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Posts Tagged ‘Person Team’

What the Tweetmeme Toyota Portal Looks Like Under the Hood

Auto manufacturer Toyota launched a new Twitter-based portal called Toyota Conversations tonight and the site is getting a whole lot of press. Most people are focused on how the site seems to contain more positive Tweets than the world at large, but there are a lot of negative links on the site as well.

We got a look at the back-end infrastructure of the Tweetmeme portal system and have screenshots displayed below. These aren’t for the Toyota project in particular, but they are the same tools being put to use in a different campaign. We know you feed and data geeks fantasize about building the ultimate feed moderation system. Check out the one that Toyota put down no small sum to get to use. It’s a nice combination of heavy duty and easy to use, just like you’d expect for a big corporate customer like this. The best news? This system will be opened up to the public soon.

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No Cover Up Here

Below, an item page for a popular link shared about Toyota. Below is what appears to be the company’s direct response. Thus the name of the site, Conversations.

Easy to Use Logic Chains

Tweetmeme portal customers set up complex combinations of rules for which tweets to display using what company founder Nick Halstead calls “a mini-programming language – with a drag + drop interface for setting them up. Rules can be based on tweet, text from the story, title, meta data from the story, geo location data, twitter users who are tweeting…almost any data that is associated with twitter and the linked story that we spider as well. Each channel can have a number of chains – each chain can work separately – but be valued differently – i.e. have a confidence factor associated with it.”

The Big Dashboard in the Sky

This is what Tweetmeme HQ looks at, standing on top of all the channels. The ten person team calls its big set of rules “the pickle matrix”. Every time someone Tweets a tweet with a new link in it, or a Retweet, that data is thrown against the pickle matrix. That’s the field “access count.” Then an optimized process of rules are matched. “The data isn’t the problem,” Halstead says, “it’s the number of rules we put against it. This is 1,000 times more powerful than Twitter’s Track or search because we can apply tens of thousands of rules to every Tweet we see.”

Halstead’s company got a big boost from this deal, but Tweetmeme has been cash-flow positive for at least the last 3 months. “I think the more interesting fact,” he says, “is that I started this company for the sole purpose of doing this and companies are now only just starting to recognize the value in this kind of proposition. I think that shows how far social media has grown up. And that you have to stick at what you know is right – even if people ignore it to start with.”

No word yet on when this system will be opened up to the public, but used in conjunction with other media types like Toyota has it sure seems like there’s a lot of potential here.

Disclosure: FM Publishing, a partner in the Toyota project, is also RWW’s advertising network.

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Pownce Founder Leah Culver Leaves Six Apart

In December 2008, Six Apart acquired Pownce, a microblogging service that never managed to attract a large following. Pownce was shuttered after the acquisition, but its two-person team joined Six Apart to help integrate the technology into Six Apart’s blogging services. Today Pownce founder Leah Culver has written on her blog that she’s leaving Six Apart, where she spent the last year working on its TypePad and TypePad Motion products. Culver writes that her next project is developing an iPhone application for Plancast.

Despite reports to the contrary, Culver isn’t joining Plancast full time (at least not yet). Plancast founder (and TechCrunch alum) Mark Hendrickson says that she’s joining on a contract basis to build the iPhone app, but that the long-term future is uncertain. Culver’s blog notes that she might continue working on Leafy Chat, a web based IRC client that’s in private beta.

One thing worth pointing out: Culver and Mike Malone were Pownce’s only engineers, and they were absorbed into the Six Apart team as part of the acquisition. Malone left Six Apart just over a year after the acquisition to join SimpleGeo, and now Culver has left just a few months later. It looks like they had a one-year post acquisition cliff, and given their departures soon thereafter, it’s possible the integration of Pownce’s technology didn’t work out as they might have hoped.

