How CloudFlare Aims to Save the Future of the Internet, With an Amazon-Style Technology Roll Out, for Free. Baby trashes bar in Las Palmas One year ago a distributed DNS and content delivery network startup called CloudFlare launched at a TechCrunch event. It didn't win. ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois wrote about its promise to "speed up your website by an average of 30% and dramatically decrease your bandwidth usage and server load by preventing spam bots and other attackers from reaching your site. " He said it had the potential to become a highly disruptive company. One year later, CloudFlare now says it serves up 15 billion web pages every month to 350 million people. That's a whole lot of people - and it makes a whole lot of things possible. Some of those things began happening this week. What do you do with a shiny new, globally distributed network capable of serving up billions of web pages? Saving the World's $9 Web Hosting Photo of CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince by Max Whittaker for TechCrunch.
I Heard You Like Internet in Your Internet. The Incredible Engagement Feedback Loops of Startup Loving TV Host Shira Lazar. You could say that Shira Lazar lives by the sword and dies by the sword, but these days media mavens like Lazar can create safety nets by engaging internet audiences with the same tools that sometimes get them in trouble. When Lazar's show about Internet trends, called What's Trending, was promptly canceled by CBS last month after someone on her staff wrongly Tweeted that Steve Jobs had died (before he had), it might have been the end of a TV show in days of old. What's Trending has built its own audience online though and a faux pas that would have axed the connection between a content producer and its audience in the past is now not such a game ender when media pros can build direct connections without complete reliance on major distribution deals.
Now that the What's Trending team is on its own again, it's taking dramatic steps to build and deepen that audience by juggling a dazzling assortment of new media tools simultaneously. All while streaming live to thousands of people online. The Incredible Story of Scott Kveton: Linux, Firefox, Bacon & iPhones. Geekdom may be a land of big personalities, but some peoples' stories are better known than others. One story you might not know yet is the tale of Scott Kveton's young, unusual, accelerated and admirable career. Not yet 40 years old, Scott Kveton built the organization that houses the Linux kernel and he saved the day when Firefox launched but all the download mirrors were overwhelmed.
He was key to bringing the biggest web companies to the table to develop OpenID and other federated identity systems. Then he spent a year selling bacon on the internet, until flipping bacn.com to an acquirer and signing a deal to write a book about lightweight, agile startups. Kveton is a dynamic, intelligent, skilled and flawed human being who is creating a very interesting life story for himself. Last night he announced his next big move. As you can expect, it could make a substantial impact on the future of the web. Scott Kveton's Heavy-Lifting Early Days Going Startup Urban Airship. PowerOne: This iPhone App Builds iPhone Apps. Elia Freedman used to have it made. He was a mobile app developer in the days of the Palm Pilot and he scored bundling deals that got his sophisticated calculator software into the hands of more than 15 million people. Differentiating his product from competitors "wasn't something we had to deal with for years," he says, because of the favored position his app got in pre-loaded bundles.
Now those days are gone. Today Freedman's PowerOne Professional Calculator ($5.99 in iTunes) was accepted into the very crowded iTunes App Store, where competition for visibility is fierce. Freedman's strategy: PowerOne now focuses on being a tool-building app. Calculators: Not Just For Nerds Anymore Our phones are becoming increasingly capable of finding meaning from and adding value to more types of data than most of us could have imagined just a few years ago. Possible Next Steps Freedman says he's working on developing a more robust Web-based back end where users can share the templates. Google Hires Twitter-Hacking PARC Scientist.
Does Google get social? It sure would like to and just a few weeks ago the search giant brought in-house a world renowned expert in social technology. Until the end of January, Ed Chi was a Principal Scientist of Augmented Social Cognition at the famous research institute PARC. Now he's a Research Scientist at Google. His specialty: Human Computer Interaction. Chi had been at PARC, the research institute where everything computer from the GUI to the laser printer was invented, since 1999.
His recent work has included investigations of how users relate to Wikipedia, Delicious and Twitter. Chi proved wildly capable by earning a B.S., an M.S. and a PhD all in 6.5 years. We've cited Chi here at ReadWriteWeb for his criticism of Wikipedia as a site that has become too exclusive because of its complicated interface and we wrote an extensive preview of the unlaunched Twitter-filtering Eddi Project. Chi is widely liked, admired and respected.
