During a run several weeks ago, I was pondering the arc of several of our investment themes. When we made our investment in Gist, we talked about it being at the intersection of our Email and Implicit Web themes. It turns out to also include our RSS theme (which previously included investments in FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati.)
I’d just finished reading A Semantic Web Primerand was thinking about the various semantic web protocols that were the basis for our Implicit Web theme such as RDF, OWL, and XML. At some point I realized that the bucket of Internet and web-related protocols that we have been investing in since the mid-1990’s included SMTP, RSS, XML, and of course HTTP.
During one of our weekly partnership lunches, we talked about all the various protocols that we liked and realized that “Protocol” was a great label for our theme that includes Email, RSS, and Implicit Web. So – from this point forward, our new theme “Protocol” will join the three other core themes we are currently investing in: Glue, HCI, and Digital Life.
I’ve been an Internet email user since early 1984 when I got my first Project Athena account as an undergraduate at MIT. Notwithstanding all the “email is dead” messages over the years, I continue to use email as my primary online communication mechanism. There are an enormous number of things that frustrate me about email, most notably the lack of fundamental innovation in email clients and servers. That said, as a messaging tool – it still dominates for me.
Several years ago I started saying that “my social graph is in email.” I found it interesting that Facebook and LinkedIn used email as a primary messaging layer to remind me to come back to Facebook and LinkedIn respectively to check what was going on. This signaled confirmation to me that these systems were making sure they were using the most persistent messaging layer to build and reinforce their social graphs.
For whatever reason, the primary email product providers have been either painfully slow at realizing this or have decided to ignore this. Facebook and LinkedIn have benefitted massively from this, but the biggest recipient of this neglect is Twitter which has created an entirely new messaging protocol (think Twitter API as analogous to SMTP).
Suddenly, in the past year, entrepreneurs have woken up to the potential of the email social graph. As I’ve mentioned before, we invested in Gist to directly address this opportunity. Xobni is another well known company that is attacking this. But another intriguing fact is the number of younger entrepreneurs that are working on this problem. Each of the TechStars locations (Boulder and Boston) has a company that – at its core – is built around the premise of email as the original social graph. In addition, as a mentor in the fbFund Rev 2009 program, I’ve recently started working with another company working on yet a different angle to this problem.
Now, these companies aren’t creating new email clients. They are working on products or web services that take advantage of all the implicit information generated by your email activity. They aren’t limited to just email (if you are a Gist user, you understand this well), but use email (name@domain.com) as a key information pivot point. If you step back and think about it, while https://www.facebook.com/bfeld is new and full of yummy chocolaty goodness, brad@feld.com is really my “unique” identifier.
I’m not going to talk about the three new companies I’m working with on this problem yet – I’ll let them “launch” on their own timetable and I’ll talk about them when they are ready. In the mean time, I’ve continuing to look to talk to more people that share this premise. If that’s you, feel free to email me.
Pogoplug: Make your hard drive a cloud drive
Last Fall, we met the fine folks at Cloud Engines, the company behind the pogoplug, a wonderfully easy-to-use gadget that turns any USB storage device into a web and smart-phone accessible file system, giving users easy control over who they allow to access their files. In short, the pogoplug allows you to take the hard drive attached to your computer (or hanging off your router in the basement of your house) and make it accessible to the world at large – allowing it to become a full-fledged part of the cloud. The beauty of the pogoplug lies in the simplicity of its premise (to give users control over making their content extensible beyond their walled network) combined with the elegant way that Cloud Engines has designed the pogoplug to be both powerful in its function but extremely easy to set up and use.
Of course, the nerds among us might argue that making a hard drive in your home accessible from the internet is “easy”. After all, all you need to do is put a NAS drive on your home network, give it a static IP address, configure port forwarding on your router/firewall appropriately and then set up a Dynamic DNS service so you can still access the device when your ISP issues your home network a new IP address. And that only makes your disk accessible remotely – nevermind if you might also want to manage the creation of user accounts and offer varying degrees of permissions and access to different users across a variety of files and folders. If that sounds easy or fun to you, then perhaps the pogoplug isn’t for you.
But for the rest of the world – those of us who would choose to simply put a slice of bread into a toaster rather than grow a field of wheat, harvest it, dry it, grind the grain into flour, culture some yeast, knead some dough, bake the bread, slice it and then toast it over an open fire, the pogoplug is a great little device that is dead-simple to setup and a pleasure to use.
Pogoplug boasts one of the simplest setup processes we’ve ever experienced for a piece of consumer electronics — even easier than the Slingbox, one of the gold standards in terms of ease of install and usability, in our minds. And while other products exist that can make a storage device LAN and WAN accessible, none go as far as the pogoplug does in truly making your local storage part of the cloud and giving you a granular level of control over how you share your data.
What does this mean? For starters, in addition to offering multi-user web access to an attached storage device, pogoplug also offers Mac, Windows and Linux client software to make the pogoplug appear as local storage on the desktop, regardless of whether the user is on a local LAN or half-way across the world. Second, pogoplug provides a great iPhone app, allowing access to files from the phone. Support for Android and other smartphones is on the way.
