What we are up to at Gnip

This being my first week at Gnip has been very interesting. We put out a new release last night, which you can learn more about on our website and from some of the various write ups like this one at TechCrunch which also covers the new products and business model for the company.

As the newest member of the team I am getting asked two questions by a lot of people, what are you doing? and what does Gnip do? I answered the first question in my last post and will address the second question in this post and point people to the main Gnip website and Gnip blog (where I will be cross-posting a lot of content from this blog in the coming months)

Gnip provides a extensible messaging platform that allows for the publishing or subscribing of events and data from across the Internet, which makes data portability exponentially less painful and more automatic once it is set up. Because Gnip is being built as a platform of capabilities and not a web application the core services are instantly useful for multiple scenarios, including data producers, data consumers and any custom web applications. Gnip already is being used with many of the most popular Internet data sources, inlcuding Twitter, Delicious, Flikr, Digg, and Plaxo.

So, who is the target user of Gnip? It is a developer, as the platform is not a consumer-oriented web application, but a set of services meant to be used a developer or an IT department for a set of core use cases.

• Data Consumers: You’ve built your pollers, let us tell you when and where to fire them. Avoid throttling & decrease latency from hours to seconds.
• Data Producers: Push your data to us and reduce API traffic by an order of magnitude while increasing distribution through aggregators.
• Custom web application: You want to embed or publish content to be used in your own application or for a third-party application. Decide who, or what, you care about for any Publisher, give us an end-point, and we push the data to you so you can solve your business use cases, such as customer service websites, corporate websites, blogs, or any web application.

By leveraging the Gnip APIs, developers can easily design reusable services, such as, push-based notifications, smart filters and data streams that can be used for all your web applications to make them better. Are you a developer? Give the new version a try!

I am joining Gnip as the head of products

After getting fully recharged by taking some time off over the summer I am ready to get back to being a productive part of society. I had a lot of fun networking and working on some business ideas of my own the last few months and in the end this networking led me to Gnip. (that is pronounced guh-nip). I blogged about Gnip in July just after they launched their initial notification service which offered a lot of benefits to data consumers and producers in several interesting ways.

My new role will be as the head of products and I will be working on helping the existing team take the Gnip services to market and focus on how we take the product development forward. I am very excited to join a quality group of people that are building an innovative company right in my backyard of Boulder. I will be blogging more frequently about industry related news both on this blog and on the Gnip blog so stay tuned.

And watch for our upcoming release where full data support will be added to the Gnip notification service.

Google Chrome - will it really be complimentary?

The big tech news is Google announcing their long awaited browser that has been speculated on for at least a couple years. Chrome is the project name and the early news is very interesting.

It appears that in several areas the good news is that Google is not creating a whole new browser from scratch.  For example, I found the fact that they are using the same rendering engine already used by several existing browsers very refreshing. (Webkit).   Too often development teams feel the need to create something new and rendering engines and app frameworks are often areas people build things that really do not need to be built.  From the Official Google Blog entry on Chrome:

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

TechCrunch also has a nice write up on the Google Chrome press conference.

I am also very interested to see how well the support for multiple running processes works and if as has been speculated, Chrome, really will end up being complimentary to existing browsers like Firefox and IE7.   There is speculation that either Mozilla or Microsoft could incorporate aspects of Chrome into their existing browsers.   This might be possible for Mozilla, but that sure does not seem to be likely for Microsoft given the likely competitive concerns that would be raised.

I plan to download Chrome and play with it so will share my thoughts in the coming weeks.

Boulder TechStars 08 Demo Day

The end of the summer is almost upon us and that means it is time for the ten companies in the TechStars program this year to show off what they are up to. The Investor Day/Demo Day was held at the Boulder Theater with about 300 people in attendance to hear ten companies give their pitch and demo their products, services and technologies.

The group this year is heavy on consumer facing products and technologies. I discussed this with a few people and this seems to reflect the Boulder/Denver technology scene. Here are my observations on the companies and their presentations.

Best positioned for their target markets
• Devver: Provides cloud based testing and developer productivity tools. I really like this product, and it was the one company within the group this year doing traditional enterprise software aimed at an IT audience. The concept is very simple but powerful, and besides saving set up costs and time for the developer I think the founders should push the IT governance angle. In a lot of cases developers just do not run tests because it is a pain, but by using Devver it might be easier for an IT group to enforce running tests as part of the check-in script process.
• App-X: Provides software as a service to venture capital and private equity fund managers. The product is built out on the Salesforce.com platform and appears to be well thought out for the target customer. They already have 12 customers and it would seem with the right focus and funding they could establish a nice business in this niche market.
• Foodzie: Provides an online marketplace where consumers can discover and buy food directly from small artisan producers. I could see this working very well in medium to larger communities where there are enough local food providers to support micro-sites, for example the “Boulder Foodzie Marketplace”. In addition, this seems like a nice way to get access to food providers from across the country if you do not mind paying the shipping costs.

New take on an existing market concept
• Ignightor: Group to group on-line dating. This was a great presentation and it is obvious that this team is very passionate about this concept. I got it immediately and I think that if they can get momentum it has a real chance of being successful. It would be interesting to see if they can broaden the target market beyond the 18-30 single crowds to a more diverse audience. It would seem this could be aimed at parents looking for play dates, to people looking for hiking or running partners or any group activity.
• Travelfli: This is the organizer for all your frequent flier programs so you can track them at one website and more easily redeem your miles or points for flights, rooms, cars, etc. I could use this now so I can track things more easily, especially programs that I use only once in a blue moon and always forget my username and password to the website. I think they will have to move really fast though as this seems like concept that has a low barrier to entry.

The wow demo of the day
• Occipital: This was one of those demos where you just go wow and the geek in you wonders how big a science project is behind the demo. This is meant to be a new and improved way to manage your digital imagery by using artificial intelligence to organize your photo stream, enabling vivid recollection with groundbreaking visualizations. I loved the auto-tagging and auto-object recognition. Object recognition scans your photos and finds known objects, say the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco or Red Rocks Amphitheater outside of Denver.

Additional companies that presented
• Gyminee: Social networking meets working out. They already have 35K users and are growing.
• People’s Software Company: Local advertising platform meets platform independent messaging and calendaring notifications.
• Highwaygirl.com: Content play aimed at independent music artists and their audiences with exclusive content and intimate interaction. Leveraging Topspin for backend capabilities.
• Buy Play Win: eCommerce platform where you get a chance to win your purchase

My iPhone Apps Should Stay Where I Put Them!

I have been using the new iPhone 2.0 software on my first generation iPhone since it was released and mostly like the enhancements. There is one issue that drives me nuts and just about has driven me to uninstall the few applications from third parties that I have downloaded. I’ll call this a bug that Apple needs to close so that when I update third party applications they stay where I had put them previously..

Why is this a bug? I should be the only person that can set the order of the applications on my iPhone. Once that order is set it should not be something that is allowed to be changed by applications when they are updated.

Right now I have seen two sets of behavior.

a) When I update applications from the App Store they all go to the last page. I have three pages of apps or home screen bookmarks and it drives me nuts that I have to reorder them if I choose to update the applications. Dear Apple, please fix this broken behavior.

b) Second, for some reason I also saw a different behavior which I can only describe as the “pick me” or “cutting to the front of the line” syndrome. In this case when I updated an application it ended up on the first page of my iPhone when previously they were on second page. Again, I expect applications to stay where I put them on my phone.

I am generally impressed with the iPhone 2.0 update but strange behavior like what I describe can be a real hit to user enjoyment and experience so I very much hope Apple will address these issues in the next update.