Beti Cung

Loopt will be free on the new iPhone using Microsoft Virtual Earth

2008-06-17T05:43:00Z

I was going to come up with a cute title for this blog but decided that there was no reason. The facts stand for themselves. The fact is that Loopt, a great company with one of the smartest CEOs I've ever met (Sam Altman who is only 24 years old) was up on stage at Steve Job's Apple World-Wide Developers' Conference last week presenting the latest version of the Loopt mobile social networkng application on the new 3G enabled iPhone. The fact is that the default mapping the application used was Microsoft's Virtual Earth. And the best fact is that this great social networking application will be available for free on the iPhone so using Loopt, folks "never have to eat lunch alone again..." as Sam promises in his speech. Did I mention that Loopt is a Microsoft Startup Accelerator Company? My colleague covered them in a previous blog that you can read here. I don't want to sound like a Loopt groupie but check out the video of Sam on stage at WWDC.

First Day of Google I/O -- Does anyone know what I/O stands for?

2008-05-29T08:59:00Z

The Google I/O two-day conference started Wednesay May 28th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco (I was going to say today but realized it's 2AM PST now). This developer focused conference was first branded Google Developer Day last year in San Jose but has since grown in scale and coverage. It was a packed house with over 2500 developers crowding into Moscone West. There was a brief hiccup with registration which caused everyone to go up to the keynote without their badge but by 2PM, everyone was badged and good to go.

Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering at Google delivered the keynote address around the theme of "Client, Connectivity and the Cloud". The sum of the message was that Google was making the cloud more accessible, making connectivity pervasive and making the client more powerful. To illustrate the first point, Vik had Kevin Gibbs, Google Tech Lead for AppEngine come up to talk about their new cloud services offering that they unveiled earlier at Google Campfire One. Additionally, Kevin had some pricing information available on what Google will charge for the service. To speak to cloud accessibility, Steve Horowitz from the Android team demo'd a mobile device running Android. This presentation was definitely the crowd-pleaser with everyone loving the compass-enabled Google Streetview application. Then Mark Lucovsky showed the Google Data APIs to spice up a simple celebrity fan-site. I don't know if I should make this observation or not but of the 4 main presenters at the keynote session, 3 of them were at Microsoft prior to Google (Vic, Steve and Mark).

The conference was not a stage for any large announcements but more a series of smaller incremental announcements for Gears, GWT (Google Web Toolkit), Google Earth APIs, etc. However, Google I/O is notable in that Google, in a more significant and deliberate way, is reaching out to the developer community, a community that Microsoft has long focused on.

What does the I/O stand for in Google I/O? Vic in an earlier interview with CNET said it means "Innovation in the Open." I thought it was Input/Output as in getting developer Input and having Google's latest announcements as Output but maybe that was too obvious...

Jajah makes it easy to phone home

2008-05-29T07:14:00Z

Jajah, a Microsoft Startup Accelerator company has been super busy lately with some really cool deals that place it where the users are. First off, last month, Jajah announced that it will provide voice services for Yahoo Messenger users (a total of 97million people). This marks Jajah's first enterprise client and also marks Yahoo's determination to move into Skype's VoIP-space which is great news for Yahoo users and all users (competition is always welcome). Jajah's subscriber base has jumped to over 10 million in just 2 years since starting in 2006. With the Yahoo deal, it should continue to grow at a pretty steep clip. My erstwhile colleague, Nicolas Kardas, wrote about the company a while back (check out his original blog) when they had 2 million subscribers and were winning multiple industry and startup awards. It looks like they haven't slowed down though Skype's registered user-base stands currently at around 246 million.

The second deal Jajah announced that I thought was neat was their integration with Chumby. Jajah has created a "Jajah Widget" for the Chumby device to allow free PC-to-PC or low-cost calls to mobile and land-lines anywhere in the world. I can have Chumby sit next to my bedside and I can make calls from there.

