The latest from TechCrunch
- For 40,000 Gmail Users, Google Has To Leave The Cloud To Review The Tapes
- WITN: New York State of the Tech Industry [TCTV]
- Bump Founder Talks Rapid Growth, Push Notifications
- What Makes @ACarvin Tweet? (TCTV)
- Ron Conway, Chris Sacca And Others Invest 800K In PaaS Dotcloud
| For 40,000 Gmail Users, Google Has To Leave The Cloud To Review The Tapes | Top |
| Yesterday, the tips started flowing in. “Google has deleted all my email.” “Check Twitter, massive Gmail failure.” “Gmail just melted down.” Users were freaking out. And that’s understandable. Many were apparently opening up Gmail to find that all of their emails had vanished. Had it happened to me, I would have been on Twitter swearing at the top of my digital lungs and promising to do something crazy — like switch to Hotmail. Of course, the reality of the situation wasn’t quite so dramatic. While the initial reports had around .29 percent of Gmail users affected by the bug (about 600,000 users), those estimates were quickly revised to .08 percent (about 150,000 users). And today, those numbers were further revised to .02 percent. This means that only around 40,000 of Gmail’s 200 million (or so) users were affected. Now, 40,000 pissed off people is still 40,000 pissed off people. But there was even better news out of Google today: all of their data is safe and sound . But it isn’t safe and sound in some remote server attached to the cloud. Instead, it’s safe on back-up data tapes somewhere in an undisclosed location. Yes, despite all the ‘cloud this’ and ‘cloud that’ talk, when it comes down to it, Google still backs up everything on tape. And thank god they do. Just imagine if this bug had affected a significant percentage of users? All of those affected plus millions more would have likely never trusted Google with their data again. Worse, it may have slowed the flow of such data to the cloud across the entire industry. That may have made Microsoft smile, but we’d all have been worse off for it. But again, luckily, that didn’t happen. Still, it’s fairly alarming that all of those insane data redundancy policies that Google has in place fell because of what seems to be a fairly standard “storage software update”. Google notes that it’s going to take a little bit more time to get all of the data off the tapes and back into the cloud. But at least it will get there, instead of being gone forever. [photo: flickr/ akakumo ] CrunchBase Information Gmail Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| WITN: New York State of the Tech Industry [TCTV] | Top |
| This week, Sarah is in New York doing various book-related things – but WITN is all about life outside the valley so she dialled in via Skype to give us an update in what’s happening on the East coast. Spoiler alert: NY is still no Silicon Valley, but it’s increasingly proving that it doesn’t have to be. We also discussed whether New York’s status as a multi-industry town is a pro or a con when it comes to technology startups. Video below. (Next week Paul will be in LA, a trip which he vehemently denies is about finding a new American girlfriend/wife. Instead, he claims he’ll be on the look out for interesting start-ups to rival Machinima and – uh - MySpace . If you know of a company that fits the bill, let him know .) | |
| Bump Founder Talks Rapid Growth, Push Notifications | Top |
| The two-year trajectory of Bump Technologies , the designers of the app that makes it easy to swap contact information, music, and other data between mobile devices,is a somewhat interesting case study in the evolution of early-stage app startups. Speaking from the DEMO Conference today in Palm Springs, Founder Jake Mintz told the audience that Bump started as a “nights and weekends project” among close friends. Co-founders Mintz, David Lieb, and Andy Huibers launched Bump in March of 2009, and a month-and-a-half later, their nights and weekend project had already pulled in 1 million users. The founders then decided to move their operations to San Francisco, where they began couch hopping in earnest. Mintz said that between May 2009 and February 2010, even though Bump raised nearly $3.5 million in Series A in November 2009 from Sequoia, they slept on couches, devoting all waking hours to their project. Originally, Mintz said, Bump was conceived as a “replacement for business cards” and had more “serious” contexts in mind, but when they began to see that Bump was being used to share more than just CV data, they began adapting. Contact sharing remains at the core of Bump’s business, but Mintz said that, in the last year, many users have come to Bump as a way to share photos, and maximizing the value of both aspects of their mobile business has been “a delicate balance”. Somewhat serendipitously, Bump went to Marc Andreesen, Ben Horowitz, and John O’Farrell for advice on how to grow the business, although they were not looking for investment at the time. Mintz said that the partners later came to them saying they would like to invest in spite of Bump’s reluctancy to raise additional funding. So, in January, Andreessen Horrowitz invested a sizable $16.5 million in Bump, with Andreessen joining Bump’s board. When asked what they wanted to do with so much money, Mintz said that it would be used primarily to hire designers and developers, indicating that, as Andreessen had said to him, there will be multiple social networks in the future — beyond Facebook — and the team wants to build a social technology that “interfaces with the real world.” It remains to be seen, he said, whether Facebook would eventually become a competitor for Bump, but today they continue to collaborate and make strides in areas that Facebook does not yet control. Part of this growth, Mintz said, is from recognizing the important element of user experience. Bump remains determined not fall victim to spamming its users with notifications: "We all know apps can also be used as a tool for evil — an app that will send you a push notification every 15 minutes," he said. "Some apps have used that mechanic and grown very quickly, and you have this really powerful opportunity to be a part of someone's life — but in the long-term you have to focus on the user experience." Early Bump incarnations essentially allowed customers to download and begin using immediately without having to register or specify user settings. And while this approach worked initially and avoided breakage, a few core features went unused, because the app didn't guide its users through a setup process, Mintz said. The Bump team is now looking to add a short registration process and tutorial that will offer detailed instructions and walk users through how to optimize the niche features that will be arriving later this year. As to what to expect from Bump’s future additions, Mintz added, “if your vision involves finding the best and easiest ways to use a smartphone in the real world, we know that our users might walk into store and want to interact with a brand, or interact with a product, and we want to ask ‘how do we facilitate our growth around that?’” Keeping an eye on customer experience has worked so far for Bump, as Mintz said that the application has become the eighth-most downloaded app on the Apple App store, attracting 8 million active monthly users, and 27 million downloads. Not too shabby. CrunchBase Information Bump Technologies Mark Mintz Andreessen Horowitz Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| What Makes @ACarvin Tweet? (TCTV) | Top |
| The recent compounded protests and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa have had the unintended side effect of highlighting information nodes/elites like @Ghonim and @Sultanalqassemi , people who electively become human routers of related information on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. NPR’s Senior Strategist Andy Carvin has been one of the most prominent Western information routers, spending 15-17 hours a day tweeting out news about the region, getting rate limited and subsequently whitelisted by Twitter, and at one point becoming so synonymous with #Egypt that someone anonymously sent him a shirt , “I followed @ACarvin before #Egypt did.” I sat down on Sunday morning to talk to Carvin about why he’s decided to devote his tweet stream to this new form of curation, what his process was for the filtering and repackaging of information, and what digital tools exist or could exist to make it easier for people like Carvin to continue to refine the closest we’ve come to the ideal form of Twitter journalism. You can watch the entire interview (please get past my beginning awkwardness) above. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Ron Conway, Chris Sacca And Others Invest 800K In PaaS Dotcloud | Top |
| Hosted application platform DotCloud is announcing 800K in angel funding today, from notable angel investors Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Jerry Yang, Raymond Tonsing, Roger Dickey, Ash Patel, Eric Urhane, Kenny Van Zant, Trinity Ventures and others. In the same space as Heroku (before it got bought by Salesforce for $212 million) and a slew of 1st generation platform-as-a-service Heroku clones, what the 2nd generation DotCloud does differently is that it gives developers flexibility. To make it easier to make server administration changes downstream, DotCloud lets companies “mix and match” components and use multiple languages and tools instead of focusing on one language and development stack. Says founder Solomon Hykes, “The problem is that developers don’t want to be tied to one language or framework anymore. They still want simplicity – but now they want flexibility, too. And for that you need a completely new breed of platform.” When asked on why he went in on the round, investor Chris Sacca said, “Hackers building stuff other hackers will pay for is too good to pass up.” Well, if Heroku has taught us anything … Hykes plans on using the financing to further focus on building what he considers to be a “developer’s dream platform” with an emphasis on flexibility and user experience in addition to world class support. CrunchBase Information dotcloud Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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