Third, while true storage-in-the-cloud and backup-to-the-cloud services exist, they are, relatively speaking, expensive. While a user can find a few gigs of free web-based storage, if you want more than that, the current market price appears to be, at the low end, about $10/year/gig. That’s fine if you’ve only got a dozen or so gigs worth of data. But whatt happens if you want a terabyte of web-based storage? We don’t see many users willing to pony up ten grand a year. With a pogoplug and a terabyte USB hard drive, that’s a sub $200 (one time) proposition.
Finally, and most importantly in our mind, pogoplug provides a web API to their service, allowing third party developers to build apps on top of the installed base of pogoplugs. This is what truly makes the pogoplug an important gadget – it takes a formerly marooned piece of hardware, the lowly hard drive, and makes it a full-fledged citizen of the web. We think that the folks at pogoplug and third party developers out there are going to dream up some exciting applications built on this API.
After spending time with the company in the Fall and hanging out with them at their very crowded booth at CES in January and seeing the enthusiastic response from folks (including ourselves) who couldn’t wait to get their hands on a pogoplug, we began spending even more time in San Francisco getting to know the team behind the pogoplug and learning about their vision and product roadmap going forward.
While a great product vision is a requirement for us to get excited about making an investment, even more important is that there is a great team behind the product that is capable of fulfilling the promise of the company, and the team at Cloud Engines is as rock-solid as they come. Founders Daniel Putterman (CEO), Jed Putterman (VP Product), Brad Dietrich (CTO) and Gregory Smith (CFO) have all been founders and senior executives of successful startups well as established large companies. What’s even more impressive is that they brought the pogoplug to market having only raised money from angel investors. While this is increasingly common in the world of startup web apps, it is a decidedly rare thing to do in the world of consumer electronics.
Today we are happy to announce that Foundry Group has made an investment in Cloud Engines, and we are looking forward to working with the team to quickly reach the day when far more cloud-based storage is available via personal hard-drives attached to pogoplugs than any service-based means.
Foundry Group’s investment in Medialets
At Foundry Group we’ve made investments in a handful of companies that participate in the online advertising ecosystem. But as we talk about how we think about these investments here on our blog and in other forums, we describe our efforts in this area not as “advertising” but as “glue.” Our interest lies in the intersection of advertising and our glue theme. Specifically we view advertising through the lens of connective technologies – those that help advertisers connect with users and remove friction from the overall system (both AdMeld and Lijit are examples of companies in the Foundry portfolio that fit into this line of thinking).
Today we’re announcing an investment in Medialets – a company that sits right at the intersection of new advertising technologies and our glue theme. Based in New York, Medialets is a mobile analytics and advertising company that helps mobile application developers track usage and other statistics about their applications and provides technology that enables them to monetize those applications via advertising.
Medialets has built out this rich media advertising and analytics platform for iPhone and Android with support for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm Pre coming later this year. The company develops technologies that enable publishers to measure their audience and monetize their applications through advertising and that allow brands to leverage the unique capabilities of mobile platforms in advertisements in a way that is measureable whether the device is on- or off-line.
Founded in June of 2008 by a team led by multi-time entrepreneur Eric Litman, and launched concurrently with the iPhone AppStore in July 2008, Medialets quickly became a market leader in mobile analytics and advertising. By working directly with large brand advertisers and their agencies, Medialets has pushed the bounds on mobile advertising and has used its success with advertisers and agencies to more quickly grow the use of its analytics platform. To date, the company has seen over 70M downloads of its analytics code across 14M unique devices. In March of this year the company created the world’s first shakable advertisement, and in April it announced that it had processed its billionth event through Medialytics, the company’s analytics product.
We’ve been working with the company since shortly after their launch last summer and have had the opportunity to really dig into the business with Eric and the rest of the team at Medialets. We feel fortunate that they’ve chosen to work with us as a key partner in growing the business and are excited to go public today with our investment in the company.
If you follow our themes, you know that Email and the Implicit Web are two of our favorites. Email is a long running theme of ours dating back to 1996 when we invested in Email Publishing (the company that we believe was the first known email service provider.) Over the years we’ve invested in a number of successful email related companies, including Postini, Critical Path, and Return Path.
We’ve continued to hunt for additional email-related investments. As the social web emerged, we developed a strongly held belief that your email inbox is a key source of your implied social network. With the rapid rise of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, there are now other social networks that have been created, but they still all build on and link to the implied social network that comes from your inbox.
We started talking to Gist’s CEO TA McCann last fall around the Defrag Conference. We saw an early demo of Gist, dove in and started playing with it. Gist wasn’t yet raising a financing so we had plenty of time to get to know the company and the team. We’ve looked at many other companies doing things in and around the inbox so we had plenty of points of comparison. As we got to know Gist better, we realized that in addition to being in the sweet spot of our Email theme, it was also right in the middle of our Implicit Web theme. We call this a special bonus double theme investment.
Brad will be joining the Gist board which is now our second Foundry Group investment in Seattle (the other one is Smith & Tinker); we look forward to spending more time in the Pacific Northwest.
