Founder Stories: Parse's Ilya Sukhar On Founding A Startup With Strangers
For this week's episode of Founder Stories, I sat down with Ilya Sukhar, co-founder and CEO of Parse. The interview was taped days before Parse was acquired by Facebook last month. Parse is a cloud app platform that provides a set of SDKs that enable developers to focus on the execution of their application instead of rebuilding backend functionality for every mobile platform. Sukhar shares his experience of leaving Salesforce after his first startup, Etacts, was acquired and going through Y Combinator for the second time.
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Hoping To Ride The Crowdfunding Wave, Celery Lets Sellers Accept Pre-Orders, Charge When Products Ready To Ship
Airbrite, a Y Combinator-backed e-commerce startup, is debuting its first product today called Celery (its name a play on the world “sell”). Celery is designed to be a “pre-commerce” store builder – or, in other words, it allows anyone to start selling ahead of having a product to ship. That means sellers can start taking credit cards now, then charge when their product is ready to launch. And in case you couldn’t figure it out by that description, Airbrite is hoping the product will be a hit with those raising funds using crowdfunding. In fact, says Airbrite co-founder Chris Tsai, the company has already seen some traction with crowdfunders during its private beta, which rolled out to hundreds of users this March. But, he clarifies, Celery isn’t just designed for those merchants – it’s for anyone in any business who needs to enable pre-commerce on any platform. Some of its early customers include Kickstarter crowdfunder the3doodler.com, e-commerce site dagnedover.com, ...
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Google's Three-Hour I/O Keynote Boils Down To These Highlights And One Theme: Foundation
Today’s three-hour-long Google I/O keynote came with plenty of announcements, but the company mostly assured us that it is focused on building frameworks that can benefit developers and consumers. We saw a more unified company that needed three hours in one session to get their message across. Breaking today’s keynote up into two days would have disrupted the momentum coming out of a company that closed the day at an all-time high on the stock market. Key areas of the business saw updates, all relaying the important foundation necessary to move Google forward over the next 10 years. From search to maps, everything is getting a new coat of paint, a new polished experience and a focus from every team within the company. The only announcement that didn’t fit into a “category” was its new music subscription service. Some are calling it a Spotify-killer, but to us, it seemed like a necessary and inevitable announcement. Android The day started out with Android, with the news that more ...
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Firefox 21 Launches With Social API Support For msnNOW, Mixi And Cliqz, Android App Gets New Fonts, HTML5 Improvements
Mozilla today launched the latest version of its Firefox browser for Mac, Windows and Linux, and the highlight of Firefox 21 is additional support for Mozilla’s Social API. This API allows social providers to integrated directly with Firefox and the organization launched in cooperation with Facebook at the end of last year. Today, it is adding Cliqz, Mixi and msnNOW to the mix. The new Social API integrations, Mozilla says, “help you stay connected to your social networks, no matter where you go on the Web.” Once installed, users can access these integrations from buttons in the browser toolbar. Cliqz users, for example, will be able to see content recommendations right in the new social sidebar in Firefox, share links across their social networks and preview Twitter commentary, all without actually going to Cliqz. The integration with Japan’s Mixi and Microsoft’s msnNOW works in the same way. The Social API, Mozilla writes, “has endless potential for integrating social networks, ...
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Market For “Apperating Systems” Heats Up, As Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz & Others Put $1.8M Into Aviate, An Intelligent Homescreen For Android
Facebook is not the only company to invest in development of products that take better advantage of the Android homescreen. South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk also recently announced its intentions to release a rival Android launcher. And now, Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others have invested $1.8 million into Aviate, an ex-Googler backed intelligent homescreen for Android devices. The round also included participation from Freestyle Capital, Draper Associates, and other angels, including Dan Rose, Facebook VP of Business Development and Monetization. The company actually closed on the funding in December, but is only announcing now. The funds will be used to grow the team quickly, and further develop the product. The company behind Aviate, Palo Alto-based ThumbsUp Labs, was founded in November 2011 by a team with backgrounds in computer science, search and OS development. Co-founder Mark Daiss majored in Cognitive Science at the University of California, and previously ...
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