Posts tagged Former
Former United States CIO Vivek Kundra to Join Salesforce as Executive Vice President
Jan 16th
Former chief information officer of the United States Vivek Kundra is joining Salesforce as its executive vice president for emerging markets. Kundra, who was the first ever CIO of the U.S., left the position in the summer of 2011 to join Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society with a six-month fellowship. He joins Salesforce at a time when cloud computing is ready to be pushed across the world, a job he is specifically suited for.
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President Barack Obama created the position of federal CIO when he came to office in 2009. Under Kundra’s stewardship, the U.S. government made a concerted effort to streamline its IT policies and procedures and make it more transparent. He managed the Data.gov and IT Dashboard initiatives (which has subsequently lost most of its funding) and the leader in moving the federal infrastructure to cloud computing, leading the effort to shut down several hundred data centers.
Kundra’s lasting legacy for federal IT is his “25-point plan.” His goal was to cut back on U.S. IT spending by making the process more efficient and implementing new technologies, such as cloud computing. Kundra oversaw a budget of nearly $80 billion while the U.S. CIO.
Before moving up to the White House, Kundra was the CIO of the District of Columbia under Mayor Adrian Fenty and previous to that the secretary of commerce and technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Kundra will be a good fit for Salesforce. As the EVP for emerging markets, there are few people more qualified to spread the word of cloud computing and its cost benefits than Kundra. He was, in concert with former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, one of the biggest drivers of NASA’s Nebula cloud computing system that became the foundation for OpenStack.
Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce in a press release. “His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise.”
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Q&A: Former HuffPost CTO Paul Berry on Scaling to 1.7 Billion Pageviews and What’s Next For Mobile
Jan 13th
Paul Berry, the Huffington Post’s CTO since 2007, is one of the best regarded tech leaders in New York. After helping build one of the biggest news sites in the world, Berry announced this week that he’s leaving AOL soon to focus on two new ventures: A social startup called Rebel Mouse and an incubator called SoHo Tech Lab to goof around with a bunch of different ideas and see what works.
I caught up with Berry this week to learn more about his experience growing HuffPost and what he’s planning for his new projects. Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
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ReadWriteWeb: I think a lot of people don’t realize how big Huffington Post is and what a technical challenge that can be. What’s a current snapshot?
Paul Berry: We’re 120 million unique visitors a month, 31-day view by Google Analytics. We’re at 1.7 billion pageviews, still growing fast. To give an indicator of the velocity, at acquisition [about a year ago], we were 55 million uniques and about 700 million pageviews. So just by sheer volume of traffic and audience, those are big numbers.
The other piece is the complexity of my CMS, and sort of how wide and deep the technology is. The team that I was leading as CTO of the Huffington Post Media Group, I had product, design, and engineering for the Media Group. There are a bunch of domains that are powered by the technology. When I started at Huffington Post, it was metaphorically day two. We were 3 million unique visitors and 70 million pageviews a month and there were three of us in the tech team. The team that Tim Dierks takes over as the new CTO is about 220 people.
Paul Berry at Google I/O, 2009. Image by David Newman, ipadportraits.com.
And these 220 people are…
That includes a lot of designers and product and project managers. The core of Huffington Post… we had some innovations in how we would put the team together that were built out of a combination of our own character and culture and out of necessity. I was born in Mexico City, my wife is Bulgarian. International, I always knew, would mean a great deal to me. And in the last ten years and in previous jobs, I started to work out: How can you truly put together a dynamic global team? That was vital to Huffington Post.
The election year growth was driven by figuring that out. It was pretty stressful – we had no money. I couldn’t just buy another server. And we had so much to accomplish. And what everyone wants from their tech team is to pull an all-nighter every single night. But you know that’s not sustainable, so you know as much as you want it you can’t have it. You can actually do it by playing that timezone game and passing batons. That was insanely vital to all of our growth at HuffPost. Literally HuffPost has people on every continent in every time zone. Eastern Europe and Latin America, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Philippines.
What were some of the technical challenges you had to deal with?
Scaling was always a point of pride that we never talked about. And we never talked about security. If you’re spending a lot of time talking about security, it’s because you’ve gone through a horrible Gawker hack type of moment, and it’s terrible. You do internally talk about security, and you have a security team, and you do a lot to make it happen. But at the board or ops level, if you’re talking about security or scalability, you’re generally suffering. It’s a point of pride that that was never a big topic at ops or board meetings. We had very, very few moments of actual downtime.