Google Hires Social Software Researcher Brynn Evans. Former PARC visiting social software researcher and startup trobairitz Brynn Evans announced today that she has joined the social product group of the UX design team at Google. Evans says she was encouraged to interview by former collaborator and PARC Principal Scientist Ed Chi, who joined Google earlier this year. (Google Hires Twitter-Hacking PARC Scientist) If Google is ever to effectively challenge Facebook and Twitter in social software, which is expected to be a key battleground in a world no longer dominated by atomized search experiences online, then hiring leading thinkers could be an important part of the company's strategy. Evans has been a frequent guest contributor to ReadWriteWeb, having published thoughtful articles here including: Trained as a cognitive scientist at Stanford and UC San Diego, Evans joins a growing list of prominent hires by Google in recent months that will at the very least complicate the common saying that "Google doesn't get social software.
" The Women Who Made Google Plus: 22 Developers Behind the World's Fastest Growing Social Network. Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day dedicated to celebrating the world's first computer programmer and to share inspiring stories about women working in science, technology and math. Surely some of the most significant technical work done by women since this day last year includes the creation of what is said to be the fastest-growing social network in history, Google Plus. Launched on June 28th and just opened to the public at large late last month, Google Plus is a feature-rich social network with variable privacy and sharing settings at the core of its experience.
Who were the women involved in building such a big, important technology? We asked, on Google Plus, and were told about twenty two of them profiled below. They are an incredibly accomplished group of people and a great source of inspiration for young women interested in science and technology - or for anyone else who could use some powerful role models. Frances Haugen is the Google Plus Profiles and Search Product Manager. Fancy Hands: Virtual Assistants, Aardvark Style. "It's not about the value of the task, it's about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore. " That's how Ted Roden describes Fancy Hands, his new side project that provides virtual personal assistants in the cloud for a low monthly fee.
Need an appointment made for you? Research done on Fantasy Baseball players you might want to draft onto your team? Roden has hired more than 100 people based in the US and England who can perform almost any quick, legal task for you, within minutes, at any hour day or night. Roden says the people he's hired include retired lawyers, actors waiting with time to spare before going on camera and former employees of competitor ChaCha.
Roden himself has a day job in the R&D department of the New York Times. Roden says he built Fancy Hands because he wanted to build something big. Casting The Tasks Fancy Hands is easy for customers to use. At its core Fancy Hands is people, though. These Hands Are Fancy Photo by Justin Ouellette. Techmeme's New Editor: An Interview with Megan McCarthy. Techmeme is a semi-automated site that tracks the hottest conversations among tech blogs each day, with updates every five minutes. It's one of the most innovative efforts in news gathering today. In December, Techmeme hired its first human editor, freelance writer Megan McCarthy. McCarthy tends the gears of Techmeme, makes sure the content on the site remains of high quality and helps ensure the inclusion of new and important voices.
It sounds like an awesome job and one that has probably never existed before - a half woman, half robot, news gathering machine. The Techmeme Editor's Job Each Day Marshall Kirkpatrick: What do you do all day? Megan McCarthy: That is fairly accurate, actually. Marshall: Can you tell us a little bit about your personal background? Megan: My personal background is a little varied. News Selection and Twitter Tips on Techmeme Marshall: So, did your coming on board "break" the "objectivity" of the site? Megan: Techmeme is biased and has been so for a while. Facebook's Mysterious Hire: The Guy Who Designed Much of the iPhone. Facebook announced today that it has acquired a startup called Push Pop Press and most of the media coverage of the news has focused on Push Pop's dazzling e-book technology for clients including Al Gore. There's been some mention that one of Push Pop's co-founders, Mike Matas, was a former Apple designer.
There's a whole lot more to the story than that, though. Matas wasn't just one of many Apple designers; he designed many of the key interfaces you probably interact with every day if you own an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac. Now he's at Facebook. This isn't the first time that Mike Matas has been hired through acquisition, either. Delicious Library is now the books on a shelf interface Apple uses to display media in iTunes, iBooks and other apps. While acting as a Human Interface Designer at Apple for the four years, three of which were before the iPhone's launch, Matas worked extensively on the secret world-changing phone. And now he's at Facebook. A Detour Through the Super-Stealth. My6Sense & The Geek Who Rode His Blog to the Edge of the World. Personalized news recommendations on the go - that's the dream of many an online news nerd and the startups that would serve them.
