CloudFlare Wants To Be A CDN For The Masses (And Takes Five Minutes To Set Up) It’s no secret that performance can play a significant factor in a website’s success — keep your users waiting, and they’ll get impatient and head somewhere else. There are solutions available to help keep things speedy, like CDNs, but most smaller websites don’t use them. TechCrunch Disrupt finalist CloudFlare wants to bring these speedy load times to the masses, and it’s offering some other benefits too, including robust security protection against online threats. CEO Matthew Prince says that, in short, CloudFlare takes your average web admin and terms them into a full-fledged Ops team. Prince says that speed issues can have a big impact on your site — one study showed that for every 100 milliseconds of time spent loading, you lose up to 2% of your visitors. He says CloudFlare offers an average of a 30% increase in speed and can “stop virtually all web spam attacks”.
Prince says that CloudFlare operates on the network level, so it supports any platform. Namesake Is The Match.com For Professional Opportunities. We’ve written about Namesake, a stealthy startup founded by former MySpace execs Dan Gould and Brian Norgard, that aims to match opportunities with people in your network. Today, Namesake is launching its professional community at TechCrunch Disrupt. Namesake, which aims to create a better way to match and route opportunities that come across your desk everyday, is part LinkedIn, part Twitter, and part Facebook. You essentially create a network on the platform by importing your Twitter and Facebook contacts (the sites doesn’t allow integration with LinkedIn contacts yet).
You can then post jobs, recommend people for opportunities, connect people with each other and more. Gould says that traditional search doesn’t work for professional match making opportunities, which is why Namesake can fill a gap in the market. Gould and Norgard sold their company Newroo to MySpace in 2006 and also founded Ad.ly, an in-stream advertising network for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. SeqCentral Puts DNA Sequence Crunching In The Cloud. The act of DNA sequencing results in massive amounts of data around the human genome. Currently, this data is housed in standalone super computers, which doesn’t allow for collaboration between scientists. SeqCentral is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today as a way for human genome scientists to match their data with publicly available data sets. SeqCentral offers highly-scalable genetic sequence alignment in the cloud. The service allows you to upload your sequencing data in the clouds, and then compare your data with other scientists genome sequencing on the platform.
SeqCentral will allow scientists to compare their data to others to see if their sequencing is new or if it is “known.” The startup will bring in public data from universities, research organizations, and companies and allow you compare your sequencing to this existing data. Q&A: Chi-Hua Chien, Keith Rabois, Sandya Venkatachalam and Lior Zorea weigh in on SeqCentral: LZ: What’s the market for this? SnapDragon Wants To Simplify Product Check-Ins And Entice Users With Comics.
We started with location check-ins. Then we moved to media check-ins. Now we’re onto product check-ins. The space is starting to fill up quickly, but are they all too convoluted? If SnapDragon takes off, the answer in hindsight may end up being “yes”. The new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt isn’t trying to pull you into a specific store (like Shopkick). It isn’t trying to mount an overall attack on in-store shopping (like Barcode Hero).
Yes, that’s right, comic books. The SnapDragon team has gotten some Bay Area comedians to write their little collectable virtual good comic books. The idea is clearly to make the idea of product check-ins fun without putting up too big of a barrier to entry (which many of the other product check-in services have). Here are the questions from judges Josh Felser, Joe Kraus, Todor Tashev, Robert Scoble, and Don Dodge (paraphrased): Q: How do you make money? A: We work with consumer product companies to deliver targeted coupons. A: Yes a bit. Techcrunch_disrupt_sf. Techcrunch Disrupt.
How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google Is Today. Remember three years ago, when Microsoft paid a quarter-billion dollars for 1.6% of Facebook and the exclusive right to run banner ads across Facebook.com? Tell the truth, how many of you thought that was a killer business decision? I can’t say I did at the time. But as that deal is about to expire in 2011, Facebook’s status as a revenue juggernaut is rarely questioned any more. In fact, I have been mulling over data from both companies, and I’m ready to declare in public my belief that Facebook will be bigger in five years than Google is right now, barring some drastic action or accident. What do I mean by bigger? Google’s 2010 revenues will be $28 billion, give or take a billion. Facebook has figured out its business model, and wants to keep it out of the public eye as long as possible. Facebook’s second-mover advantage affords the company the luxury of offering both types of Internet money-making product: Advertising and Commerce.
But it’s not just Madison Avenue. Games. Inbox.