It’s CES week: Are there any personal technologies that you’re excited about?
The emergence of mobile and the emergence of HTML5 together is what’s really interesting.
Personally, I think people are making a lot of mistakes in developing everything as native apps completely, when you can have a thin shell as a native wrapper around HTML5 plus responsive web design. And now you solve the problem. This really drove me crazy at HuffPost. We had so much to do, and then all these tablets kept on launching with different screen sizes and different OSes, and everything we did was native because at the time that was the way everyone was doing it.
And now what I think key companies and developers are realizing is that HTML5 and responsive web designs solves for whichever dimension and whichever OS. And you have to get really, really, really good at it before you can pull that off and still have it be a smooth app. But that’s where our focus will be.
The most interesting stuff to me was how could we keep up, how could we push the whole industry farther than it was.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter were all fairly frustrated with the media landscape – how slow media companies were to implement stuff, how slow they were to be creative and to push the envelope. And that became the roadmap pillars: Editorial efficiency and pushing the envelope with partners. A lot of the stuff that I plan to take into the incubator and into the new company is that culture of pushing those limits.
So what are these new projects?
There’s two parts to it. Both, unfortunately, I have to remain a little stealth about, or I guess a lot, annoyingly. Part of my contract with AOL allowed me to work on things during this transition. So I’ve actually had a team working on Rebel Mouse for a while. I’m really excited about releasing some alpha and beta stuff in recent months.
Rebel Mouse is the startup company that’s well defined – it has its name and its logo and it’s a really well-defined concept that we’re deep into. The incubator is a way to give us space to throw a lot of stuff up on the wall. It’s not meant to be a 500 Startups thing, where there’s a ton of companies. It’s going to be much more sharing a technology stack and a social approach. And it will be social, web, and mobile that defines the companies that we end up creating. What we’ll be doing is trying with a very small but elite and awesome team to take things into prototypes that start to gain real traction and go viral, and at that point, fund those into companies that we build into really big businesses.
My definition of viral is: We don’t spend on marketing and ads. And that was another point of pride at Huffington Post. We never spent on SEM, it was always SEO. We never went and bought Facebook ads, we just did really well at social. These things have to have their own organic growth, where they hit this mark where you see them growing by themselves. Then you realize we have something now that we can double down on and go raise money and built that toward a big business.
Are there any specific technologies that have been particularly useful to you at HuffPost?
When I started with HuffPost about six years ago, there was still debate about whether open source would win or not. I think that has been answered. The open source stack – whichever you end up using – you have tremendous potential. It’s crazy how much has been built out the last five years. The trick has really been to keep up with those sorts of things the way you keep up with a Facebook, or a Google, or a Twitter, and their product releases.
One of the surprises has been that MySQL – when Oracle bought MySQL, everyone thought it would die – and it’s actually very much alive. We use Redis (“sort of a database alternative”) a lot at Huffington Post, for example. There are some of these core technology stacks and open-source libraries and etc. that we’ll definitely be using at the incubator.
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Former Caterpillar Global Brand Manager Jen Wilfong Joins Slingshot SEO as VP … – MarketWatch (press release)
Dec 20th
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Former Caterpillar Global Brand Manager Jen Wilfong Joins Slingshot SEO as VP …
MarketWatch (press release) INDIANAPOLIS, IN, Dec 20, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Jen Wilfong, a 25-year veteran of Caterpillar Inc., has joined Slingshot SEO as Vice President of Marketing. "We are delighted to add Jen's decades of marketing experience and success at a … |
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Former Google Search Reps Start Search Quality Alliance by @rustybrick
Oct 10th
A new site just launched under the name Search Quality Alliance, which is currently made up of five companies that offer SEO and web services. The big punch line here is that these five companies are all founded by former Google Search Quality representatives.
