Unype blog

Peter Verkooijen from GeoWeb Report was kind enough to interview me last week about Unype and the future of geoweb applications. Here is the video:

Last night’s E.R.7 hosted generously by Joe Daniels from Fulbright&Jaworski featured Gil Beyda from Genacast Ventures and provided some very timely and useful information for all entrepreneurs who were in attendance.

Gil first talked about his technical and entrepreneurial background, which includes a series of very successful startups with big exits such as RealMedia (sold to 24×7Media) and Tacoda (sold to AOL). He pioneered the first ad server at Real Media as well as inventing Behavioral Targeting while at Tacoda. He setup Genacast with Comcast Investment Fund after meeting them while closing Tacoda’s E-round. Genacast invests upto $500K (or in syndicates upto $1.5M) in seed and series A rounds and the investments do not have to be strategic invesments for Comcast. It is a very new and open-ended fund with a current size of around $25M. They have made 2 investments so far and they are looking to make around 8 investments per year. Gil and Comcast are the only LP’s in the fund.

After brief introductions by the more than 40 entrepreneurs in attendance, Gil described his deal flow and how he makes his investment decisions at Genacast. His selection criteria include how much money is sought, valuation, if the space is familiar to him (since the fund helps its investments using their knowledge, experience and rolodex), evaluation of team risk, technology risk and execution risk and how realistic and thoughtful the founders are about their business. He usually has a 1-hour call after his initial screening of around 100 deals he goes through in a month. After stressing that the terms on a seed-round usually get carried onto the subsequent rounds, Gil recommended to all the entrepreneurs to become very familiar with the freely available documents (such as sample terms sheets) at nvca.org.

The last half hour of the meeting, we had an open-call for impromptu on-the-spot 3-5 minute pitches to Gil. After Gil promised to have conference calls with everyone who would pitch to him on the spot, we had 5 great pitches:

Manish Vora from Artlog.com

Greg from e-commerce startup

Greg Artz from General Sentiment (Technology demo site at http://www.textmap.com/)

Herman Mazard from Home Shop Technologies

Roger Wu from Klickable.tv

Gil provided great and very useful feedback to each of them on the spot and he will be talking to each startup who pitched to him in the coming weeks. The meeting ended with networking.

Thanks to Courtenay Stewart from Ning who worked with us, Unype is featured on the Ning blog!

With the latest announcements of T-Mobile releasing the HTC Dream phone running Android on October 13th, we deemed it appropriate to show a preview of Unype on Android:

Here is the presentation for the “Location-based social networking BOF” to be held on September 17th, 8PM at Hudson Hotel - Gallery B, as part of Web2.0 Expo:

Javascript is getting very fast through some optimizations. I mean, as fast as C, which is the fastest you can get for a non-assembly language. Firefox 3.1 will ship with this optimized javascript engine: TraceMonkey.

(Graph courtesy of Brendan Eich.)

Paul Graham’s prophesy that web-based applications though slow now, will win at the end when javascript runs at the speed of C, may be coming true

Meanwhile hordes of developers are busy porting their web applications (written in Javascript) into Objective-C (iPhone) and Java (Android).

Why? Because you cannot access the native APIs on these platforms from javascript.

But then all we need is a way to call the native methods on the iPhone and Android from Javascript. And this is already happening at the grassroots level for iPhone as PhoneGap. And the new Mobile Safari DOM model has events for touch/gesture manipulation from javascript. But of course Mobile Safari javascript engine is very slow today, so handling gestures using javascript only works on the emulator. So we are working on our iPhone and Android applications as we speak

But I expect this ‘porting web-applications to native smart phones’ to be a transitory phase. Eventually, to use Facebook, you will just go to facebook.com on your smart phone and will not have to install some application from some ’store’.

Hi5 today announced that they will integrate an embedded virtual world platform that they had acquired earlier this year into their service.

Hi5 is one of the most popular social networks and its userbase is mostly outside the US. They clearly see the value in having their users interact with each other more in real-time, rather than the current bulleting-board-like model where a user posts something and you see when you ‘refresh’ your page.

With a dynamic real-time interaction model like Unype, users do not have to refresh their homepage or relogin to the service to see what is new. Each new action, post and event is propagated to all live clients in real-time. Unype’s backend has been fine-tuned to support just that.

We are looking forward to seeing more social networks develop and employ more real-time interaction models.

We are extremely excited to have my friend Eric Redlinger join Unype, bringing along his deep research and development expertise on mobile devices, especially the iPhone.

We are also excited to present Eric’s immediate contribution: initial screenshots of an early version of Unype on the iPhone:

Eric’s previous projects include work on the popular multiuser media-synthesis platform KeyWorx project and several innovative iPhone applications: DropCopy, a wireless file transfer utility that has already been downloaded over 300,000 times in just 4 months and the shape-shifting MrMr, an amazing iPhone app that can morph its GUI on the fly according to instructions sent from a server.

We are excited to innovate on the iPhone to bring new kinds of user-focused experiences to the device.

Starting a tech company used to be hard. You needed lots of developers, lots of resources, lots of money and more money.

Then web APIs made it easier to start companies. ProgrammableWeb has at last count 861 APIs available for use, and 3257 mashups created using these. Now instead of creating your own map application for your rock concert website, you can use one of 88 mapping APIs available and slap your concert listings on top of that.

In the meantime, there was still one big hurdle for startups: deploying and maintaining a backend that could scale if the startup actually indeed succeeded. Not all startups hit millions of users but still, every startup had to be ready for the onslaught or they could kiss their exits goodbye. This required buying/leasing servers, architecting, rearchitecting and then maintaining clusters of servers, replacing burnt hard drives, backing up, adding more hardware as more customers showed up and keeping an army of sysadmins fed and appropriately caffeinated during the process.

Google and Amazon’s big advantage was their infrastructure. Especially Google’s big competitive advantage was their MapReduce/BigTable-based seemingly-infinitely-scalable infrastructure that could support huge amounts of traffic and data, running on low-cost hardware.

Amazon opened the flood gates to offering this big competitive advantage to any company in the world by becoming the book store that sold cocaine out the back door. As Larry Dignan said “Books will be just a front to sell storage and cloud computing”.

Not a day goes by now without an announcement from another industry giant (Intel, HP, Yahoo, IBM, Verizon, AT&T) offering scalable compute clouds. Dell even tried to trademark the term ‘cloud computing’.

Now that cloud computing is going through what web APIs has gone through, it will be interesting to see if the competitive advantage for startups will be purely innovation now that all startups will be able to scale their service without a huge amount of investment and resources.