Putting the Social back... and forth

In the year 2006 'google' was officially declared a verb in Oxford Dictionary and Merriam Webster. But startups have not given up on building search engines. That same year Facebook opened its doors to users over the age of 13, preparing for exponential growth spurt. The list of startups working on yet another social network and lining up to present their sites at Silicon Valley New Tech Meetup kept growing too. And so were the crowds attending the meetups - as everybody wanted to see the next Google or Facebook. Or get a free pizza.

In 2009, it looked like both search and social bubbles were bursting. At least judging by the pitches and taglines. Favorite startup words now were mobile, twitter and monetization. 2009 was, indeed, the year of mobile, twitter... and ponzi schemes. It was the year when Waze Mobile launched internationally and Tumblr released their iPhone app. 

But the Social Digital era has only just begun.  Web was still ripe for more social experience and new startups were fighting for the audience, and fighting against the audience fatigue. The question was whether they could build a business off that audience or whether that audience will be worth an acquisition by the likes of Google or Yahoo. 

From dancing in the 90s to clicking in the 2010s

Shifting focus of social networks, as judged by the SVNEWTech pitches 

The common uses of social networking are promotion (personal or business-related), learning and entertainment. Text was the starting point for broadcasting and marketing ourselves via the Internet. Technologies were evolving and, as shown in the graph below, so were audio- and visual features of social networks, until they merged into video and movie-sharing capabilities.  GPS-enabled smartphones gave rise to location-based services and networks focused on "local" - places, rideshares and travel information. Networks could serve as a self-updating address book and their purpose was shifting from keeping in touch with old friends to finding new ones, increasingly focusing on finding business partners and opportunities. Startups were transitioning from virtual worlds to virtual goods, becoming less interested in just chatting vs learning something useful, and more interested in handling money - from social lending, to fundraising and "helping retailers to serve us better". 

What's next? Despite the challenging funding climate, Silicon Valley startups will keep trying new things, mixing and matching new needs and technologies. After all, the combinations provide endless choices, and the possibilities are endless. 

REFERENCES

Cantor M, & Whitehead H (2013). The interplay between social networks and culture: theoretically and among whales and dolphins. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 368 (1618) PMID: 23569288

Panek, Elliot T., Yioryos Nardis, and Sara Konrath. "Defining social networking sites and measuring their use: How narcissists differ in their use of Facebook and Twitter." Computers in Human Behavior 29.5 (2013): 2004-2012.

Doreian, Patrick, and Frans Stokman, eds. Evolution of social networks. Vol. 1. Routledge, 2013.

AWS for Startups: what's up there in the Cloud

gSounds great, isn't it - computing services that don't need any infrastructure on your end, almost instantaneous delivery of whatever server and storage capacity you need, suite of just-right software, middleware, virtualization, security, and management tools? The "cloud" label is placed on almost every Internet-based application, adding to the large crowd of cloud computing vendors.

In a previous article, we talked about new and established players offering cloud services. This one is about cloud computing pioneer Amazon and AWS Start-Up Event in Silicon Valley (hashtag: #awsstartup_sv). See also presentation slides from their 2009, 2008 and 2007 start-up events on slideshare.net.

The April 14th event was held at Plug and Play Tech Center

Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, gave an overview of cloud computing. Here are a few notes taken from his talk:

Design for Automation is important, but things that are out of your control should not be automated. Examples are Human interfaces and Delete operations.

Every task should be decomposed into simpler form.
Ordering pipeline, for example, consists of cart - order - process - store - archive components that need storage and other functionality. If you decompose the pipeline into individual pieces, you will find that most of that storage is needed for particular tasks.

Good things about key value stores is that we know how to scale them. We can't do it with relational databases.

Database administration could be monotonous, overstressed, expensive. Should be more automated and scalable. Need DBA as a service.

Developer should decide how to implement services to obey regulations, failure jurisdictions, break transparency, avoid performance failures

Need evolution not revolutions.