Lastly, Jajah is working with MobileTribe in order to reach Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo users through a mobile phone to place calls and send SMS. Whether instant messaging, hanging out at home or on my mobile phone, I can make hugely discounted or free calls to my friends and family anywhere in the world thanks to the busy team at Jajah. I'm sure they are as busy as ever work on the next level of integrations.

LiveUniverse + Pageflakes, Greater than the sum of its parts

2008-05-19T08:57:00Z

Pageflakes, one of the companies I have had a chance to work with in the past year in the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program, last week finalized its acqusition by LiveUniverse (a private company headed up by Brad Greenspan of MySpace fame). The acquisition was announced in mid-April of this year with financial details of the cash and stock deal with-held.

This is exciting times for the team, and I'm happy to see they found a synergistic acquirer that will give them additional firepower to fully develop and distribute their platform. Many of the blogs about the acquisition announcement hinted that the acquisition was not for a large sum and that Pageflakes has not gained as much market traction as its closest competitor, Netvibes. I can't say I know any details, however I do know personally that LiveUniverse was not the only suitor and that the other suitors for the company saw the widget platform as a highly strategic and desirable offering to have. Not to mention several people have asked me about how they can poach the technology team.

This underlines for me what is valuable when building a company. The company was attractive to LiveUniverse for not only its technology or market traction but also its team. Dan Cohen, Pageflakes' CEO is a seasoned veteran of startup companies as well as Google and Yahoo. Omar Al-Zabir, Pageflakes' CTO is a programming wunderkind at 24-years-old, Microsoft MVP and author of the O'Reilly book on Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 and I have met many of the scrappy folks that work with them at the young company pulling late hours to make it all happen. Dan will report directly to Brad Greenspan and Omar will work with Toan Nguyen, the original social networking architect of MySpace. When considering off-shoring a startup company's human resources, you should at least ask yourself if building a great team isn't a saleable asset in and of itself.

Also, both Pageflakes and LiveUniverse are based on the Microsoft platform so the integration of technologies made sense. Pageflakes and LiveUniverse started out with a business development/partnership-type relationship and very quickly the LiveUniverse team realized it would be more strategic for them to take Pageflakes directly into the fold.The first integration point will be with LiveVideo and Pageflakes' capabilities will allow the sharing and spread of video content through the 35 LiveUniverse properties as well as the web through "page-casting".

Just from that initial focus you can see that LiveUniverse will have greater virality of its content leveraging off of the Pageflakes widget platform and Pageflakes will have greater growth through exposure and marketing to the LiveUniverse sizable audience network. Brad gains a strategic and seasoned executive and entrepreneur in Dan and Toan and Omar will create considerable technology firepower for the combined company. Already with team + technology, Pageflakes + LiveUniverse is greater than two.

Creative Power to the People

2008-01-30T17:06:00Z

One of the take-aways from Demo is how far rich interactive applications (commonly abbreviated as RIA) have come. The web today is a much more exciting and accessible place than the HTML webforms of 1999 and some of the following cool companies that presented this morning demonstrate this enabling creative power.

CapZles; This company provides an online tool to create and present an asset "filmstrip" and add comments. They have an ad-based revenue model so the tool is free to anyone. It's a nice way to share pictures and video with your friends and family. It looks beautiful and is very easy to create. My mom would love this tool and I think I'll send her a link to a CapZle I created of pictures from her garden. The company says they integrate with FlickR.

Cozimo is an online collaboration interface geared toward the design community but super simple it could be used by anybody. Cozimo lets you upload images in PDF and video and then allows you to overlay these files with markups and comments. You can annotate the files in different colors and collaborate with multiple users as you hash over a creative idea or vision. All viewers will see the same area or frame in a design document and can chat real-time. You can zoom in their viewer with full vector graphic support. They have wrapped their viewer so that you can embed with a few lines of code, their application into your website imagery which is very cool. This tool brings the phrase "get on the same page" to life.

