Archive for the 'Startups' Category

Zoto Open Sources Their Web Site Code - Maybe

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 2, 2008
in Open Source, Software and Startups
. 0 Comments

image The folks over at the photo sharing site Zoto have decided to Open Source the code for their site. Kord Campbell, CEO of Zoto and currently Chief Evangelist at Splunk, makes the announcement at GeekCEO:

I’ll keep this simple. I’m uploading the Zoto 3.0 source code to its new Google Code project tonight, and placing the BSD free software license on it. Version 2.0 of Zoto will follow in a couple of days (as soon as I find where we put it). We’ve also been working on a new site called Fotofluff, and its code is going up there as well.

This is a very cool development, and very cool of the Zoto folks to do. Hundreds of files filled with Python goodness representing a very well done photo sharing site. Nice.

However, while Kord claims that the code will be released under a BSD license, and the Google Code page specifically references the New BSD License, the About page on Google Code says:


The server and the rest of the Zoto code base is now free for non-commercial use. If you want to use Zoto’s software in a commercial, for-profit environment, you can contact Kord Campbell at kordless@gmail.com, to inquire about licensing options for commercial applications.

That’s not exactly a BSD license.

And, when you download the code using: "svn checkout http://zoto-server.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ zoto-server", there is no LICENSE file included in the distribution to clarify. Interestingly, someone even filed a bug/issue against the project about this.

The BSD License would certainly allow for the greatest re-use of the existing code and is a good choice to use, depending on what Kord’s goals are.

I look forward to the clarification of the license.



Y Combinator + RescueTime: Lessons Learned

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 2, 2008
in Software, Startups and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

image Tony Wright wrote a nice article over at FoundRead about his experience with the folks at Y Combinator in getting his most recent company, RescueTime, to market. Definitely worth a read.

I like the Y Combinator model that Paul Graham has put together. And, they’re getting lots of great companies built (on the cheap, as it should be).

Sun Microsystems Acquires Parallels For $205M???

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 31, 2008
in Startups, Venture Capital and Virtualization
. 0 Comments

Just saw the story over at Virtualization.com.

I hope for the sake of the Parallels folks that this is an April Fool’s joke.

Parallels would be able to build a company valued much higher than the reported price. And, we all know what the Sun stock has been doing: Pretty much flat over the last 5 years.

A heck of a deal for Sun, however, if it’s true.

Tags: Sun, Sun Microsystems, Parallels, SUNW, M&A, Acquisition, Merger, Brian Berliner,brianberliner

New LinkedIn Feeds Work For Me

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 31, 2008
in Personal, Startups and Technology
. 0 Comments

I must admit that I’m finding some clear networking value in the newly releasedLinkedIn RSS feeds.

You can get Public feeds from LinkedIn Answers (which I don’t care about), or a Personal feed of your Network Updates (which I very much care about). Here’s the announcement.

From the Home page while logged in to LinkedIn, click on the subscribe link next to the Network Updates.

Then, read it with your favorite news/feed reader. Mine’s Google Reader.

Makes it easy to snoop keep up with the connections happening in your network of friends & associates.

Enjoy!

Tags: LinkedIn, RSS, Feeds, Google Reader, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

Universal Parallel Computing Research Center

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Software, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

 

My good friend and advisor, Dave Patterson, has been selected to lead the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at UC Berkeley.

Patterson has been an advisor for three of the startup companies that I have founded. He’s a great guy and has a brilliant mind. He has a knack for doing research with immensely practical applications. He gets ahead of problems in Computer Science, and addresses them with the end result in mind. I just can’t say enough nice things about him. Brilliant.

The UPCRC is a joint venture between UC Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by Intel and Microsoft. These two universities will spend the next 5 years trying to figure out how we build computing systems that can fully utilize the coming wave of multicore and manycore systems.

This is absolutely critical stuff.

Take a look at some of the coverage:

This is a very interesting project to me, and I will be writing more about it later. Why? Well:

  • I know David Patterson well, and have always admired his work
  • I am a graduate of the UIUC Computer Science department
  • Much of my career has been spent on HPC and supercomputer systems
  • Multicore and manycore systems are coming. You can’t stop it or deny it. There’s a solid reason why Intel and Microsoft are sponsoring this research.
  • I’ve been thinking about this topic of late.

