4 posts tagged “startups”

Now I can properly link to it as a "book" asset instead of a weak-ass "photos" asset:

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days

Jessica Livingston

One literary micro-genre that I enjoy is the startup book–tales of technology startups, whether fictional (Douglas Couplands's Microserfs) or non (Jerry Kaplan's Startup!) Recently I read Dreaming In Code, which I recommend highly. Now comes another one, called "Founders At Work" which I learned about from Joel Spolsky's blog Joel On Software.

Here's a description of the book, copy and pasted from its website.

Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

I was pleased to discover after reading the full list of interviewees that Mena Trott is one of them.

Bcm

Another startup referenced by TechCrunch, this time a blog-related one: BackUpMyBlog , which does exactly that-back up your blog, assuming your blog runs on mysql and is on a server you have the right to execute php scripts on. Thus, the only 6A product it will work with is MovableType. As the FAQ puts it:

Can you backup my LiveJournal, TypePad, MySpace or other hosted blog?
No. BackupMyBlog only works if you have rights to install scripts on your blog server.

I'm not sure this is really a business. I looked at the php script it generated and while it looks fine I can't claim it would be hard to reproduce. It seems more like something someone should just write and offer to people for free. Of course, BackUpMyBlog also has to maintain the repository where the backups get sent, but still.

It seems like it would be a good feature for MovableType, for 6A to maintain a backup server for MovableType users who were unwilling to set up backup for their MT installations. That seems like small market though-anyone smart enough to be able to set up and use Mtype is probably also smart enough to know they should be backing up their system.

So last night I went to the Pioneers of the Inevitables' MozBirdParty last night at the SongBird nest in the Mission. I was nervous going in since I knew literally know one at Songbird. Once I entered, though, people were very welcoming and friendly. When I was at the bar, a guy introduced himself as Rob-turned out this was Rob Lord , the head pioneeer. When I said I was a prospective extensions developer (and immediately started talking his ear off about Trizzle) he took me over and introduced me to Aus , who is apparently the only guy there working on the Linux and Mac OS X versions of Songbird and gave me a demo of both. Well, I saw him try to make the Linux version and produce errors. The Mac OS version is running, though, but I didn't really get a chance to play around with it too much. I guess it's still too fragile. Based on what I saw I wouldn't expect the Mac and Linux versions to be publicly available until early summer. I asked Aus how it was working out to sqlite as the database engine and he said it was exceeding expectations, amazing how well it was doing. So that's pretty interesting. I wonder how large a music library they've tried it out with.

It was a pretty happening party. Michael Arrington was there (I had to my surender my position by the demo machine so he could take a look.) I met a lot of interesting people, from Yahoo, Apple, box.net and Flock. I gave the Trizzle pitch over and over, changing it each time, trying to see what connected with people. Tagging music collections definitely resonated, as did easy blogging of music. No one seemed to think it was a bad idea, I thought I even saw a few gleams of excitement.

I talked for a while with Erik Staats , who has actually programmed several Songbird extensions so he's way ahead of the rest of us. He works on them at night after the kids go to bed, after working a full day at his dayjob. That impressed me.

All in all, a very cool experience and got me even more excited about Songbird, and Trizzle's potential with it. I just wish they'd hurry up and get that Mac version out.

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