XtraNormal: This company is really neat, allowing anyone on the web to create a customized 3-D rendered "movie" video clip with just a few clicks. They provide a library of 3D avatars where you can customize your characters by selecting from a library of assets, gestures and appearance. You can choose scenes and add props. It's in private beta currently but I can't wait to wow my friends with xtranormal and flex my movie-making muscles. Their motto, "we're not normal, we're xtranormal..."

The defining traits of these companies are impressive visual design, ease-of-use and ease of sharing. With just a few clicks I can impress my friends and family today more than I ever could before.

Earth Class Mail is First Class

2008-01-29T00:26:00Z

My colleague Lynda just wrote a blog post about using email to check your voicemail, and I thought it was timely to talk about Earth Class Mail, a company we are working with in the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program. Earth Class lets you check your snail mail the way you would check email. From a consumer perspective, it's a brilliant solution for people who travel, have multiple residences, or get swamped in the deluge of mail that we all get. It lets me stay on top of my correspondence and manage it in digital format. It is also a very green earth-friendly solution as Earth Class will let you indicate which mail items you would like recycled and they take care of it. All of those catalogs, flyers and solicitations can get flagged easily from a web interface and sent to the recycling bin with the click of a button. The pieces of mail that you want opened and scanned into digital format you indicate and you can have it stored. Pieces of mail that you would like to actually hold in your hand (ie family pictures or personal mail) you can get forwarded on to you at your real address. The subscription fee is very modest and the convenience value is great.

For the enterprise mailroom, it's a no-brainer. It is secure and cost-efficient. And as telecommuting, virtual office-scenarios and companies increasingly spread their workforce into local markets, having a solution like Earth Class Mail makes perfect sense. There is no training for the workforce as well. They can check their corporate paper mail as they would their email. So there is less stress over an unopened document sitting on your desk that you miss because you had to catch the last plane out. With this service, you can "virtualize" your mailing address, having different addresses given out to different types of people or organizations so you can better manage and prioritize your mail. You can have a local address where you don't necessarily have a brick-and-mortar location. If you move often (as my parents did when I was younger), the act of forwarding your mail is less painful,... you don't have to do it and if you want something forwarded, it's as easy as changing a webform to have your mail redirected.

Years ago, I subscribed to a service from Intuit that let me direct certain bills to their Bill Pay service (phone, utility). My bills would get scanned in and I could then manage them from a web interface, get them paid directly and track them. I loved the service and wished I could do that with all of my mail. Now I can! I can track any piece of mail in a digital format with a truly impressive operation. Earth Class Mail has the ability to track every piece of mail that comes into their facility and can tell you exactly where that piece of mail happens to be (on the conveyer belt, being opened by which personnel). Everything is coded and the people handling the mail have security clearance (most are veterans), they work in a clean environment, and each piece of mail is filmed as it is being opened and scanned. It's amazing to see. Your information is safer going to the Earth Class facility than sitting in your driveway mailbox or in a box in your company's mailroom floor. The USPS cannot tell me where my mail is even when I pay to have it tracked. Earth Class mail accomplishes all of these features with a high-scale, high transaction infrastructure built on the latest Microsoft technology. They were recently a featured Microsoft partner at Post Expo 2007 in Barcelona.

Additionally, the crack team of entrepreneurs at Earth Class were filmed for the first season of a reality series by the MOJO HD network called Startup Junkies. My team hosted the preview to the show to an audience of investors and entrepreneurs in back-to-back nights in Silicon Valley on January 16th and Redmond on January 17th. The show is a must-see; definitely worth watching for the entertainment value, the beautiful scenery of the Pacific Northwest in high-def and the tumultuous and exciting world of upstarts. Ron Weiner is a class-act and the go-get-em team make you root for them. Currently funded by Ignition Partners and the Keiretsu Forum, Earth Class Mail is definitely a timely idea bringing innovation to the dated postal system. As they say on their website, with Earth Class Mail...You’re now using Postal Mail for the 21st Century!