You will absolutely hear more from me about this.

Tags: UPCRC, David Patterson, University of Illinois, UIUC, UC Berkeley, Intel, Microsoft, HPC,Parallel, Multicore, Manycore, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

BeInSync Synchronizes With Phoenix Technologies

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Software, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

image In the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked about the file synchronization market. Products and companies like FolderShare, Dropbox, Syncplicity, and Sharpcast.

In a timely moment, BeInSync has been acquired by Phoenix Technologies for $25M. TechCrunch covers it well.

BeInSync looks to be most similar to Sharpcast’s SugarSync product in terms of functionality. Sharpcast has support for Mobile devices, while BeInSync does not. BeInSync may only work on Windows (no Mac) in fact. BeInSync charges $39.95 for 50GB of storage per year, while SugarSync charges $199.99 for 60GB of storage per year. BeInSync certainly has the more attractive price!

I must admit that I don’t fully get why Phoenix Technologies was interested, except that Woody Hobbs, current President/CEO and previous President/CEO of IntelliSync, clearly knows what he’s looking for.

And, the $25M price tag can’t be sitting well with the Sharpcast folks, since they’ve already taken down $16.5M in VC money. Sharpcast would need a significantly higher exit for an acquisition to make financial sense.

Amazon EC2 Gets It Right

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Open Source, Software, Startups, Technology and Virtualization
. 0 Comments

I’ve written a couple of articles about the Amazon EC2 service. It’s the Elastic Compute Cloud that lets you build very scalable (and, reliable) web sites "in the cloud", using Web Services created and operated by Amazon.

It’s amazingly good.

And, just got significantly better.

Amazon just announced two significant improvements to the service:

Elastic IP Addresses:

Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to host web sites, web services and other online applications in Amazon EC2. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your AWS account, not with your instances, and can be programmatically mapped to any of your instances. This allows you to easily recover from instance and other failures while presenting your users with a static IP address.

Availability Zones:

Availability Zones give you the ability to easily and inexpensively operate a highly available internet application. Each Amazon EC2 Availability Zone is a distinct location that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations, but now it is as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. You can choose to run your application across multiple Availability Zones to be prepared for unexpected events such as power failures or network connectivity issues, or you can place instances in the same Availability Zone to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.

These two capabilities answer the primary complaints that I have heard about the EC2 service, and I suspect will allow for significant customer adoption in the next 18 months. Static IP Addresses, combined with serving up the proper certificates, should allow for fully secure computing under Amazon EC2.

The guys at RightScale have described Setting up a fault-tolerant site using Amazon’s Availability Zones.

Amazon also announced User Selectable Kernels:

Amazon EC2 now allows developers to use kernels other than the default Amazon EC2 kernels with their instances.

Including:

This release makes the following new AMIs and AKIs (Kernel IDs) available:
AMI: Fedora Core 6 - 32 bit - a stock FC6 release with matching kernel and RAM disk
AMI: Fedora 8 - 32 bit - a stock F8 release with matching kernel and RAM disk
AMI: Fedora 8 - 64 bit - a stock F8 release with matching kernel and RAM disk
AKI: 2.6.18 Kernel - 32 bit - a stock 2.6.18 kernel (can be used with 32 bit AMIs)
AKI: 2.6.18 Kernel - 64 bit - a stock 2.6.18 kernel (can be used with 64 bit AMIs)

Tags: Amazon, EC2, Cloud Computing, Web Services, Static IP, Failover, Redundancy, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

Sharpcast Puts $16.5M To Good Use: Releases SugarSync

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 26, 2008
in Gadgets, Software, Startups and Venture Capital
. 2 Comments

Sharpcast, founded in 2004 and funded in 2006, has just announced the launch of their SugarSync product (formerly known as Project Hummingbird).

Similar to the products I talked about last week in the article, "FolderShare, Dropbox, Syncplicity, Oh My…", SugarSync is a tool that keeps your files synchronized across multiple computers (PC & Mac today, maybe Linux as well someday), including mobile devices.

