TechCrunch
Keen On… IfOnly: How Silicon Valley Can Do Well By Doing Good
Brian Solis says that the future of business lies with the sale of experiences. Serial entrepreneur Trevor Traina would certainly agree. Traina’s freshly minted startup, IfOnly, is an online platform for the sale of once-in-a-lifetime experiences offered by celebrities. But while IfOnly is a for-profit company, its goal is to enable celebrities to distribute most of the revenue from sales to their charity of choice. IfOnly, Traina thus says, is “the Uber for doing well by doing good.”
Backed by angel investments from tech notables like Marissa Mayer, Yuri Milner, Marc Benioff and Mark Pincus, IfOnly already has, according to Traina, “dozens” of celebrities selling experiences including basketball star Kobe Bryant and the popular band Third Eye Blind.
Traina, probably best known as co-founder of the car data network Driverside, has also been in the news recently for having just bought the most expensive house ever sold in San Francisco. So, I asked him, would he enable me to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience and have tea with me in his new Pacific Heights mansion? I offered Traina $500 for the experience to be donated, of course, to one of his favorite Bay Area charities, Tipping Point.
To see if he accepted my offer, you’ll have to watch the interview. But I’m beginning to think that the future of business may indeed lie with the sale of experiences. How much would you pay, for example, for breakfast with Mike Arrington? Or cocktails with Alexia?
Floobits Debuts Remote Pair Programming Tool Where You Can Collaborate In Your Favorite Native Editor
Y Combinator-backed Floobits, a new startup allowing two people to write software at the same time on the same codebase – an activity known as pair programming – is officially launching today to help better connect remote developers and distributed teams. What makes this company’s implementation interesting, however, is that instead of requiring developers to use a web-based editor as many pair programming solutions today do, Floobits’ users can pair program directly within the text editors they’re already comfortable using, through the installation of plugins.
And for those who do prefer to work via an online editor instead of a native one, Floobits has integrated its web-based editor with one-click access to Google Hangouts for chat, audio and video conferencing.
Meanwhile, on the native side, the company currently supports plugins for Sublime Text, Emacs, and VIM. However, Floobits’ founders admit that some of these plugins work better than others at present, with Sublime Text being the least buggy, and VIM being the most difficult. In fact, the company may launch its own version of VIM in the future, as there were a number of “workarounds” (read: hacks) needed to make Floobits work.
Floobits was officially founded this February by former Rackspace engineers Geoff Greer (who came in via the Cloudkick acquisition, and who built this) and Matt Kaniaris. But in reality, they’ve been working on the idea since last August – and yes, often via pair programming.
Kaniaris and Greer pair programmed together while at Rackspace, and after leaving, they realized that they wanted to build something that could help others do the same. “The biggest advantage with pair programming is that when you get stuck on something and you’re alone, you can get stuck for an hour or two, at times,” explains Greer. “But having a person next to you who notices the one tiny detail that you need to fix…that saves so much time and frustration.”
Of course, pair programming costs companies more because it means less code is produced per person, but its larger goal is to reduce the bug count. And while it’s not necessarily an environment that needs to be used 100 percent of the time, it can serve as a great learning tool.
Going forward, the founders see Floobits better capitalizing on the benefits of pair programming by expanding its capabilities to include more social features – like, allowing strangers to find each other and pair up, or letting users watch others code publicly in real-time. Eventually, the team also wants to enable a way where a domain expert could join users’ sessions to help them get up to speed on a new language or library they had just started to use. “That could massively improve productivity for programmers,” notes Greer.
At launch, the service offers freemium pricing, where free accounts have up to 5 workspaces available. But to work privately, a paid account starting at $15/month is required. Pricing for businesses and the enterprise is also available. In the future, the company will aim to better serve those larger organizations with a behind-the-firewall solution, as well. They will also roll out support for more editors, including IntelliJ by year end, and then Eclipse or Visual Studio will follow.
Floobits already has a handful of paying users, the team says, including three organizations, one of which is fellow Y Combinator startup, StatusPage.io. The company, only a team of two for now, has no outside funding beyond its YC backing and funds from YC VC.
Floobits soft-launched its service on Hacker News recently, which helped them catch some bugs, and better prepare for today’s public debut. The HN launch kind of melted Floobits’ servers, admits Greer. “Once we had 300 people in the same workspace all typing at the same time, it didn’t work out so well,” he says. But he adds that they’ve since moved to more servers, and faster ones at that.
“Well…”, interjects Kaniaris.
“It’ll be fine, Matt, it’ll be fine,” says Greer.
Let’s see, shall we? Interested developers can try Floobits here for free.
Facebook All But Kisses Its IPO Price After Investors Embrace Its New Mobile Gaming Push
Fourteen months later, Facebook today came within a kiss of its $38 IPO price, spiking to as high as $37.66 before easing slightly. It was the highest peak for Facebook since its first week as a public company.
Facebook hit a rough stock price trough alongside the stumbling launch of both Facebook Home and the HTC First. But now Facebook has found its momentum again. Following a simply stellar second-quarter earnings report, Facebook today announced a new mobile gaming push that will help small and medium scale game publishers “take their mobile games global.”
Facebook will pick up a cut of the revenues from those titles. The effort, if successful, could give the company a way to continue growing its revenue and, more specifically, the slice of its top line that doesn’t come from advertising — diversifying its larger business. One source in the gaming industry told us Facebook could eventually make a significant portion of its total revenue from game publishing.
The new effort’s focus on mobile isn’t to be dismissed as incidental: Facebook is working to grow the mobile side of its business as quickly as possible, essentially chasing a market shift toward mobile usage of social properties and services that has caught some companies, Zynga most especially, in the crosswind.
Facebook, currently trading at $36.89, is up around 4 percent on the day.
Reaching its IPO price would be a psychological victory for Facebook, and vindication for its investors and bankers that took it public at that price; Facebook had what was at the time the third-largest IPO in American history. The rapid deterioration of its stock price that followed left many poorer, fuming, and looking to sue. However, a return to form would erase some of those complaints, though will do little to assuage those who were caught in the crossfire of its first-day technical trading woes.
What a rising stock price could help with are hiring and employee retention. Facebook needs to be competitive in both, perhaps even more now, especially given the rising profile of Yahoo. Hiring in the Bay Area remains blood sport.
This last year it’s seen a seemingly constant exodus of critical veteran employees in product ads and design. While many likely felt they’d done their duty and were ready for a new challenge, the ailing stock price surely didn’t persuade them to stay. A climbing stock price could convince young guns that there’s still a big financial upside to working at Facebook, along with the potential to build products that impact more than 1 billion people.
A final thought, and one that I’ve made before in some form: Facebook is currently a far stronger company than its former self that went public in terms of usership, revenue and so forth. And the market is still not quite comfortable valuing it at the price it initially bore at its IPO. That indicates that we as a market have become more conservative in the past year. Or perhaps simply more sensible.
Top Image Credit: Emmanuel Huybrechts Additional reporting by Josh Constine
No comments:
Post a Comment