VC Outlook for 2008: Bubble Looming but Focusing on Fundamentals

2007-12-10T08:10:00Z

This is a re-cap of DealMaker Media | Strategy Series - VC Outlook for 2008 on December 5, 2007.

MODERATOR: Harold DeGraff, Partner, Perkins Coie

PANELISTS: Duncan Davidson, Managing Director - VantagePoint Venture Partners
Rob Hayes, Partner - First Round Capital
Jim Long, Partner - Gabriel Venture Partners
Will Price, Managing Director – Hummer Winblad

Social networking was discussed in length, but the panel felt money would not go to yet another social network. Instead, Will Price focused on adjacent areas such as analytics (he frequently cited Hummer’s investment in Omniture). He spoke enthusiastically about the rich information mining capabilities promised by the opening of the social graph and the possibilities social networks offer to finally explore these inter-connections between people first discussed 40 years ago when Stanley Milgram did his "Six degrees of Separation" experiments at Harvard in 1967. Will mentioned the study of churn rates for cell phone users and how a friend leaving a network has a direct measurable probability on that of anothers’. Vodaphone and O2 are reaping the benefits of such “social-churn” analytics. Also, mentioned was the ability to identify influencers and trend mavens a la The Tipping Point in order to better target customer segments. There is a wait-and-see mentality on whether Google’s OpenSocial initiative will be the key to opening the social graph for these types of analyses. Duncan tentatively cautioned over-analysis of data in making advertising decisions.

There was consensus that online advertising potential still remains untapped. However, the VCs felt companies generating page views were over-valued (they cited RockYou and Flixster). The thought is such businesses will never be able to monetize via ad-revenue effectively due to poor targeting capabilities and lack of control of the appropriateness of the content. The anecdote given: Coca-Cola does not want to advertise against a slideshow of someone killing a cat. Cited was the case this summer of advertisers such as Vodafone, Virgin and Prudential pulling out of Facebook after their ads were displayed against content by the British National Party (Nazi Party in the UK). The emphasis instead was on companies that offer greater interactivity and measure on total time spent instead of page views. A gentleman from Newsgator cited his business as an example of effectively monetizing online advertisement.

To sum it up, the panel felt that while a bubble was looming, as evidenced by hyper valuations (that the VCs themselves are driving), they are still focused on investment fundamentals like cash-flow b-e and customer growth that start ups can produce in a consistent and predictable manner.

Cool deal: Microsoft takes equity stake in Facebook

2007-10-25T11:13:00Z

The big news for this week in the Valley is the Microsoft equity stake in Facebook announced yesterday. Everyone's reaction so far has been "cool!" I have to admit. It is pretty cool. This news is exciting but really tickles me for a number of reasons.

Firstly, Microsoft rarely takes an equity stake in a company except in strategic areas or special circumstances. Equity investment is the exception and not the rule. I can think only of the IP Venture spin-off companies as examples where equity is in exchange for the use of Microsoft research IP. So exceptions are definitely interesting to study.

Secondly, the valuation blew my mind. At $240M for 1.6% of the company, Facebook's valuation is now $15B. This is up from speculation of $3B only last year. That sure is a lot of money. I have to admit that I questioned the huge valuation for Facebook even when people were talking $7-10B.

Thirdly, how wrong we all sometimes are! I remember reading a paidcontent.org article about Facebook in June of 2006 after the announcement of the Interpublic deal with them. Interpublic group basically took 0.5% of Facebook in exchange for $10M in ad revenue. That deal seems like a bargain today but at the time, I think the paidcontent.org commentary was that it smacked of FB desperation and that the social network was trying to fake a $2B valuation. Times do change and sometimes it's so hard to be psychic.

Lastly, I have to admit that it's a little weird for me to hear the word Facebook everywhere in the Valley since I'd like to remind everyone that it is the namesake of the Harvard freshman registry. At Harvard, also Mark Zuckerberg's alma mater, students obsessively flip through to find cute classmates (ahem, so I've been told). But that said, Facebook has taken that concept to pretty impressive places. The Facebook platform, which I blogged about after the F8 hackathon, was a stroke of genius. One VC told me he thought that move was worthy of Google's Larry Page and he didn't see it coming from Mark Zuckerberg. But it did come from Mark so bravo for Mark! And bravo to Microsoft for a cool deal.

