Blog – Page 26 – Niall Kennedy

Four million Netvibes users

French personal homepage company Netvibes has amassed over 4 million users in its first 9 months of operation according to founder and CEO Tariq Krim. Tariq mentions the user numbers about two minutes into a video interview with CNET News.com. The site picked up over 15,000 visitors in its first week of operation. Close to half of Netvibes’ users are in the United States.

Netvibes users can configure their homepage without logging in so it’s unclear if the 4 million users are non-expired cookied users or actual user accounts.

Either way, keep the user numbers in mind when looking at feed subscriber counts of default homepage modules Boing Boing, TechCrunch, and NowPublic.

Yahoo! Local adds microformats

Yahoo! Local has added microformats support — including hCard, hReview, and hCal markup — to almost all of its business listings, search results, events, and reviews. The new markup allows parsers of Yahoo! Local pages such as web browsers and search engine to automatically recognize the structured contact, review, and calendar data present on Yahoo! Local pages.

Yahoo! Local is an entry point for small businesses on the web. The new markup should help Yahoo! market its listing services as optimized for machines and humans, giving businesses optimal exposure for their extended listings.

The new microformats markup on Yahoo! Local can also serve as a lightweight API allowing developers to easily pull out content from web pages.

LinuxCare rises again

A poster child of the dot-com boom, LinuxCare has rebranded itself “Levanta,” raised another round of capital. BusinessWeek profiles the company though it’s rise and fall and attempt to rise again and I found the details rather amusing.

Levanta sounds a lot like erectile disfunction drug Levitra but it’s possible the company may be able to get their finances up again. Renaming the company seems like an attempt to hide from its past, which BusinessWeek covers in detail. Some highlights from the company’s history.

Raised over $70 million in venture capital, including big names such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Threw a party for thousands of people at LinuxWorld in New York shortly after raising capital, including many smoke machines, lasers, bands, arcade games, and free food/drink.
Filed to go public in January 2000, despite over $20 million in annual losses.
An abrupt resignation by the CEO and CFO.
Big layoffs in the summer of 2000.
The company landed contracts with SGI, Motorola, and Maxtor in January 2001 and was able to raise a few more million dollars in venture capital.
Changed its name to Levanta, the name of a positively received product, in 2004.
Raises about $14 million in venture capital in 2006.

Founder and former CEO Arthur Tyde is back, helping the company develop new business in Southeast Asia. The former private investigator took the job under encouragement from his therapist to help him “deal with his demons.”

LinuxCare contributed some good cash and code to open source projects over its years, but still remains a poster child of the buzzword exuberance of the late 1990s. The BusinessWeek article made me laugh repeatedly and hopefully some lessons can be learned from the past.

You down with A.P.P.?

Lately when talking about the Atom Publishing Protocol I can’t help but think of O.P.P. from Naughty By Nature. I don’t remember how it first got in my head, but now that it’s there I feel the need to share this brain worm.

You down with A.P.P.? Yeah, you know me.

A.P.P. how can I explain it
I’ll take you frame by frame it
To have y’all jumpin’ shall we singin’ it
A is for Atom
P is for Publishing scratchin’ letters
The last P…well…that’s not that simple

Geeky protocols meet early 90s rap music. Army with harmony.

Standards for Users

When I think of standards I think of the Stephenson gauge. Two pieces of steel laid at 4′ 8.5″ apart carries rail traffic for 60% of the world’s railroads. The standard has been around for centuries, allowing easy interoperability between rail lines from different companies and countries, creating new and cheaper opportunities for commerce around the world. Railroad companies did not always believe in the power of standards but eventually came together for big contracts and their rewards.

Next Friday I will lead a discussion at Bloggercon IV about the affects of standards on the lives of users. How can cooperation and interoperability lead to happy users, increased profits, and more participation online?

In the world of railroads companies varied the width of their rails to force a transfer of goods from Company A using the trains and workers of Company B. These increased costs meant more direct control over commerce by the companies laying the lines, but ultimately made travel by rail unreliable and costly, forcing customers to utilize other methods of transport such as a river barge. The arrival of cross-country travel and military contracts in the United States eventually forced standardization and better options for users.

In the online world we rely on a few standards to make life easy for users. The W3C activity around HTML provides a common base for implementors and authors. We still have to tweak our pages for optimal use in each browser, but a common baseline reduces some of the work involved in deploying all over the world.