A Virtual Private Cloud with secure VPN connection; a number of devices to have traffic routed through - such as spam, etc

Design with Security in Mind. For example, anonymous access time limit; other limits defined in scripts

Let your customer benefit.

During the past 2 years Amazon reduced pricing 6 times. Amount of bandwidth increased by orders of magnitude more than Amazon itself consumes (see this older slide showing the history of usage growth).

Amazon customers built great applications on top of AWS.

E.g., Cloudmmo - instance cloud, or cloud middleware to reduce infrastructure costs, technology risk and development time

Innovate for your customers

For example, innovate on cloud pricing models: on-demand instances; reserved instances, spot instances

Stax - elastic cloud app for J2EE

Heroku - ruby platform. maps ruby apps to amazon instances; SQL DB

Salesforce.com toolkit to build new cloud-based applications

Tibco's software helps to innovate by connecting applications and data in a service-oriented architecture, providing intelligence tools to make smarter decisions. They have templates that can be launched to cloud.

RightScale® providesfully automated management platform for Amazon EC2 cloud deployments.

Synteractive consulting and automation solutions provider, incl. CloudAdvantage

Also Netflix, Pfizer, eHarmony, Lilly, Malbec..

Pfizer uses Ec2, eHarmony uses MapReduce to find better matches.

Playfish - a fast growing social games company

Intuit - massive spiked testing with SOASTA's cloud test

Everyone files taxes at the last possible moment, so Intuit needed AWS to scale

Lots of companies use clouds for testing and simulations. Intuit simulates submitting tax forms -- if too many at a time

Ribbit; SimpleGeo; Siemens; twilio

Dr. Vogels' contact is werner at amazon or check him on twitter: @Werner

AWS Customer Presentations included VC-backed startups @tubemogul, @rberger, @satyar73, @zynga

Adam Rose (adam at tubemogul.com) founded online video analytics startup Illumenix wich later merged with TubeMogul. The company helps in video delivery using IP and the Internet - deploying uploads and providing analytics, real-time viewership and engagement tracking.

See also useful tips from Nicolas of TubeMogul.

Robert Berger of Runa presented his company's experience with Elastic Compute Cloud, opschef and HBase, along with a few other useful AWS tips. His slides had a bit too large font size, at least for those in the front row. Guy Kawasaki says that optimal font size should be about half of the age of the oldest person in the audience. Centenarians would be certainly happy with this presentation.

A few notes I took were about Javascript for every page, every consumer, one or more AJAX calls; step function, Physical Layer; load every time a new merchant is added..

The company uses Opscode Chef for their tasks, helping to treat "Hardware"as Software .. which took under 5000 lines of ruby code

We are Living in "interesting" times with Amazon. The biggest problem is managing complexity of all the moving parts.

It's impossible to manage horizontal stacks - that's why to use Opscode Chef

there are lots of Learning Curves to Climb

Useful monitoring is hard but not critical

Satya Ramachandran of Jovian Data talked about the reasons to move to the cloud. He discussed HBase on AWS and how it may be dangerous, especially becouse of Hadoop namenode SPOF. if it went down, expect big problems

EC2 can surprise you if deploy multiple versions of horizontally scalable code

JovianData is a paltform as a service to optimize analytics of large data.

NoSQL does not solve application provision challenges

billions of impressions

10 users run 400 reports; 40% of them in hundred milliseconds

JovianData helps to avoid expensive data processing; Reduce Disk IO - by using their propriatory partitioning scheme - by materializing expensive groups (usage-based automatic view materialization).

3 main concerns:

Capital expenditure - long approval times

Over Provisioning - cluster up but nobody is using it

Application Isolation - one person runs unique report, another side section, how to isolate them to not let them run into one another

Biggest mistake - take entire image; 15 terabyte system monthly cost $30K

Role Based Clusters - example - double click services; data cleansing and creating models/ All model creation at night, than hybernated -- Hybernate Model

just kill 20 to 30 nodes; duplicate selectively then kill the nodes

ex: campaign manager needs to run lots of reports/ Classic Tera Scel won't be able to provision in minutes

Satya's advice was - If you are not getting 10x performance improvement - do not move in the clouds.