Spock explores the new search frontier for people

2007-09-04T07:19:00Z

Last month, Spock Networks launched to the general public. It was in private beta for the first part of the year but I'm pretty excited to see it go live and am actively watching to see it grow. Spock is a startup company that promises to serve up accurate information on people including name, birth date, address and relevant articles, tags and links. The results were pretty impressive. I found my college roommate immediately with a search on her name. They had her picture, several books that she has written and a completely accurate tagging of who she is - ie Harvard grad, Indian, award-winning writer. It had a much harder time finding some folks from work who have managed to stay off the web and some of my friends who have hard names equivalent to John Smith. I did find myself though my entry wasn't that compelling, I'll have to go and try to edit it ;-)

But more seriously, Spock identifies three main search spaces (general web search, product search and people search). According to the company, 30% of all web searches are for specific people (e.g. Britney Spears, President of GM or the “vanity search” for oneself). The company contends that this type of search is not adequately addressed and optimized in existing web search engines such as Google. Given this outlook, Spock is specifically indexing people online using social networking sites, Wikipedia, blogs, photo websites and web searches. At launch they promise to have over 100Million people indexed.

Although the people-search space is crowded (see competitors in Wink, Streakr, ProfileLinker, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, UpScoop, PeopleFinders, Reunion.com, ZabaSearch, PeopleSearch.com, and the list goes on and on...), Spock is worth a closer look. Unlike ZoomInfo, which is positioned more toward a business directory and requires an upgraded service to view names, Spock seeks to index the whole world of people and be a true search engine. Wink, the closest offering to Spock, does a simple crawl of the 3 major social networks and therefore has less reliable data. While the majority of its competitors focus on scraping information from social network websites (such as MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and LinkedIn) or from public business directories, Spock takes people search a step further using probability algorithms to determine whether the profiles across networks and web sources reliably describe the same person. In addition, they will allow a user to “claim” their profile giving them more weight over the information for that profile. The profile collects images of a person, articles about the person referenced from Wikipedia and on the web and Spock also highlights relationships between people’s profiles. You can tag other profiles and view tags that other people have entered as well as add tags to your own profile and upload photos. The tagging features of Spock allow a search on “presidential candidate 2008” to return a list of the current candidates. A search on drunk driving returns Mel Gibson and Vice-President Cheney (that's entertaining, our blog has a bad language filter - I just found out after writing Cheney's firstname). It’s a fascinating “mashup” of functionality - de.li.cious + Wikipedia + LinkedIn + Flickr all centered on people, personal and contact information online and the relationships of one person to another.

Spock is addressing an area of weakness in the Google search engine and potentially defining a whole new search competency. If they manage to gain a foothold, the Spock profiles would aggregate your personal data across the web, determine popularity or more accurately, reputation, online through how someone is tagged and allow user voting to validate information on a person’s profile. Spock is interesting for social communities as a way to drive traffic when people do people-searches. Spock closed $7M in December 2006 and has been consistently generating a good deal of excitement from a demo at the Web 2.0 Conference in April 2007 to a number of blogs since their public launch. It may still be early to make a call on Spock, but they are a company to watch.

Tafiti: Swahili for Imagine the possibilities

2007-08-24T07:12:00Z

Actually, tafiti apparently means "do research" in Swahili. I guess it wouldn't sound as fun if the project was called "do research." I have been playing with the Tafiti interface recently, even for a few days pre-launch. It's very visually cool like almost everything I've seen built on Silverlight. The design element is married tightly with the workings of the interface. It also has some neat functionality like the post-it note stack of search queries that builds up and the ability to drag and drop in order to save off your results on a shelf or folder tab. I also really like being able to rotate between searching RSS, web and news sources.

