Jeff Clavier's Software Only

A few data points on Digg from Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps

Kevin Rose is presenting at Ryan Carson’s Future of Web Apps in San Francisco. He spent quite a bit of time covering the functionality of Digg, and briefly shared a few interesting data points:

• Starting in October 2004, Kevin funded the initial build of Digg by himself, paying co-founder Owen Byrne (who he found through eLance), $10/hour for his development work. Then, and still now, Kevin acted as the product architect of the service.
• After launching via Kevin’s blog, the growth of the service led to increased capital requirements to build a scalable back-end. One of Textamerica’s founders, and friend of Kevin, provided angel funding to the tune of $50K.
• The rapid growth continued and required some “serious” funding – matetializing as a $2.8M investment led by Greylock’s David Sze.
• Digg hit scalability issues upon the launch of version 2.0. Throwing in a bunch of servers did not have any effect, it was necessary to re-architecture Digg’s database layer to optimize it.
• Digg has 15 employees, of which 3 PHP developers and 4 guys in charge of operations and scalability. There is a cool picture of the whole crew on the Digg site.

More: As usual, Wikipedia has quite a complete coverage of Digg, and Richard McManus recently published an interesting interview of Kevin (part 1, part 2).

Congratulations to Netvibes on their $15M raise

I am late to it (been busy with the aftermath of my own news) but I have to congratulate my friends Tariq Krim, Pierre Chappaz and Freddy Mini for closing Netvibes’ Series B of 12M EUR (or $15M). Per TechCrunch:

NetVibes, a Paris/London based company, will announce a $15 million round of financing on Monday. Existing investor Index Ventures joined new investor Accel to lead the investment, which is one of the largest this year for a European company. The valuation was not disclosed.

I missed the angel financing round that involved Index Ventures, Pierre, Marc Andreessen and Martin Varsavsky but Tariq has since asked me to join his advisory board. The growth of Netvibes in users and traffic has been stunning, and I am delighted to be involved in helping build the company.

Actually, Freddy – the COO and future expat in the Valley to build the co’s business in the US –  is going to attend the forthcoming TechCrunch party this Friday. Feel free to look him up and say hi if you want to chat with a Netviber. Or send me an email and I will introduce you to Freddy. Just to make it easy, a picture of Freddy is on the right of this post.

Don’t look for me at TechCrunch VII. Unfortunately (well not that unfortunate), I will still be on hols for a few days when it takes place. Have fun, you all 700+ lucky bastards attendees.

AOL acquires Userplane to expand AIM network

A brief interruption of my holiday schedule to announce a great news: portfolio co Userplane has been acquired by AOL LLC a couple of weeks ago, and I just heard that the official press release is now up there. I started working with the three founders of the company, Mike Jones, Nate Thelen and Jave Hall, over a year ago, and it is really with delight that I am congratulating them, and the whole team, for such a great outcome (that I will not give any detail about, as AOL has elected not to disclose any financial information about the deal). So let’s just say: a great outcome for all involved.

Userplane is in the business of powering online communities with a suite of communication tools: Instant Messaging, Chat rooms, A/V Recorder – on a white label basis. The original model was to license these tools to very large social networking and dating sites (MySpace, Friendster, Date.com,…), to which a free ad-supported version was added in June 2005. Now, about 120,000 communities use this suite of zero-install, zero-download communication products reaching millions of users in 25+ countries. The ad-supported version recently broke the billion monthly ad impressions, adding meaningful revenues to the bottom line of the company which had been profitable for a long time. A lot has happened indeed since that initial TechCrunch profile.

Userplane is joining the AIM group, inside the AOL Audience Business Unit, and will be overseen by Marcien Jenckes – the head of the AIM team, and Tina Sharkey – who runs IM and Social Media at AOL. Tina and Marcien are both based on the East Coast, but the whole team of 12 – and the 6 or 7 additional resources they will need to hire in the short term to build the business to a new scale, will remain in Los Angeles.