Aurametrix' comments - and if you do not need 10 or 100x improvement in performance, don't go in the cloud either. AWS is still a bit pricey for webapps and early-stage startups. Neither of the presenting startups fit the bill. A traditional VPS is a better solution if you only have hundreds or thousands of users or beta-testers. GAE is great for experimenting. Back to Satya's talk:

Dynamic Provisioning; using EC2 should be able to reduce performance by 100

Jayme Cox, talked on why Zynga chose AWS.

Zynga is conencting the world through Games. It's hosting 5 of the top 10 Facebook games

they use S3 - simple storage

Jayme Highly recommends RightScale

Scaling services without scaling Sys Admin Team

plan for success - could have 100K users

Horizontal scaling important

The 4 presenting startups also participated in

Bay Area Startups Looking for Cofounders: March 2010

Starting a company can be a difficult experience. Working alone is hard and a lot less fun than working with co-founders. And even though two is said to be the right number, some data point to an increase in success rates with up to 4-5 co-founders. Co-founders wanted March meetup (organized by Alain Raynaud and Thad) featured startups dedicated to improving many aspects of our lives - from education to work productivity, transportation, energy and health.

Kromink
Srini Reddy is developing online service for high school students. His startup is looking for a web application developer, senior architect, and senior product manager to join the founding team.

Seeyu
David Pollak is working on the next generation youtube and looking for the 4th co-founder, a web application developer

FiestasMariachi
The audience gave their hearts out in applause for Beto Juarez' performance of Mariachi La Bamba. His vision is a Mariachi website similar to Lawyers.com (see also Alain's post-presentation interview notes and the technical co-founder description). Beto can be reached as BetoIII at gmail and twitter.

Apptizr
Dave is working on the application helping to discover iPhone apps. Looking for one more tech cofoudner to extend bootstrapping time. He can be reached as dli at apptizr. Twitter: @apptizr

Roxolar
Yaya's @roxolar is generating leads for solar energy, the model is similar to lendingtree

Stremfocus
Fred Gibson is looking for a business/marketing cofounder and a coder (Java, Lisp) - the startup is focusing on streamlining workflows based on Steve Blank's Customer Development process. Twitter: @gibsonf1

Gesturelife
Navneet Dalal – with background in machine vision and learning, has an idea on gesture detection using cameras

Life360
Doug gave a brief presentation about this company supported by investments from google and facebook - they won Android Developer Challenge for building one of the top 10 mobile apps and yet are looking for more co-founders.

Crosspath
Ivan presented this early-stage bootstrap making carpooling more accessible form of transportation. Looking for a technical co-founder with 8-10 yrs of experience with web apps


StartupSquare
Tristan Kromer presented MarketResearch Wiki, alternative to Gartner ways to deliver market research and technology insights. The startup needs one more developer/lean co-founder (in addition to 4 technical co-founders). Twitter: @startupSquare

RiseTribe
Matt Howes tries to eat healthier and wants others to do the same. His startup - incorporated in September 2009 - allows members to set goals and track their progress, tapping into the $11 billion self-health market. It integrates with Facebook and Twitter (@risetribe)

Aurametrix
"What if you could have powerful solutions at your fingertips that help you manage your health the way personal finance software manages your money?" asked Irene Gabashvili, who presented her vision for health management systems, including a product in development that focuses on relief for those suffering from digestive problems. Twitter: @Aurametrix

For more startups see:
January minutes
November minutes

Silicon Valley Meetups and Startups

View Larger Map

Highlights of January Meetups (that we did not have the time to attend):

Co-founders wanted January meetup

High Note,
Customized Concerts
Contact; Chongkee at HighNoteLive.com
Looking for: Expert ROR developer, Equity only