Reading through some early blog reviews about the beta product, people seem to dislike the tree view of the search but I think it has merit. It may not be readily useful but it never hurts to see something from multiple angles. It provides an alternate way to visualize search queries and results much like looking at clustering and tag clouds. Another cool example of Silverlight and search is an app written by Criteo who has built a blog search and discovery interface that puts you in the driver's seat of the Star War's Millenium Falcon.

I do think Tafiti is a lot of overhead for maybe a simple search query but the purpose is not to replace search as we know it. I think Tafiti is asking us to imagine what could be possible. What the project is for is to demonstrate the power of using Silverlight to take an existing scenario that we are all very familiar with and make it exciting and richer both in a design sense and in an interactive sense.

Microsoft closes aQuantive acquisition

2007-08-13T15:32:00Z

It's official! This morning Microsoft announced the completion of the $6 billion aQuantive deal announced in mid-May of this year. This is a key piece in our online advertising strategy. Microsoft can now roll-out a monetization story around MSN and Windows Live with the solutions gained from Atlas, DrivePM and Avenue A/Razorfish. The combination of Microsoft and aQuantive will bring choice, expanding services and healthy competition to the online market and benefit users, advertisers and publishers. With a single acquisition, Microsoft has gained three critical components:

1. Atlas provides a single-point feature-rich solution for agencies, advertisers and publishers to manage and optimize their campaigns, spend and revenue across the web for display and search advertising as well as rich media (such as video).

2. DrivePM is a top-tier ad network with a large and existing customer-base of top-tier agencies and advertisers.

3. Avenue A/Razorfish is a leading interactive marketing and media firm with talent that understands how to optimize ad campaigns for the online market.

Add to this product line-up the acquisition of AdECN and Microsoft has a powerful offering. A lot of startups have been asking us when Microsoft will expand its advertising services since it is always better for the market when there is not a single source. WIth the close of this announcement, I think you can expect to see Microsoft starting to address these questions. I will follow the developments and blog as they unfold.

The online advertising market is heating up and the next year is going to bring significant change with this announcement and the outcome of Google's DoubleClick acquisition announced in April 2007 still under review by the FTC.

My colleague Don Dodge blogged about the aQuantive deal when it was first announced and the AdECN acquisition announcement.

Giving is Receiving: OblinQ and GiftWisdom

2007-07-02T16:23:00Z

I just met with Rahul Pandhe, Founder and CEO of OblinQ.com last week. It amazes me how many ways folks can make money online. Rahul's company, OblinQ provides yet another way. OblinQ allows you to set up your own virtual store (or meta-store) and add bookmarked links to products you recommend and enjoy. If you're constantly being asked by friends and family what electronics to buy, why not setup your own electronics store with the latest digital camera you recommend, the DVD player you think is best on the market and send them a link to your website. Visitors to your site can peruse your picks and click-through to purchase from Amazon or Best Buys and you get the affiliate marketing payment. OblinQ does not take any percentage of customer earnings.

Built on the same Microsoft code stack that OblinQ is built on, Rahul also has another company called GiftWisdom. This site targets the universal wishlist or gift registry market with the ability to pool payments through an integration with PayPal. He reports that this site has received a lot of traction on its own through no marketing effort on his part. GiftWisdom provides a convenience for event-driven gifting such as weddings, baby showers, and birthdays.

Even if you don't have your own e-commerce capabilities, you can create a website through OblinQ and get in on the new monetization strategies available in today's web economy through services such as OblinQ.

SF Beta: Happy Hour with the Web 2.0 Crowd

2007-06-28T20:50:00Z

On Tuesday this week I attended SF Beta held in the 111 Minna gallery space. Microsoft sponsored the event along with ServePath. If you're wondering what Web 2.0 movers and shakers are doing on weeknights, come to this event. They're all mingling here with drinks and ideas in hand. I met the CEO of Shufl, a neat company allowing users to share their photos without an upload. Two guys from Rapleaf focused on building an online reputation engine and JB from Criteo who on-the-fly did a demo of his "Star Wars-like" Silverlight application built in just 5 days. The app is a very cool visualization of blog search results in dimensional space.

