Lijit has a lot to celebrate this week. They just closed a $3.3M round of financing, their first birthday was last week, and they’re looking to double the size of the team. Come by and help them celebrate at their Louisville offices this Thursday (June 28th @ 4pm.) If you are a technical dude (or dudette), they may hire you on the spot.
Lijit is currently located at 864 W. South Boulder Road in Louisville but working hard to migrate to downtown Boulder.
In April, Lijit published what we thought were the first Widget stats. Last month, comScore published their “Widget Metrix”, a new service they have started to track the usage of widgets across the Web. The data was interesting – and very different – as the two methodologies were different (Lijit is looking at it from the publisher point of view; comScore is looking at it from the visitor point of view.) Both approaches are important indicators of both widget growth and popularity.
Lijit just published their June Widget Statistics. They are tuning their algorithm – the crawler now includes 29,139 blogs and the definition of a widget is any regularly-occurring functionality on a blog powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the blog owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript.
Based on the June crawl, the top 10 most popular widgets on blogs are: google-analytics, sitemeter, googlesyndication, technorati, statcounter, mybloglog, blogrolling, feedburner, haloscan, and truthlaidbear. The analytics widgets still dominate (over 50% of blogs) with ads and trackbacks on about 20% of all blogs.
I expect both the comScore Widget Metrix and the Lijit Widget statistics to rapidly evolve over the next few quarters as both absolute and trend data become richer, the sample sizes continue to expand, and the methodologies become more evolved.
I occasionally use this blog as a job board so if you aren’t looking for a job, please ignore this. Also – if you aren’t a superb Flash ActionScript developer that is willing to take on a short term (but super cool) consulting gig, please also ignore this post.
If you are an star Flash ActionScript developer that can add custom GUI elements, modify some animation routines, and extend the XML used in API calls, please drop me an email along with a resume and/or URL links to work that you’ve done.
Me.dium announced today that they have closed a $15 million financing and have decided to stay in Boulder instead of split for Rio. Me.dium is one of the most ambitious projects I’ve been involved in. Alex Iskold – the founder of AdaptiveBlue (another exciting company) – has written an excellent overview at Read/WriteWeb where he describes Me.dium as “the dawn of collaborative browsing.” Alex nails the goal and vision of Me.dium and Phil Butler over at Profy gives another useful explanation.
One of the themes I’ve been banging away on for the last year is something I call the “Implicit Web.” I’m not alone – some of my favorite co-investors and friends are also playing with this idea. I’ve even helped start a conference – called Defrag – with Eric Norlin to further explore this problem.
Me.dium is going after the real-time element of this. As more time is spent online, the value of having real-time interactions with others increases. This isn’t new – we’re all “enjoying” IM. However, there’s no contextual relevance with any of these services. I can’t easily discover new things or people in real-time based on what I’m doing. Dumb.
More importantly – my computer isn’t helping me! Wouldn’t it be nice if my “computer” (or more properly – my “compute infrastructure”) was paying attention to what I was doing and making all these connections automagically in the background for me?
The technology behind this is incredibly difficult. The guys at Me.dium have recruited some of the local tech hotshots and have assembled a fantastic team. They’ve also taken a really smart approach to developing this – rather than open it up and see what happens, they’ve worked meticulously to manage scale, figure out the issues at each scale point, and iterate. My list of “active friends” has steadily grown, the real-time relevance has increased, and the performance has continues to be acceptable (with the occasional expected burp.)
If you are interested in trying Me.dium out and you are a Firefox user, click on my invite code and sign up. You’ve got to add some friends to get the real sense of the value (not too many – once you get above 10 active ones it gets really interesting.)
Look for a lot of exciting stuff to come in the next few months (e.g. non-Firefox.) As my friends at Me.dium like to say, “Crossover…”
Greg Reinacker – NewsGator’s founder/CTO – has a post up describing in detail how he thinks about the NewsGator Syndication Services line of products. This part of NewsGator’s business is growing at an extraordinary rate and is great reinforcement in the value of creating the NewsGator core online platform. Some stats – from Greg’s post – that give you a sense of today’s scale of the thing called “core.”