The world of feed aggregators interoperates using the OPML file format for subscription portability. Users can post to their blog and backup their entries using the application of their choice thanks to standards such as the MetaWeblog API and the Atom Publishing Protocol.

Open standards create open competition, eliminating lock-in and allowing users to pick the best services for their wants and needs. The door remains open, but companies focused on their users believe you are happy enough within their walls you’ll never want to head for the doors.

What are your experiences with standards or the lack thereof? What new standards and interoperability would you like to see companies develop to thrill their users? Bloggercon is part of the user-centered summer of love. Let’s chat about the things you love and hate about your experiences online and how collaboration and standards can help.

Box.net graduates from college

Box.net had humble beginnings as a Berkeley class project to revamp an industry in need of change. Aaron Levie (pictured above) and his cofounders thought online storage, backup, and sharing could use a makeover and they built a prototype and business reasoning for the class. Fellow students bought-in and encouraged the team to further develop the service in exchange for a few dollars a month.

Box.net currently offers 1 gigabyte of free storage, with upgrades available starting at $5 for 5 GB. They don’t offer the most free space or the cheapest but see their strength as integration with other services and easy sharing. Using the Box.net API developers can add access to Box.net storage from within their own web applications. Customizable homepages such as Netvibes and Pageflakes already offer Box.net integration, allowing anyone with a Box.net account easy access to their most recently used files within their browser start page.

The three employees of Box.net will be working hard this summer on a new site release with lots of new features. According to a recent blog post by Aaron the team is “planning to change the face of storage and sharing” over the next two months. Stay tuned for more from this small team.

Fabrik storage at home and in the clouds

Fabrik creates smart networked attached storage software and online storage to help home users backup and share their digital media assets such as music, photos, and videos. Fabrik’s founders were previously executives on Maxtor’s OneTouch line of storage products, a product line with hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly revenue, and have spent many years thinking about the networked and online storage space. Fabrik’s software is included in Maxtor’s new Fusion line of networked storage. The first product launched on Thursday, and Dave Tang of Fabrik came by SF Tech Sessions on Thursday evening to show us the new hardware and management services.

The Maxtor Fusion networked hard drive includes half a terabyte of storage, Linux and Apache onboard, and automatic online backups. You may choose to use the hard drive as a web server, sharing your photos, videos, and music with the world. The device works with Mac and Windows out of the box and supports up to 12 user accounts to keep files private or under a set storage allocation. The networked drive launched on Thursday and is currently available at J&R Computer World for $800. An older Maxtor 500 GB networked drive from J&R costs $450, a 40% difference.

Fabrik has a slick browser-based interface to help people interact with their files on the local network or online. They call the technology a weblication, and it’s a slick use of JavaScript and browser plugins to create an integrated media experience within a web browser. The software automatically retrieves ID3 tags and album art for music placed on the device. If you can listen to a music file instantly within the browser, or watch videos in a JavaScript overlay.

Built-in to the Fabrik file browser is a sharing function allowing anyone to place a media file in their blog or on their MySpace account. There are even specially configured options to add a photo album or slideshow to your MySpace page. This feature is slick, and allows home users to share large files using their home broadband bandwidth.

Fabrik will open up its online storage service to beta users in the next few months. Usage plans are expected to cost $2-$3 as a base plan and $5-$10 for larger amounts storage. General availability is expected by the end of the year.

Amazon Simple Storage Service

Amazon shook up the world of onlien storage with the introduction of Simple Storage Service (S3) in mid-March. The web service is aimed at developers, providing REST and SOAP access to file storage and retrieval for 15 cents a month for a gigabyte of storage and 20 cents for each gigabyte transferred. The service has BitTorrent support built-in, and developers have extended developed many libraries and services in the three months since its launch. I was lucky enough to have Jeff Barr of Amazon present on S3 at this month’s SF Tech Sessions.

Amazon needs to store its own data reliably and cheaply all over the world. S3 opens up the same platform with, 99.9% reliability, to developers around the world. Applications such Jungle Disk, Backup Manager, and S3 Ajax wiki use S3 as their backend.

Jeff Barr mentioned Amazon was able to push the storage prices low due to their existing operating efficiencies. Prices should be adjusted over time as Amazon grows and hardware becomes even cheaper.

I like the S3 system due to its cheap, reliable storage and broad access options. Small developers can use S3 as their backend with one less thing to worry about as they build a business. If you are serving up web pages from your home broadband connection, S3 can handle big files to help you stay small longer.