As it states on the website:
Search…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Former Search Tool Evri Joins Crowded iPad News Club
Sep 26th
The recent trend for search technologies that aren’t or weren’t able to compete directly as search engines is to become newsreaders or content discovery vehicles. This is not meant to demean the technology or the companies involved but simply to acknowledge the difficulty of competing…
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Twitter Buys Julpan, Former Google Engineer Ori Allon’s Company
Sep 23rd
Twitter has picked up a year-old startup known as Julpan. This service will help Twitter surface relevant results in the stream. Equally important, though, is the acquisition of the Julpan engineering team, which includes renowned engineer Ori All…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Former Mobile Search Engine Taptu Reinvents Itself As Tablet Platform Tool
Sep 12th
The search technology behind failed social search engine Worio became the guts of the successful Zite app, which was recently acquired by CNN. Similarly Taptu, which began as a mobile search engine in the pre-iPhone era (2006), did almost the identical thing and is hoping to follow Zite’s…
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Tapjoy Grabs Former Sony SVP As Its Chief Marketing Officer
Sep 8th
Mobile advertising and marketing company Tapjoy has added a big chip to its company. The company announced today that it has hired former Sony senior vice president of marketing and PlayStation Network development Peter Dillie to be its chief marketing officer.
Grabbing an executive of Dillie’s stature is a big win for Tapjoy and a sign of the company’s maturation. Tapjoy’s network spans over 10,000 mobile applications that has around 250 million users on iOS, Android and other mobile operating systems. As Tapjoy looks to expand to Europe and Asia, Dillie will be instrumental in helping the company acquire more users, more developers and advertisers.
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“This is just a red hot market,” Dillie told ReadWriteMobile. “I think as far as size, it is a small company where I can really step in and make an impact.”
Dillie left Sony in March, well before the hacking scandal where the PlayStation Network exposed the personal information of 70 million users to malicious hackers. He took the summer to spend time with his family including taking his son on tours of colleges.
“Once you take a step back you can assess what kind of company you want to work for,” Dillie said. “There is a real close parallel (between Sony and Tapjoy) from a CRM and ARPU perspective.”
Tapjoy plans on enhancing its product line to further help developers monetize their apps. That will include a video product that he describes, “will be on everyone’s go-to list when bringing and app to market.”
“Peter has proven operating chops in the interactive entertainment industry and we are absolutely thrilled to bring Peter’s depth of experience to the Tapjoy team as we continue our rapid expansion,” said Mihir Shah, president and CEO of Tapjoy.
Dillie’s hiring shows that Tapjoy, which has had a couple run-ins with Apple over the course of its short history over app store regulations, has turned a corner to become a mature startup. Its revenue is healthy and it has made developer partnerships in the last several months that should ensure its viability as a marketing platform.
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Former Apple HTML5 Leader Builds His Own Apps Platform
Sep 2nd
His brainchild is SproutCore, a JavaScript library whose goal is to accelerate HTML5 apps on multiple platforms, including tablets, so their execution speed approaches that of native apps. Charles Jolley began work on SproutCore at Apple, and was a key architect for Apple’s vision of HTML5: a standards-driven effort that could yet be maneuvered to showcase Apple’s strengths.
But one of that effort’s first culminations was MobileMe, Apple’s first attempt at a data-syncing service for Mac and iPod/iPhone customers. That effort became synonymous with “disaster,” one which then-CEO Steve Jobs promised to rebuild. Not very good with failures, Apple let MobileMe languish, and its HTML5 message was dialed down. Rumors such as a reconceiving of the iWork platform diminished, and eventually Jolley left Apple, taking SproutCore with him.
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The list of people who have left Apple to do something successful is very, very short – after Steve Jobs himself, the names aren’t very recognizable. Charles Jolley intends to change that in a very big way. His new company, Strobe, has completed development of an HTML5 apps delivery platform, the kind of nerve center for devices like the iPad that Apple would never have signed off on, because it caters also to devices unlike the iPad.
“One of the big reasons I left [Apple] is because I really believe that the next great app ecosystem for mobile especially, but also for PCs and television, is going to be built around HTML5,” Jolley tells RWW. “If you look at the people who are building mobile apps today, 70% of those people will say they want to use HTML5. But a lot of them don’t make it to market, except for a few large companies like Amazon and Financial Times, most people aren’t able to deliver HTML5 apps.”
The Apple platform for apps delivery is rich and compelling, Jolley points out. Unlike an ordinary “open” platform that, almost by definition now, is all self-service, Apple provides direct, personal business services to help developers organize themselves and get on their feet, even if their employer is already recognized around the world. Then Apple provides hosting and deployment services, managing user entitlements and licenses. It creates an ecosystem and then nourishes the entities that live within it, and that’s why Apple’s platform works as well as it does.
