Sachin Rekhi

The imeem Mafia

Last night I read Sarah Lacy's excellent post entitled Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia. If you haven't read it yet, you should. It not only catalogues many of the excellent startups that have come out of Facebook, but the emerging patterns amongst the bunch.

It got me thinking about my own experience at my previous startup, imeem. When I think back on imeem, I always felt that we had an incredible group of fascinating, talented, and ambitious people. While we never achieved our ultimate goals at imeem, I was sure many of these same folks would move on to something great afterwards. I told myself to keep a lookout as I was sure many would likely start their own ventures.

And sure enough, about a year since imeem's acquisition by MySpace, more than ten new exciting startups have been founded by the original imeem crew. I thought I'd take a moment to showcase some of them.

The most well known of the bunch is obviously Mixed Media Labs, the creator of the popular iPhone and Android photo sharing app, picplz. It's well known not only for it's impressive traction thus far, but because it was started by imeem's founder Dalton Caldwell and his right-hand man Bryan Berg. In addition, they have brought together many from the original crew including Tim DeGraw, Allan Hsu, and even Ali Aydar as a director. They've raised funding from Andreessen Horowitz and are a strong contender in the now heated mobile photo sharing space.

Mobile has become a popular space for many of the imeem alumni. One of our top mobile developers at imeem, Ty Amell, teamed up with our search guy, Will Palmeri, to start Stackmob, an application platform to ease the development of mobile apps. They even convinced one of the back-end rockstars at imeem, Keith Dreibelbis, to join them. Similarly, imeem's CMO and Head of Biz Dev Steve Jang went on to start Schematic Labs, which is also focusing on the mobile space. He's roped in former imeem designer Alex Katzen into the mix as well.

Some took imeem's sucess in the entertainment space and propelled it into their own incarnation of an entertainment property. Our COO Ali Aydar went on to be CEO of Sporcle, a gaming site with endlessly entertaining quizzes and more. VP of Sales David Wade went on to start Popdust, a music news, reviews, and gossip site.

Still others have gone in completely different directions, following their passions wherever they lead them. For example, Sameer Alsakran, who managed imeem's entire big data infrastructure, including our large Hadoop cluster, is continuing his work in the Hadoop space with his latest venture White Label Labs. Raj Irukulla and Gina Olsen, two folks who were always passionate about great food, went on to start their own startups in the space. Raj founded FoodPair, which helps you find recipes to make with whatever ingredient you choose. Gina started Mothergood, which produces wholesome snacks for expectant mothers.

As many of you know, I got to imeem myself because my own startup, Anywhere.FM, was acquired by imeem. As I fully expected, the three co-founders of Anywhere.FM, have now gone on to start their own new ventures as well. Anson Tsai is already having amazing success with Cardpool, the easiest way to buy and sell gift cards. Lux Chen is following his dream of getting into gaming with an upcoming iPhone\iPad game. I myself have started Connected, a personal relationship manager that brings all your contacts and conversations together in one place.

Though it's too early to tell which will ultimately be successful, I've continued to be impressed with what the imeem crew has gone on to do. Maybe one day we'll even see a post on TechCrunch about the imeem Mafia instead of the already popular Paypal or Facebook Mafias ;)

Palm Gets it Right With Mojo Developer Platform

The most exciting news out of CES 2009 was the Palm announcement of the Palm Pre, webOS, and Palm Mojo Application Framework.

Palm to my surprise has reinvented itself and gotten back into the smartphone game with the release of the sexy Palm Pre device and new webOS operating system. Early indications suggests it should be in the same consideration set as Apple iPhone, Android G1, and Blackberry Storm. Yet the most innovative news of this announcement was the new Palm Mojo Application Framework.

Only several weeks ago I was having a conversation with one of my colleagues about the double-edged sword of open native mobile platforms. While the opening up and associated app stores have created a lot of opportunities for developers, they have also required developers to learn many disparate development platforms for each and every device. Sure Android should make it simpler to port apps across supported devices, but I suspect it will go the ways of OpenSocial in that it won't bring the promise of write once\run everywhere, but instead the philosophy of learn once and then simply minimize cost of porting to anywhere.

In the desktop world we have just gone through a revolution where we have moved many apps away from native Mac, Windows, and Linux applications to a web world where we build cross-browser and cross-OS experiences. And we are continuing to encourage the revolution with even more powerful browsers like Firefox and now Google Chrome.

I am eager to skip the pain of native proprietary platform mobile client apps and jump right to a world of mobile web browser based applications with cross-device javascript libraries to provide hooks into the native operating systems. Of course the typical criticism of browser based mobile apps today is that they can't take advantage of many of the benefits of the native device, including location based services, address book, local cache and offline data access, and native UI components and gestures. Yet these are all solvable problems by simply having each of the popular platforms exposing javascript APIs for each of these components. Joe Hewitt's early work on iUI shows just how powerful the existing iPhone Safari browser already is in allowing you to recreate full fidelity iPhone native app experiences within the browser.

Palm is taking the first step in realizing this vision and releasing the Mojo Application Framework to allow developers to build application on the new webOS using the web technologies they already know: HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. This thus allows organizations to tap into their existing web assets and already vast experience in building scalable web applications. Developers can leverage the local storage capabilities of HTML5 to have offline access to data. They also have full access to gestures, transitions, and more and access to many of Palm's native device components. It even has full support for background running applications and user notifications, a common criticism of the iPhone platform.

While its too early to tell whether the Palm Pre, webOS and Mojo will take off, it is definitely a step in the right direction for mobile developer platforms. I see way too many examples of native applications on the iPhone that could be much more cheaply developed, more stable and robust, more easily maintained, and available across many more devices by simply making enhanced mobile web apps. I hope to see iPhone and Android opening up even more capabilities in their browsers through javascript APIs and making apps developed with web technologies feel like full fidelity applications on the device, just as Palm is promising to do.