Image by hyku

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Chicken Soup for the Startup: Dysfunctional Leadership Quotes

It’s an unfortunate fact that great historical speeches and literature are often bastardized to justify poor management practices, leadership decisions and policies. There are at least 84 Chicken Soup for the Soul-related books on the market today and not one directed towards tech startups. As told through a series of abused “inspirational quotes”, here’s our effort to explain why.

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“It is better to be feared than loved.” – Niccolo Machiavelli
Hold a contest for worst employee of the month, instigate a bathroom pass for your five person team and remove all flare from the office. If the message you’re hoping to express to others is that you’re a terrible human being, then by all means, engrave this quote into your desk.

If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss. – Sun Tzu
Send your vast army of interns on fact finding missions, monitor every signal from the competition’s trench and position yourself as the RC Cola to their Coke. If you define yourself by your industry leader and let your employees know it, they’ll be enthused to exclaim the inspirational company cheer “We’re number four!” every chance they get. After all, you can’t lose a battle if no one thinks you’re worth challenging.

“If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.” – Napolean Bonaparte
Armed with reruns of the Apprentice, some advice from a second cousin and a Wired magazine article from 1996, you’re the most brilliant person alive. Reduce your designers to pixel pushing monkeys, make the CTO your whipping boy and drive your product manager to prescription medication abuse. If you think you can code, design and sell better than any one else alive then surely your chutzpah and street smarts will make you the Charlemagne of startups.

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Should Apple Care That Facebook’s iPhone App Developer Has Quit?

News reverberated through the developer community that long-time and highly prominent community contributor Joe Hewitt has quit developing the iPhone Facebook application. While Joe said that Apple has the right to do what it wants, he does not agree with its policies and has chosen to move on. Joe posted this tweet in the afternoon of November 11th:

“Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project.”

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This guest post was written by Elia Freedman.

The Problem

Apple’s App Store is a mess for small and independent developers. Very few developers are making even a livable wage, and the approval process is a black box.

Let’s start with making money. Pinch Media reports that the average iPhone application has netted (for the developer) a grand total of $8,500, and 80% of developers have made less than that. That’s not per month – which would be a starting point for a two-person team – but rather total revenue earned.

And as reported a few thousand times, the approval process is a black box. For the most part, developers don’t know whether their app will be approved or in what timeframe, making the entire experience a nail-biter.

Should Apple Care?

Well, of course, Apple should care. Apple should be inclusive of its community and encourage small developers to grow and make a living from developing for the iPhone. Apple rightly views the App Store as a competitive advantage and should continue striving to keep its developers in-house.

On the other hand, Apple is not responsible for marketing and selling for its developers. The App Store is a distribution medium, not a marketing and sales platform. Apple has a system in place for enabling customers to quickly and easily purchase and download software for their devices. And it has been a massive success, with over two billion downloads.

The difference, though, is that the apps that Apple needs in the App Store most – gaming and entertainment titles – are getting in. And they are being developed by some of the biggest brands in the world. After all, the iPhone and iPod Touch are, first and foremost, entertainment devices.

Note that these big brands do not face the same problems as the rest of the developer community. Many have contacts deep in Apple, are magically ushered through the review process in a few days and get great placement on Apple’s virtual store shelves. Electronic Arts, for example, has no public rejection stories and currently has titles throughout the list of top grossing apps, suggesting that it is in the top 10% for App Store revenue generation.

And so, Joe Hewitt has quit the App Store. It’s a great show of unity for small developers, but Apple has clearly linked successful applications to big brands, and those brands continue to clamor for iPhone presence.

Guest author: Elia Freedman is the CEO of Infinity Softworks, the leading provider of software calculators with over 15 million distributed. In its 13-year history, Infinity Softworks has developed applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows, Palm OS and Windows Mobile. Elia writes about tech, mobile and running a business on his blog, eliainsider.com and at Twitter as eliajf.

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Photo site Shutterfly goes mobile — acquires Tiny Pictures for $1.3M

Shutterfly, a company that lets you create photo albums online, has acquired mobile photo-sharing company Tiny Pictures for $1.3 million.