Besides the mingling, art work and an excellent pear cider, there were a few companies with laptops set up to demo their latest brainchild. Unfortunately the wi-fi at the event was not cooperating but I did get a chance to lookup the location of the nearest bathoom on my phone using the MizPee.com service (I kid you not, a truly location-based company meeting a real-world need). I also liked the GoLightly.com offering for non-profits who wish to leverage online collaboration and community tools.

When not socializing, we manned a small booth with some information on the EBT (Emerging Business team) and our partner companies. However, probably 90% of the questions everyone had for us centered around Silverlight. My colleague, Anand Iyer (read Anand's blog), had to do several unplanned demos of the technology. Overall, it was a fun time. More happy hour than valley netwoking event and the companies ran the gamut from a lone entrepreneur with an idea to VC-backed contenders. I heard that Thursday SF Beta events are much more packed. This past Tuesdays event looked to be about 150-200 people.

Photosynth: A Picture of mankind's collective memories

2007-06-07T06:37:00Z

The photosynth technology makes me wax poetic! Many blogs and articles describe Photosynth as a tool for photo-tourism but as I watched the video and played around on the Microsoft Live Labs site I felt an overwhelming sense of awe. All of our photo images, books, newspapers, the collective knowledge of mankind eventually assembled into 3-D form and we glide through these pieces of literature, vacation pictures, people's memories effortlessly like moving through weightless space filled with fields of stars. It's amazng. Superman might have seen this as he learned from the crystals in the Fortress of Solitude about his doomed home planet. Check out the video demonstration from Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an Architect of PhotoSynth I've embedded below as well as an interview of him on Channel9

Video: Photosynth 2

F8 brings developers together

2007-05-29T08:31:00Z

Last Thursday, Facebook's Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the "start of a movement." This was the dramatic setup for his announcement of the Facebook Platform. Any developer can now build on top of the "social graph" within the facebook framework. The "social graph" meaning the network of users within the Facebook social network.

The Facebook platform offering promises 3 main things:
1. Deep Integration - Users will be able to add and remove any applications. You can use the Facebook markup, you can use Flash, Silverlight, you can create as many pages as you want.
2. Mass Distribution - The promise here is the access to Facebook's over 24 Million active users that form the backbone of the social graph. These people can be reached through newsfeeds, alerts, notifications.
3. A New Business Opportunity - This is either ad-based revenue or transaction-based revenue. You can build your apps and give them away for free with ads. Or you can charge customers for use of your apps. Pretty much, the Facebook partners I saw weren't going the transaction route.

Max Levchin, Founder and CEO Slide, Inc., (who shared the stage with Zuckerberg, Dan'l Lewin from Microsoft and Russ Grandinetti from Amazon), hinted at even bigger things in his encouragement to the large crowd "Build on top of these new operating systems. Build a large company on top of this platform." Is Facebook's platform announcement really a new operating system or just a brilliantly clever way to have partners make the already popular social network more sticky and create more pages for ad real estate?

I think the former statement is pretty clear. With already well over 80 partners, almost all offering free services (read: ad-based business models), it will be interesting to see if the other social networking sites follow-suit and allow partners and potentially users to share in ad revenue. The claim to be a new OS is a little less clear to me. It has some merit (allow 3rd party apps to be built within the Facebook framework, add/remove apps, rudimentary permissions), but when I think of Web OS, for some reason, I'm not really thinking within a social networking site. Nevertheless, the new offering is fascinating and the amount of partner enthusiasm impressive. I never would have guessed Facebook would take this step, but it makes complete sense in the evolution of the current web - open APIs and services + advertising focused revenue streams + leveraging consumer audiences in what Zuckerberg coins "the social graph." It will be interesting to see what fate or F8 has in store for Facebook's future.