“Apple makes it very, very easy for someone to build an app and take it to market. You have these small groups of one or two people who can create businesses around them. And today with HTML5, that’s simply not possible,” says Jolley. “Even though there’s a huge benefit to HTML5 – you can be in any app store, you can go direct to the consumers, you can build any kind of business model you want – if you’re going to reach all the 1.2 billion people out there who are going to be running smartphones in the next few years, you have to be able to reach all of them and have the ability to control your own business. HTML5 is the key for that, but it’s going to have to be as easy to take a product to market and build a business around it as it is for native apps today.”
Currently in active beta, Strobe’s one principal example for iPad comes from NPR, whose approach is designed to mirror the native NPR app available from Apple’s App Store.. Today, Strobe’s Add-on Marketplace – its gallery of HTML5 tools for browsers – is only open to select developers by invitation. Heeding some of the lessons of MobileMe, Strobe intends to work the bugs out of the system before setting its milestone dates in stone. Those dates will not be determined by the release of other products in tandem, as was the case with MobileMe and iPhone 3G.
There is a self-service aspect to Strobe in this early round, at least in appearance. Its division of functions and resources appears more inspired by Google than Apple, with icons that lead prospective vendors along the way, and that promote a vision of simplicity and straightforwardness.
Strobe tries to be much more than a listing service for folks to go download stuff. These days, users expect apps to be supported by the services that make them available. They’re not looking for the equivalent of apps vending machines.
Jolley tells us, “When we started Strobe, we spent a lot of time promoting our open source JavaScript framework SproutCore, which came out of Apple. We did that to educate people on the fact that they could build HTML5 apps for mobile. But what’s remarkable is, that has really shifted in the last three months. Now, we do almost no education on HTML5. There’s a huge amount of people who have decided they know how to build an HTML5 app, there’s enough tools out there, they can make this work. Now, where we physically engage people is [at the point where], ‘I’ve built the app, now what? I need to take this to market.’”
That said, Strobe does utilize a JavaScript framework, called Strobe.js. Its developers page says it “provides a single API that smooths out the limitations and inconsistencies of the different platforms, using our server environment behind the scenes where necessary.”
Most importantly, Strobe.js resolves the problem of scripting that applies to multiple domains simultaneously, leading to the kinds of cross-domain discrepancies that security tools presently associate with hijack attempts, and which newer browsers disallow. HTML5 developers will want their apps to include links to functionality from Facebook, Twitter, and other social services. These links seem simple enough, but their security protocols require logins and virtual sessions – which means the domains of these services’ URLs must be addressed somehow.
Strobe.js creates a level of indirection, letting apps use Strobe servers as proxies to authenticate themselves on social services and use their APIs, without having to build OAuth functionality directly into their apps, or to force users to log in separately. This is the core of the Strobe Social add-on, which is key to the company’s unique business model.
Unlike Apple, which takes as much as 30% commission on sales through its App Store, Strobe’s business model relies on how much and how often deployed apps use Strobe’s server-side API. “It works a lot like an analytics system, like Omniture,” explains Strobe’s Charles Jolley. “Every time you launch an app, it hits our server for an update to see if there’s a new version available. That’s an API call. If you turn on one of these add-ons to get the server to do social, that’s an API call. You buy packages from us based on API calls.”
The first 10,000 API calls placed per month on a developer’s account are free, as well as the first 10 GB of bandwidth on Strobe’s servers. That’s to give developers a leg up during the testing phase. Typically once apps are deployed, the bandwidth use will expand to a level worth charging for. Up to 1 million API calls per month, and 50 GB of bandwidth, carry a $19 monthly fee. API calls numbering up to 10 million per month with 250 GB of bandwidth, costs $95 monthly.
Forthcoming iterations of Strobe will give participants greater app storage, Jolley tells RWW, as well as the back-end software necessary to connect downloaders with the back-end clouds these apps will require.
“Today, your options for doing HTML5 are basically to build the app and roll everything yourself, or to launch on Strobe. Those are your two options,” says the CEO. “The fact is, there are people who can build and launch a great HTML5 app… But they have huge teams that have to know a lot about a wide array of technologies in order to make this happen. It’s definitely not something that your average one or two developers in a garage or a cube, trying to launch the Next Big Thing, are going to be able to do. That, to me, is the big difference with Strobe. Now, all you have to do is build your app, and we take care of everything else. Today, with HTML5, building your app is just the start.”
CORRECTION: An earlier draft of this story incorrectly stated that Charles Jolley had developed the NPR app while at Apple. Though Jolley is the co-developer of the current build with Strobe, the original SproutCast demo was created by independent developers looking to mirror the functionality of the native iPad app.
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