ll give you simple example. A few people dropped out of the course, so on course performance they got a 1. Idea quality and course performance are managed on objective metrics, and then we correlated those with the test results.

What this means, Anthony, is dramatic. There’s some early data that suggests there can be a test that can predict your success as an entrepreneur — not with certainty, of course. There’s always the unknown factors, like running into an investor who screws you. But it appears that a test can, in fact, identify the key traits and characteristics that may make you a successful entrepreneur.

We can find people who may be stuck in a day job at Pfizer or Microsoft or Apple or Google, and we can tell them, “You have the propensity to come up with a great business idea, and you have the great stamina and fortitude to build an entrepreneurial business.” I think we can do this today, and I think within a few years’ time, we’ll be able to additionally measure probability of building a successful business. But to be able to find the people who really could be great entrepreneurs, but are not, is astounding. That has a profound impact to investment strategy, and it has a profound impact on economic development.

I want or one or two more classes to validate the model and then we’ll talk about it more publicly. It’s potentially game-changing.

VB: Can you be specific about what kind of success you’ve seen so far?

AR: Seventy-nine founders entered the program and 66 people graduated, with a total of 54 companies between them.

So we lost a bunch of founders because of life circumstances — people got transferred or moved. There were some other reasons that we lost founders. A couple of them did not want to join the bonus pool and participate in the shared equity upside, and we don’t make that mandatory, you just drop out of the program. We lost, interestingly enough, a few founders couldn’t really develop a fleshed-out idea. If you really didn’t have an idea for a business at the end of the program, we didn’t feel it was fair for the founder to graduate.

VB: And you’re launching a new program in San Diego?

AR: I went down to San Diego; we had an informational meeting there. About 100 founders showed up, and so we’re going to launch the application process tomorrow. [Since the interview, the San Diego institute started accepting applications, as has a program in Washington DC.]

By the end of 2009, we are looking at least three more locations and as many as six. Since the goal was to launch a thousand businesses a year, the only way to do that is to be in multiple locations. And since the first semester was so successful with the graduation rates, the quality of the founders, the quality of the experience, we really wanted to strike while the iron’s hot.

Plus, we’re in the middle of a horrific downturn and it truly is a great time to start companies, because they will hopefully bear fruit as the economic conditions improve. As the economy gets better, these companies will grow.

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Postling: Etsy Founders Do Social Media for Small Business

Half of the team that founded Etsy, along with a former Etsy and Amazon.com product manager, have quietly launched a new startup. Postling is a centralized platform for small businesses to publish to the social Web.

The pitch is that it’s a single place to do all your social media work. If you’re thinking it sounds like a clone of other multi-network social media apps, you’d only be partly correct. By signing up on the site, businesses get a single place to blog, share photos and post to social networks. With no free option, it’s clearly placing itself as a business tool and not a place for social media addicts, like FriendFeed or Ping.fm.

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Social Media Labor-saving Device

Chris Maguire and Haim Schoppik were co-founders of Etsy, and now make up the engineering side of Postling. CEO David Lifson was a product manager at both Etsy and Amazon.com previously.

The value proposition that it’s making is saving time for small businesses looking to test the social media waters. You publish to a variety of platforms and networks, and all your activity is also aggregated in to a central Postling blog hosted on a subdomain. There’s a free 30-day trial for the service, but after that it’ll be $9/month or $90/year.

Once you sign and connect your accounts, it offers a simple interface for four basic activities. In trying out all of them, it quickly became clear that although Postling has the right idea, it was definitely still in beta.

Status Updates: You can selectively post updates to Twitter and Facebook. Nothing really special here, since it’s not doing anything that TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop can’t do for either of those networks.

Blogging: Postling supports posting to your WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, or Squarespace blog. On the one hand, it was extremely fast and easy to write and send off a post. But there were some bugs and missing functionality, such as poor image handling and no ability to add categories in WordPress.

Images Uploads: You upload images to include in posts, and you can also upload them to Flickr. Instead of images alone, it’d be really nice upload videos and integrate with YouTube, Blip.tv or Vimeo. Online video is a medium growing in importance for many businesses, especially small ones which usually can’t afford big production costs.

Share a Link: This task was the most confusing. Most social media participants use social networks like Twitter and Facebook for link sharing, or they use social bookmarking. But it appeared that “sharing a link” as a separate function meant composing a blog post.

Turn The Bullhorn Around

It’s easy to forgive bugs in a service less than a week old. But there’s one thing that is glaringly absent from Postling right now: the ability to receive updates, in addition to publishing them.

Though it looks like the team at Postling is working on listening capabilities right now, until it shows up the service is of limited utility. In the near future, be sure to look for new features that will flesh out Postling as a social media tool for business.

Tip of the hat to Bre Pettis

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