A new player called Wikisphere (no content on the website yet) has just raised $5.25mm in series A funding. I don't know much except for this, from PaidContent.org:
Wikisphere Inc., a Seattle-based provider of services for wiki creation and editing, has raised $5.25 million in Series A funding, according to a regulatory filing. Backers include Trinity Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures. The company is run by Blue Nile co-founder Ben Elowitz.
According to Ross, its going to have a consumer focus.
For those of you keeping score, JotSpot has raised $5.2mm in one round and SocialText has raised almost $4.8mm in three rounds.
Slim Devices, about whom I have written before, have just released the new version of their SqueezeBox hardware, the Squeezebox 3. Interestingly, there are no new features — the guts of the SB3 are exactly the same as the SB2. So the SqueezeBox 3 is all about the new design.
Clearly, this is a move motivated by the entrance of Sonos into the market early this year. Sonos received a lot of kudos for its design and a lot of knocks for its price. Sonos's price is still quite high compared to the Squeezebox, and now SlimDevices is attempting to offer a comparably designed experience.
I haven't seen a new SqueezeBox in person yet, but from the pics, it appears that they have closed the gap to some degree. It's a nice little unit, and the display is excellent. Sonos makes the argument that you're better off with their small, but full-color, LCD in your PDA-sized remote control. And having used it, I agree that it's quite nice. As an interface to your large music collection, the scrollwheel is unbeatable. But it also costs $400, just for the remote.
I continue to think that the SqueezeBox is an excellent product from a very cool company. Other folks agree. I have a pair of the first generation players, but this new release is making me consider replacing them with two of the new ones. (BTW, if any of you might be interested in buying two lightly used SqueezeBoxen, drop me a line.)
A brief digression: Sonos is a depressingly silent company. I see their advertisements, but I don't hear anyone inside the company talking. I have no idea what they're working on, or what their vision is for digital media in the living room, or if their users are doing cool things with the product, or customizing it, or hacking it, or if Sonos intends to work with other new media products. I want to get excited about them, but I'm having a hard time doing it.
It's lame to cross-post, I know, but another short update is at the Atlassian Developer Blog (with pictures!).
I'm here in Sydney, in the Atlassian office. I arrived early this morning, made it into the city, checked into my hotel, took a shower and then came to work. I've been hanging out with the folks all day and catching up on a day's missed emails and posts. And I got to sit in a design meeting with Mike and Anton (JIRA lead) about JIRA 3.5, which is just starting the planning stages.
But now my body thinks that it's two in the morning and despite the massive amounts of caffeine I've been sucking down, I'm beat. So I think I'm going to call it a night. See you tomorrow.
When next we speak, gentle reader, I will be on the other side of the globe. I'm leaving tonight for Sydney, to work for a couple of weeks in Atlassian's Sydney office. The primary goal is to meet the rest of the team face to face. But I'll also be able to do some socializing and some sight-seeing. If you're nice, I may post pictures.
I'll be in the office and on AIM during Sydney work hours, so feel free to contact me that way.
I'll be back on November 2nd.
As of tomorrow, I will have been at Atlassian for exactly one month. But as of today, we're announcing the official start of The Atlassian Developer Network. I've been lining up resources and tools for the last month. This is just the beginning, but there enough stuff there that people can start working with it.
As I wrote in the announcement post, there are four goals that I have for the dev network:
- Communicate openly – We believe in open and honest communication. We strive to make our products and our processes as transparent as possible so that you can make better decisions.
- Encourage participation – We believe in the power of the community. And we believe that collaboration on an equal footing will create the greatest value for everyone.
- Listen to the community – We believe in listening closely to our developers. Your feedback and participation will guide how the Developer Network evolves.
- Iterate rapidly – We believe in delivering value to our customers quickly and frequently. We plan to expand and improve the Developer Network on a frequent and ongoing basis.
I'm really excited about getting out in front of the users and starting the collaboration process. This will be a chance to see if all the things I've been preaching about openness actually pay off.
Go read the announcement post to get the rest of the details.
P.S. I get to go to Sydney next week. Woot!