Ever since I met Mike Jones at BlogOn 2004, Userplane’s founders had earned my respect for having built a sustainable business purely on cashflows, without ever taking outside investment capital. They had been approached numerous times by potential acquirers and VCs, and decided to stay the course until the right offer came: a great termsheet, from the right firm, a Tier 1 VC from Sand Hill Road that could really help the business grow. But it just so happens that someone “high up” at AOL had decided that Userplane was a strategic asset, and pushed for an acquisition to happen swiftly. This was a very smart move.

It is always a moment of mixed feeling to have one of your companies acquired. On one side, it is a tremendous achievement for the team, and the just reward for the hard work the founders have put in over the past 5 years. On the other hand, I really had a blast working with these guys – and there is always the question of what (and how much ) could have been achieved by building the company further. I am however really happy for my friends Mike, Nate and Jave - and have to thank Marcien, Tina, Tom, John U, Christine, Stephen, Laura, Mark, Jorge, Jim and Jon – and all the AOL people I have not mentioned – for all their efforts in making this happen. As I said – a very smart move.

Web 2.0 around the world

Erick Schonfeld from Business 2.0 has put together a map of Web 2.0 startups from around the world. I suggested a couple of French companies I am involved in, Wikio (investor) and Netvibes (advisor). Interesting story as well.

Tags: wikio, netvibes

Two new investments: Rapleaf and Wikio

I was meant to mention it much earlier but last week went by so fast! I have joined the investors syndicate behind the Series A of Rapleaf, the startup headed by my friend Auren Hoffman. Rapleaf is looking at developing a comprehensive portable reputation system for Internet communication and commerce - a major piece of infrastructure that is yet to be built, and I am excited to be involved in that project. Matt Marshall has more about the funding, and the TechCrunch review is here.

Another investment that just closed (yes, I have done quite a few recently – more to be announced) is the initial round of financing of Wikio, a European startup that has developed a news search engine bringing together a number of functionality included in Google News, Topix.net, Digg and Memeorandum. I had written about it when the service entered a closed beta (and before I investigated a potential investment). It is now open to everyone… who speaks French. The English, German, Spanish and Italian versions of the service will be available later in the summer. I am pleased to do join my friends Loic Le Meur and Martin Varsavsky in this syndicate, backing Pierre Chappaz (founder of Kelkoo that he sold to Yahoo in 2004 for $600M) and a great product team led by Wikio founder Laurent Binard.

Tags: rapleaf, wikio

 

Happy birthday TechCrunch!

Mike is reflecting on his first year writing TechCrunch, which is just a tremendous example of the power blogs give to individual voices. A year ago, that ex-lawyer dude started a site to review Web 2.0 companies, and wrote with passion hundreds of profiles and becoming the number one launchpad for the next generation of startups, and large Internet companies as well.

I looked back in my email archive to see when Mike and I started interacting and found our first email exchange, in which he said:

I'd like to put profiles of both up at techcrunch. We have about 500 uniques per day now after being up for only a week and a half.

Both was referring to two of my companies I recommended Mike to take a look at: Buzznet and Userplane. I then offered Mike a pass to attend VerticalLeap, the conference that Dave McClure and I organized, and then turned into the Search SIG (which is taking a bit of a break due to total overflow on my part). We then kept on bumping into each other at conferences like BarCamp, TagCamp and the likes, and I had the privilege of being one of the 15 hamburger eaters at that Sept 15th BBQ party that became TechCrunch One. And then I got involved in Edgeio, Mike and Keith Teare’s startup. The rest is history, as chronicled by our blogs.

Not only have you become a key player in our industry, you have also become a great friend. I have to thank you for both.

Happy birthday to TechCrunch, and looking forward to Year 2!