One of the things that sets Sharpcast apart from the others is the support for many mobile platforms. They support Brew, J2ME, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian (coming soon). I don’t really think that the mobile aspect of this is where the market is right now, but I could be wrong. And, Sharpcast certainly has enough VC money to address the perceived needs of the mobile users. In any case, Sharpcast certainly has a big enough market with just the Universal Sync service.

Sharpcast charges $9.99/month or $99.99/year for their basic plan, which includes 30GB of storage in the cloud. I have 40GB of music, 30GB of photos, and 50GB of documents, so for me to use the service for just that (not counting my 450GB of camcorder video), I would need the Business Plan, which runs $499.99 yearly and covers 250GB of storage in the cloud.

Yikes! That’s pricey.

For data protection, I think I’ll just buy another Time Machine drive.

A Note About Sharpcast Photos:

Sharpcast has had a product in the market for a couple years now known as Sharpcast Photos. Focused on synchronizing just your photos between your computers and mobile devices. A subset of what SugarSync provides, to be sure. However, it does not appear that Sharpcast Photos has gained many subscribers. The site https://www.sharpcastphotos.com/ doesn’t even register traffic on Quantcast or Compete.com. Does anyone have any paid subscriber data for Sharpcast Photos?

When Sharpcast Photos was first released, my feeling was that they had priced themselves out of the market. The cost is $5.99/month or $64.99/year, which is a bit steep for just photo protection - especially since the sharing part was limited to their photo sharing service. Perhaps the limited subscriber base backs that up. Anyone?

Tags: Sharpcast, Photos, Sharpcast Photos, SugarSync, Dropbox, FolderShare, Syncplicity,Synchronization, Sync, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

Brain Fitness Program and VMware Fusion

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 25, 2008
in Entertainment, Personal, Software, Startups and Virtualization
. 2 Comments

    

My wife and I listen to National Public Radio almost exclusively when in the car these days. And, living in the Bay Area, you are in the car a lot. Trust me.

So, we make sure to donate to KQED, our local station, every year. And, with that donation, you often get a gift in return.This year, we received Brain Fitness Program Classic.

That’s a fantastic gift, and one that we were certainly looking forward to receiving. Because, hey, we all need to keep our brains sharp, right? We can’t just rely on blogging to do it, can we? No. I didn’t think so.

The product arrived today!

Installation into Windows was a snap, but it wouldn’t run:

The error message is: "Protected program can not be run under virtual machine!"

Now, why would they do that?

So, the problem is that we run our Windows system under VMware Fusion on our Apple iMac computer. Works great and saves electricity (two computers and only one plug in the wall).

However, the fine folks at PositScience that created the Brain Fitness Program seem to specifically check if their application is running on a virtual machine, and refuses to start!

That’s ridiculous.

I now have no way to run the program.

Ridiculous.

Harumpf.

Tags: NPR, KQED, Public Radio, National Public Radio, Charity, VMware, VMware Fusion VMware,Fusion, Windows, Mac OS X, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

Bug Labs at EclipseCon 2008

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 19, 2008
in Mobile, Open Source, Software, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

bug_labs I enjoyed the presentation done by Bug Labs at EclipseCon 2008, titled BUG: A Customizable Hardware and Software Platform using Linux, Java, and OSGi. If you haven’t seen the BUG device, you should check out their Products page.

It’s Geek Candy.

And, it’s entirely built with Open Source goodness - both software AND hardware. Bug Labs gets it!

Start with a BUGbase (which is a full-fledged Linux box on an ARM processor), combine it with a variety of BUGmodules to add various hardware capabilities (like LCD screens, video cameras, GPS devices, accelerometers and the like), and snap it all together to do something interesting. Or, make your own hardware to their spec, and use their software stack. Or, run a different software stack on their hardware. Or, create your own BUGmodule hardware. It’s all open. Knock yourself out.

While I find the hardware interesting, I think the truly exciting part of the business is the software components and the dynamic nature that binds it all together.

Yes, it’s got OSGi at it’s core, including a version of the Concierge runtime!

I think that was a very smart, and bold move. This company may be doing some of the most practical and interesting work in the OSGi space.

This will be a fun company to watch.

spark-capital They are good guys.

Bug Labs is a Spark Capital portfolio company (shout out to Bijan Sabet!).