This is a significant beast – it has about 1.5 billion articles indexed, sees about 7 million new articles per day, sustains around 650 new articles per second at peak times during the day, and supports about 15 million API calls per day from customers and our own clients. It also collects usage metadata, which can be used to calculate relevance information (more on this another day).
Greg has several customer examples in his post, including USA Today, CBS News, Media General, and Discovery (look for the widget on the right sidebar for Everest.) When we started doing stuff around “Private Label” eighteen months ago, I didn’t understand the potential magnitude of this stuff. “Private Label” is now “Syndication Services” – that sounds much more interesting.
Today, FeedBurner announced that they had been acquired by Google and Google announced that they had acquired FeedBurner. There’s a nice symmetry to that. I’m burning with glee for all my friends in Chicago, especially Dick, Steve, Eric, and Matt (aka “the founders.”)
A little over two years ago (4/5/05 to be exact) I made an investment in FeedBurner. At the time, I didn’t realize how important it was to Dick Costolo that I capitalize the “B” in FeedBurner so I accidentally titled my post on the investment I’m Hot on Feedburner.
I’ve been very successful investing in stuff around SMTP (er – email) and after playing around with RSS, the ecosystem that could be developed around the RSS protocol felt analogous to what had happened around the SMTP protocol. I (along with my partners Seth Levine and Ryan McIntyre) identified three key parts to the RSS / feed puzzle – subscribe, publish, and search. FeedBurner was our investment that addressed publish (NewsGator addresses subscribe; Technorati addresses search.)
From my first interaction with Dick (5/8/04) five days after I started blogging, I knew he and his gang was creating something special. I’m FeedBurner publisher #699 (not quite as low as Fred’s number, but a very beautiful number nonetheless.) Today, there are over 430,000 publishers. FeedBurner’s ability to scale, their ability to regularly roll out new functionality, their dedication to their publishers, and their sense of humor, good looks, and charm has served them well.
Congrats to everyone at FeedBurner. To my friends at Google (which I guess now includes my FeedBurner friends in a recursive sort of way), you picked up a great one (and make sure you ask Dick for a FeedBurner sticker!)
Bruce Wyman, the Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum, sent me a beautiful demo from TED2007 by Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Photosynth. In addition to being graphically brilliant, it’s a phenomenal example of how the computer infrastructure should be doing all the work (rather than the user.)
I expect one of the big buzzes tomorrow will be Microsoft’s Surface Computing initiative. The first articles are appearing and on10 has a First Look: Microsoft Surfacing Computing! video up that shows off a great demonstration.
I’ve recently been exploring a theme I call “Human Computer Interaction.” A metaphor speaks volumes – if you remember John Anderton in the movie Minority Report, you can envision a much more interesting way to interact with a computer than using a mouse and keyboard.
Several experiences, including my investment in Harmonix Music Systems (the makers of Guitar Hero), finally coalesced in my mind about a year ago resulting in the idea that there was a real opportunity around creating platforms and applications to change the way that humans interact with computers. This isn’t a “consumer” problem or an “enterprise” problem – it spans the entire spectrum of computing applications.
I’ve made one new investment in this area and expect to make several others in the next few years. Of all the things I’ve played with and thought about in the past year, this area has the greatest opportunity to radically transform the way computers work. For a while, I’ve been suggesting to anyone that will listen (mostly my dog) that I’m ready for my implant that will jack me directly into the metaverse. As each day comes, I get a step closer.
On this delicious three day weekend (I love three day weekends), what would be more fun than a new version of FeedDemon. (Ok, I can think of a couple of things, but I’m the only one awake in my house at this point.)
I’ve been a rabid FeedDemon user for several years. I’ve tried every reader combination I could think of (web and desktop) and the FeedBurner / NewsGator Online combination is the way I deal with the 800+ feeds I read daily. Nick Bradbury is an artist when it comes to crafting Windows-based software. FeedDemon is his current work of art.
While FeedDemon has a pile of new features, Nick has his top five:
#2 – the offline support – is awesome. Given all my travel I often read my feeds offline on an airplane when my brain is tired – now I get the whole feed including links and images.
Great job Nick – again. Gotta go – Amy just woke up.