One strong entrant into this field is My6Sense, a well-designed, venture-backed, Israeli company that uses implicit behavioral data from users to recommend the most relevant content in your personal river of news. It's a good service, and one you're likely to hear a lot more about soon. The company will announce this week that it has hired Louis Gray, a self-made Silicon Valley internet celebrity and startup consultant, as its VP of Marketing and first US employee. The Good Stuff Machine Using My6Sense is easy. We first reviewed it last Summer, but here's how it works. Sync your Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook or other account, or add default recommended streams. There are many apps that offer personalized mobile news reading experiences. My6Sense is the one most closely aligned with your existing streams of content. Hiring Louis Gray That's pretty awesome. Microsoft Makes Key Hire in Researcher Danah Boyd. Microsoft Research has hired social network researcher danah boyd, probably the most high profile academic in the world focused on the emerging web and its social consequences.
Who is danah boyd? (She spells her own name with lower case letters.) You may have seen her when she hit the international spotlight for writing about the shift from MySpace to Facebook. She wrote that her research leads her to conclude that "The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other 'good' kids are now going to Facebook. ...MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, 'burnouts,' 'alternative kids,' 'art fags,' punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm.
" That paper was very controversial and widely misunderstood. It also argued what many people may were thinking quietly, though often not within a context sympathetic with underprivileged youth. What Boyd Writes About Boyd's Fascinating Gigs. History's Longest Imprisoned Blogger, Kareem Amer, is Free. The man believed to have been imprisoned longer than anyone else in the world for the contents of a blog, Egyptian Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, has been released after four years and 10 days of detention, his supporters have announced on their blog. Suleiman, who blogged under the name Kareem Amer, was sentenced in 2006 to four years of jail for insulting religion and the leadership of Egypt on his blog.
He was critical of, among other things, Egypt's treatment of women and of its Coptic Christian minority. Supporters report that during those four years, Amer was tortured, beaten, attacked by other prisoners, disowned by his family and had his books, letters and personal effects taken away. His case is of international interest not just because of his humanity, but because of the political conflict between authoritarian states and a new world of freely self-published bloggers who would challenge them with new Web technology. Part of a Larger Trend. How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google. Chris Messina grew up in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state. As a high-schooler in the early 90's he held his school's website hostage after being suspended for running an ad on it for a controversial gay rights group.
Now Chris is nearing 30, today was his 29th birthday, and he just announced that he's taken a job at one of the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world. The latest chapter in the fascinating story of Chris Messina's life ends with one of the most high-profile young proponents of an Open and Distributed Web joining Google, a company that aims to organize all the information in the world and a behemoth that many free spirits online eye with ambivalence.
What will the future bring for Messina and his work? A look at how he got to Google might offer some clues. It isn't all pretty, some people worry about what the move will mean for the web, but the announcement is definitely important for all of us. Where Chris Messina Comes From Has Chris Messina sold out? Man Writes Software, Blogs About it, Makes $100k in 5 Months. We love this story. Back in July we wrote about the inspiring experience of Peldi Guilizzoni, a lone software developer who'd built a web design mock-up tool called Balsamiq and who was opening up his financial records on his blog to show everyone how things were going. We'd been following his progress since before he launched, but just 6 weeks after Balsamiq hit the market at roughly $79 per license, we wrote that Peldi had already made $10k in revenue. That was a cute story, but now it's been just 5 months and today Peldi reports that he's just cleared $100,000 in sales of the four variations of his product.
Talk about a simple tool coming along at just the right time! It's cool software, too. In addition to selling Mockups for Desktop, Peldi also sells Mockups for Confluence, Jira and XWiki. Peldi says that while October was slower than September, and sales seemed to slow a bit when news of financial crisis was breaking out, so far November looks to be his biggest month yet. How Tim O'Reilly Aims to Change Government.
Expert Labs: Can an Outside Incubator Turn Government Tech-Savvy? 10 Interesting Details About Twitter's Mysterious CTO. MrBabyMan: Digg Users Revolt, Against the One Pure Man at the Top. The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next. Thoughts From the Man Who Would Sell The World, Nicely. The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul. What Does it Mean to Make 5 Million Maps? Platial's Legacy.