Phine
Contact: Aaron Tait
Seeking equity compensated founders and investors

sparkler.tv
personalized broadband TV
Contact: sethc at sparkler.tv

Bright Lights
Headlight restoration

Sexy Enterprise XRM
Contact: Sudhir at gqc.com (Sudhir Kshirsagar)
Looking for Equity-based Partner(s)
Money, Brains, Personality, Coffee-powered, FT/Pt (Significant)

EasyLingual
Contact: Sabir Ibrahim
online language learning community

No name company
Contact: mattt314
new communication medium
3 founders developing the prototype
looking for full time engineer founder; equal equity split

Revenzy - a lovechild of eBay and Facebook
plan to IPO in 2012 or 2013
looking for co-founder/China Operations

Bonvoy - that is to Expedia/Orbitz as Generics are to name Brand Drugs
Looking for people who want to disrupt travel space

SaferBuilding
Healthy Home and Office Experts
Rapidly Growing List of Contacts across networks
wanted Lead Architect/Engineer Cash/Equity Package
winston Choe winston.choe@inno-scape.com

(See also November minutes of co-founders wanted group).

The SiliconValley NewTech Meetup Group [SVNewTech] featured the following presenters:
* apptizr.com - iphone app suggestion service that actually works. It's like Netflix for apps on your phone. [David Li]
* iformbuilder.com - Data Collection on the iphone, that is super easy to build and use. Some customers include Hershey Chocolates, Comcast, and a number of Universities. [Chris Reichart]
* thinkcomputer.com - Will be launching a new mobile payments service [Aaron G. & Michael Anderson]
* Expert Talk Series - Putting a Term Sheet together. [Brad Rock, Partner DLA]

Also, check out this SlideShare Presentation from the Semantics in Financial Services meetup organized by Peter Berger and Silicon Valley Semantic Technology Group.

Semantics in Financial Services -David Newman

View more presentations from Peter Berger.

Bay Area Startups Looking for Cofounders

The Bay Area is a well known hub for innovation. Good to see innovations are surging. Let's hope many of the new startups will be given the support they deserve.

Here are my brief meeting minutes from the Cofounders Wanted November Meetup, organized by @alain94040
(see also FairSoftware's blog on this event and Aurametrix' analysis of startups presenting at Silicon Valley New Technologies meetup)

• Interesting idea of hotels for everyone and by everyone was presented by russ.hearl at staysherpa.com The startup is looking for a CTO-to-be PHP programmer. http://www.sherpatravelexchange.com/ & http://twitter.com/sherpatravelx
• Greg Gentschev is looking for a technical cofounder for a Business Search & Workflows project: http://twitter.com/gentschev
• Justin at binarynomads.com is looking for a technical cofounder too: http://binarynomads.com/
• Peter Kazanjy is building a site to outperform LinkedIn and Yelp, his LI prfile is at http://www.linkedin.com/in/kazanjy see also http://getunvarnished.com/
• Ira Chayut is building a Fun Site with Sound and Voices: http://www.linkedin.com/in/irachayut
• Sujit Kirpekar (kirpekar at gmail.com) has a great Autolicious idea, follow him on twitter: http://twitter.com/discoganya
• Kristen at Hazard.com presented her Timesarrow project: http://www.hazardbio.com/, see also http://twitter.com/timesarrow. She is a yoga buff and is looking for a business cofounder.
• Georgi Dagnall at geogad hopes people will travel more, with their personal mobile tour guide. See http://www.geogad.com/
• Junk Cloud brings the power of auctions to online classified ads: http://www.junkcloud.com/ and http://twitter.com/JunkCloud. Contact Ryan at juncloud.com for more information

Other bay area startups looking for cofounders and team members:

• Al Brown, Deep Therapeutics, is looking for mechanical, electronics, robotics engineers to help implement the prototype.
• http://fairsoftware.net/- legal framework for early-stage projects, finding cofounders
• http://www.chagora.com/ - microdonations
• http://revenzy.com/ - social auctions site
• http://valverdecomputing.com/
• Jobnob
• WebSketch
• Welebrity
• As to Aurametrix, it's all hush hush now. The public site is for general informational purposes only. The company may be looking for a cofounder at a later stage.