Andrew Rollins

For anyone who missed the flurry of news over the startup Cuil, I think it’s an interesting look at what’s wrong (at times) with Silicon Valley. Despite being full of ex-Google employees and $30+ million in funding, all they have is a crappy search engine that sucks. It might be because they were too busy eating muffins and strawberries.

It’ll be interesting to see where Cuil goes. The search relevance is so bad that some people speculate it isn’t about search, it’s about flipping their indexing algorithms. Considering the high amount of funding, I have a hard time believing anyone will pay for this.

Quite possibly one of the funniest things to come out of this was the jab from Yahoo. Using their BOSS API, Yahoo created a search mashup called Yuil. Yahoo has since taken down Yuil, but it was a funny shot at Cuil while it lasted.

Despite how much the product sucks, I do have to hand it to Cuil or whoever did their marketing/PR/advertising. They were all over the blogosphere and major new sites. I haven’t seen a launch blitz like this in a long time. Hell, they got me to say something.

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I spent this last weekend attending Barcamp Boston 3, a two day grassroots technology event on Saturday and Sunday, as well as the Barcamp pre-event party at Betahouse. I put some pictures from Barcamp up on Flickr, and here are pictures from everyone.

Barcamp is best described by the following snippet on their web site:

BarCamp is an unConference, organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees.

There is no registration fee, but you don’t just attend a BarCamp — you can participate in discussions, demo your projects, or join into another cooperative event.

Topics may include, but are not limited to: open source software, startups, UI design, entrepreneurship, AJAX, hardware hacking, robotics, mobile computing, bioinformatics, RSS, Social Software, programming languages, and the future of technology.

Barcamp Boston is just one instance of Barcamp - there are other Barcamps all over the world. You can find them on the main Barcamp web site.

(For those of you who aren’t programmers, “Bar” in Barcamp doesn’t refer to a place where alcoholic beverages are served. It comes from Foobar, a common placeholder name in programming.)

For a list of sessions, I took pictures of the Saturday and Sunday session boards from both days. Flickr displays them out of order, so I marked them with numbers.

Sessions I attended:

• Saturday
  • Visualization at an Internet Scale by Matt McKeon from IBM’s Many Eyes project
  • Distributed Twitter by Joe Cascio
  • Git as a subversion replacement by Josh Nichols
  • Google App Engine by Shimon Rura and Brian Olson (shown in picture)
  • iPhone Development by Dan Grover
  • Viral Marketing by Matt Peters from Pandemic Labs
  • Open Source Backup and Recovery Discussion led by Joe Slag
• Sunday
  • Code Secrets
  • Build your own wireless router
  • Ubuntu Discussion
  • PHP Development Discussion led by me

Here are some links to products and web sites I learned about:

• Career Numbers - career analytics currently in stealth mode
• Wonder Warp - iPhone and Mac applications from Dan Grover. He did a talk on iPhone development.
• Draconis Software - web application development
• Diet.com - nutrition information with access to info over SMS
• My Punchbowl - party planning and invitations, fairly well known and funded. He hosted a discussion on hiring people in tech.
• Gigafloat - social messaging, link sharing, etc.
• Babbledog - social bookmarking and news.
• Many Eyes - data visualization research from IBM

This is just a small sample. The Barcamp Boston 3 wiki has a much more comprehensive list of attendees with links to their sites.

I enjoyed the event, met a lot of great people, and received many clever suggestions for my company.

Some events on the horizon include:

• Ignite Boston - sponsored by O’Reilly
• Mobile Monday Boston - mobile technologies and development

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Last week I went to the 17th meeting of the Web Innovators Group. It is a seasonal gathering of a few hundred people to network and watch presentations from web startups. Here is a list of the presenters from WebInno17. To get a better idea of what it’s all about, check out this video of a previous WebInno event.

Founders, employees, people looking for work, and all flavors of investors show up. I spent an hour or two just walking around meeting people. Startups always have at least one interesting story to tell.

As for the companies presenting, my favorite was Jack Cards. It was the one truly unique service. The business model wasn’t the same old “we’ll sell ads” gimmick.

The concept behind Jack Cards is simple: you tell the service the birthdays of people you know, they’ll mail you cards at just the right time. They’ll even send a pre-stamped and addressed envelope. Never forget to send someone a birthday card again! The service also works for anniversaries, mother’s and father’s day, and more.

PicMe’s photo browsing software also caught my attention for its ability to browse massive amounts of photos quickly, sort of like Microsoft Photosynth and Seadragon.

I’m looking forward to the next WebInno in July.

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The Y-Combinator demo day is March 18, and TechCrunch described the 19 companies delivering presentations. Out of the list, here are my top picks:

• Tipjoy
  • Easy micropayments for giving tips to web site owners and content producers. All the video upload sites on the net sorely need this feature, and I’m glad someone is finally seriously focusing on this problem.
• Baseshield
  • Virtualization, something I’m always interested in.
• insoshi
  • Open source social network. I’m curious what an open source approach can do for social networks.
• deluux
  • Destributed, decentralized social networking. I like the idea of not having a single entity control all my social data and keeping it in my hand instead.
• YumDots
  • Mobile application to help you find restaurants on the go. Interesting, and somewhat overlapping with a small piece of what my startup wants to accomplish.

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I noticed this article about Pubmatic today on TechCrunch, and I found it interesting. It includes a video of Amar Goel, founder and CEO, presenting at TechCrunch 40. They were a 2007 TechCrunch 40 finalist, and the company is based in India.

Pubmatic is an ad optimization service. Think of it as aggregating the different ad services out there (Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, etc.) in order to maximize the return you get on your ad space. While it seems mostly targeted at publishers - people who want to display advertisements on their own site - they also provide some features for those of us who want to place ads.

For publishers, the idea behind Pubmatic is simple. They automatically pick and display the highest paying, highest converting advertisements out of the major ad networks, allowing the publisher to increase their ad revenue.

It certainly sounds like something I could use, but how does Pubmatic make money? For now, the service is free to their beta users, but eventually they’ll need to take a cut or have some sort of fee. I’ll have to keep tabs on this service and similar services and see how they develop in the future.

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