EBay partners with Kaboodle to launch collectibles bookmarking site

Kaboodle  and eBay will launch on Monday, at eBay Live 2006, a new collectibles web site, powered by Kaboodle. Essentially eBay users will have the opportunity to leverage Kaboodle features to promote their collection, interact with the community through comments, etc. You will hear more about this new site from the eBay side as their marketing machine kicks in to promote it.

Mike Arrington got a preview of the new site from Kaboodle Manish Chandra and eBay’s GM of Collectibles Laurence Toney, and just blogged about it on TechCrunch.

I will also mention the site during my panel at the eBay Developers Conference, as an example of how social tools can be used by eBay, over and above the blogs and wikis they have already announced.

Congrats to Manish and the Kaboodle team for developing this key relationship, since collectibles is one of the most active category for eBay. And this is one of the first “Web 1.0 partners with Web 2.0” relationship.

Additional coverage of the news:

• Elinor Mills, CNET: eBay, Kaboodle collaborate on collecting
• The TechMeme thread is here.
• Gary Price’s comments are here. He points to issues of ambiguity with tags being used on collectibles that will be worked upon.
• Pete Cashmore’s comments are here.

Tags: kaboodle, ebay, mycollectibles

Disclosure: Kaboodle is one of my investments.

Gil Penchina takes the CEO spot at Wikia, and other musical chairs

My good friend Gil Penchina, the former VP International of eBay, has taken the CEO spot of Wikia, the company offering a wiki-based infrastructure to build open editable communities, per the official press release. Mike Arrington and Gil have also recorded a TalkCrunch podcast, and I recommend listening/watching Gil's intervention at the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar.

Gil is a very active, and gifted, angel investor and even while being based in Paris and traveling all around, he has managed to get involved in a number of interesting companies here on the West Coast. From his LinkedIn profile:

Active angel investor in Linkedin, Wikia (wikipedia spinoff), Flock, Wink, Become.com, Vamoose, Paypal, Findwhat, Evite, Feedster, Betzip, Qype, Bounty, Properazzi, Military.com, eTour, Desktop.com and many more

I actually expected Gil to join a VC firm (and he definitely could have done so) but he decided to jump in the startup world - hats off for that, and I look forward to seeing what happens to Wikia in terms of growth and commercial success. Note that in true Wiki approach, the “About Wikia” page can be edited and I added Gil to the page since he was not listed there yet.

Today also saw other announcements, namely Tara “Pinko Marketing” Hunt leaving Riya, Philippe Kaplan passing the reigns of AdBrite to Iggy Fanlo and Mark Fletcher leaving Ask/Bloglines to look after his cats start thinking about his next company.

Photo credit: Esther Dyson

Tags: gilpenchina

Six Apart 's Vox (ex-Comet) is out in preview

Six Apart has opened (ajar – since it is an invite only preview) the door of its new group/family-oriented service: Vox. It is full of your usual Web 2.0 features such as Ajax and tagging, integrating multimedia content, social networking, etc.

The result looks pretty slick and a tad slow (but it is just a preview). A lot of the features, such as embedding photos in posts, adding tags, etc. are very easy to use as compared to other implementations. Hey guys, actually, can we get these goodies on TypePad as well ?

More as I play with it further on jeffclavier.vox.com. A couple of other posts on Vox:  TechCrunch’s review, Cecily’s post.

Tags: vox, sixapart

Web 2.0 for the geeks, by the geeks

Ah! Just read that post on Mr Greed (aka Paul Kedrosky), referring to a one-year old geeky tag line for Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 = chmod 777 web

For those (non-geeks) who  don’t get the reference, chmod is the Unix command allowing you to change the access control of a file or a folder, and 777 means that everyone can read/write/execute your file or read/write/traverse a folder. I.e the Read/Write Web (no Richard, no cease and desist please).

From the author:

There is something more fundamental going on right now. The web is becoming more hackable.. in the good sense. People are starting to realize that the web is more than just a publishing medium. It's a place where you can (or should be able to) actually do stuff. Web sites that let you do stuff are more important than web sites that only let youread stuff.