Shutterfly will expand its mobile offerings by using Tiny Pictures’ expertise in mobile, according to John Poisson, chief executive of Tiny Pictures, who confirmed the acquisition in an interview this morning.

The deal is a loss for investors, who had pumped in a whopping $12.2 million into the company, and suggests Tiny Pictures was unable to gain any significant traction. It faced scores, if not hundreds, of other photo sharing sites that flooded the Web in recent years, and so the odds it would produce the returns expected by its investors were very low.

Tiny Pictures runs a mobile site called Radar.net that lets users upload photos to pretty much any phone, and lets other users comment on them. Radar has an iPhone application that lets you do things like pull your Flickr photos into your Radar photo-stream. Radar enjoyed favorable reviews, but with Facebook emerging as a dominant photo sharing site online, its future looked rough as a stand alone site. Shutterfly apparently wants to apply some of these social media features to its own service.

Poisson wouldn’t comment on whether the Radar site would keep running, or be shut down. He said to “expect a new product release from us,” suggesting it would be soon, but he provided no specifics on timing. He also wouldn’t comment on the number of users Radar has.

The acquisition also includes a $1.3 million earnout for the nine-person team at Tiny Pictures, thus providing an incentive to the team to keep working at Shutterfly even if the deal is a complete wash for investors. Tiny Pictures had raised its money from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Still, Poisson said he and his team are excited about joining Shutterfly, which he called a visionary company, and great fit for Tiny Pictures. Tiny Pictures was founded four years ago, and was experimenting early with things like real-time browsing, commenting and social “whispers.”

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Why The Brain Behind Hadoop Left Yahoo

Earlier this morning the Internet was buzzing with news first reported by The New York Times Bits blog: Doug Cutting was leaving Yahoo. In specific, he was leaving Yahoo for Cloudera, a small startup.

Cutting was one of Yahoo’s best and brightest, especially in the area of search and software infrastructure. He got to work on the largest installation of his wildly successful software Hadoop, an open source solution for dealing with huge data sets. Both Yahoo and Cloudera use Hadoop, so the work is the same on the most basic level. Why would he leave to join a 20-person team at a young company?

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Blame Bing?

The gut reaction of many, including Ashlee Vance in her Bits post, was to speculate about the effect that the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal had. With Bing now in charge and Yahoo search gutted, was it the reason behind Cutting’s departure?

In a phone conversation, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson staunchly denied any connection with the deal. He stated that the discussions with Yahoo about Cuttings move predated the search deal announcement.

While Yahoo representatives were unavailable to confirm the claim, Yahoo will definitely continue to do much of the work with Hadoop that was Cutting’s job, even if Bing is now front-and-center. In other words, the deal doesn’t affect him that drastically.

But if it wasn’t the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal that caused Cutting to depart, then what was it?

The Question of Scale

Both Yahoo and Cloudera use Hadoop for mission critical work. The latter built an entire business around it, and for Yahoo it’s become key to their operations. The difference is in scale.

In his blog post explaining the move, Cutting specifically states that he joined Yahoo in order to get the resources needed to scale the system so it could process the full Web.

Today, Yahoo uses what it claims is the largest implementation of Hadoop in the world, and a lot work that goes into it revolves around the scaling problems that so many clusters bring. Cloudera, on the other hand, is a relatively young startup working with a greater variety of clients. “Going forward, Cloudera presents an opportunity to work with a wider range of Hadoop users,” Cutting said.

A Proving Ground for Hadoop

Working with Cloudera might mean working on a smaller scale, but it presents the opportunity just about every passionate developer wants: an exciting (and potentially profitable) proving ground for their work. That proving ground is the appeal that a startup like Cloudera has, and it’s what serial entrepreneurs get addicted to.

Photo by Tim Bray, via Wikipedia

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