From 37Signal's SvN post announcing their new product, Writeboard.
Where are all those fancy “WOW! WOAH!” features?
Where’s the MS Word export? Or the real-time live editing with other people? Or the WYSIWYG editing mode? Or the ability to drag and drop text around to reorder paragraphs? They’re in JotSpot Live and Writely. If you need that stuff check them out. If you just want to write, share, revise, and compare quickly, easily, and with minimal fuss, check Writeboard out.
UPDATED: And here she is: http://www.writeboard.com/ Looks like the guess was pretty close.
37Signals is finally about to release the much delayed Writeboard, according to this post on DHH's site. I don't know exactly what it is, except that it is to some degree wiki-related.
But I'd be willing to bet that it's highly similar to JotSpot Live and Writely. We'll find out next week if I am right. Maybe once it's released, I'll finally write up the review/comparison of these SubEthaEdit-style apps that I've been meaning to get to for weeks now.
So today was the second Atlassian FedEx Day ("We deliver"), and the first one I've gotten to participate in as an employee. (Here's a link to the description of the first one back in April. Presumably Mike will post the results from the second one soon.)
First thing: I had a blast. No doubt it would have been more fun had I been in Sydney with the developers and the beer, but I made do in the SF office (where I am camping out for the week). I don't know when the last time I got to code uninterrupted for 8 hours straight. It felt so great to get into that zone.
For my contribution, I decided to add a feature to Confluence that I have wanted for ages. I wanted to work on Confluence specifically because I haven't done any development for it yet: until now, I've been focusing almost entirely on JIRA.
I started at the very beginning — checking out code and getting Confluence to build for the first time on my new PowerBook. I had to dive in and start figuring out how all the pieces fit together. With a little prompting from Scott, I figured out how to add a column in the database and then I was off and running.
I have to say, though it may seem opaque to the uninitiated, I'm really impressed by the internal architecture of Confluence (and JIRA, for that matter). Adding my feature turned out to be clean and simple, so much so that I even had enough time to build a macro to display the new content.
So anyway, I had a blast yesterday. I can't wait for the next one. I really hope that with a little clean up and review from one of the official Conf devs we can get my feature ready to ship in 1.5. Fingers crossed.
As soon as Mike posts the details of what everyone built, I'll link to it.
I'm a little late on this, but Steven Berlin Johnson (of EBIGFY fame) wrote a smart article for Discover Magazine that examines the idea of The Long Tail in the context of urban life — something I've been increasingly interested in the last few years. (It also plugs Dodgeball, a service I think it pretty damn cool but haven't had a chance to use yet. See, I still live in a little backwoods town called Santa Barbara.)
His thesis is here in his blog post about the article:
The logic of the long tail will favor urban environments over less densely populated ones. If you're downloading the latest album from an obscure Scandinavian doo-wop group, geography doesn’t matter: It's just as easy to get the bits delivered to you in the middle of Wyoming as it is in the middle of Manhattan. But if you’re trying to meet up with other fans of Scandinavian doo-wop, you’ll have more luck in Manhattan.
Serendipitously, I read this article from the Harvard University Gazette which outlines the principle that population density is what makes a good city.
Which also brought to mind an article I read in The New Yorker(?) about a year ago(?) that argued that New York was in fact the greenest city in America, simply because of it's incredible density. Google has failed me and I can't find the article now, but the general idea is that because New Yorkers are so tightly packed, it takes far fewer resources to heat them, to transport food to them, to move them around, and to deal with their trash. So per-capita, energy is used much more efficiently in New York than in, say, rural Washington despite the fact that rural Washington has more trees.
And here is a Malcolm Gladwell article that draws lessons from The Death and Life of Great American Cities for office planning. (I really need to go read that book.)
All of which does a fairly good job, in sum, of explaining why I decided that I wanted to move to San Francisco. Of course, I didn't really have the vocabulary to explain that at the time. I just knew I was looking for more opportunity on a whole range of levels. But I'm really excited about the chance to live in a real city for the first time — a city that's crowded enough for interesting things to happen. I'll let you know as soon as I'm signed up for Dodgeball.
Jonathan Nolen 