Technically Speaking

Well it didn’t take long from taking NSFW from an idea to a Firefox extension did it? Technically Speaking, I think this is a very useful attribute for web sites and their readers.

Q1: Today I am interviewing Matt Rubens, of Jamglue. Jamglue is that new remixing site that was talked about here on Friday 12/15/06 as well as on TechCrunch and other media and blogging outlets. So Matt, what was the inspiration in creating Jamglue? The reason I ask that is I have seen so many online “music” type of sites come and go. What do you think is not only the inspiration, but also are you trying to create a music social network of sorts of remixers?

Why isn’t there a hugely popular user-generated content community like YouTube for audio? That’s the big question that motivated us to create Jamglue.

We believe that the answer is that music is a fundamentally collaborative form of media. While it’s possible for one person to shoot a funny video and post it on YouTube or take a great photograph and send it to Flickr, it’s a lot harder for one person to make interesting audio on their own. Specifically, desktop music mixing software can be expensive and complicated to use, and it’s difficult to collaborate and share the music you create with your friends.

With Jamglue, we’re trying to make making music easier and more fun. To do this, we provide free tools for remixing songs and clips from within your browser and a vast library of searchable content to use in your mixes.

We’re hoping to build up a social network around our mixing tools that appeals to music fans and musicians of all sorts. Musicians who want to give their listeners more freedom to interact with their music can import their songs into Jamglue. Remixers can showcase their skills on Jamglue and build up a fan base. Music fans can discover new songs through their friends and find new friends with similar musical taste.

Q2: How has Y-Combinator, your investor, treated you and your company? I wrote a bit about them, and I think they are a “smart” investor company. Have they let you have creative and artistic control of the Jamglue project?

Working with YCombinator has been a great experience for us. My co-founders and I are all first-time entrepreneurs, and they provided us with exactly what we needed to get started: a little bit of money, a little bit of advice, and a little bit of involvement.

We consider YCombinator to be trusted advisors and we have a lot of respect for their opinions, but we’ve always had creative and artistic control of the project.

Q3: What are some of the obstacles you have run into while building Jamglue? Things I would imagine would be such things as copyright law, bandwidth, etc. Can you maybe share some of your experiences in building a music site to help out the aspiring or future music site creator?

To be honest, the things you listed haven’t actually been huge obstacles for us. We take copyright seriously and have the infrastructure in place to respond to takedown requests, but it hasn’t been an issue to date. Thanks to Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service (S3), bandwidth hasn’t been a problem for us either. We stream all of our audio files directly from S3, which only costs us $0.15/GB/month for storage and $0.20/GB for bandwidth.

With these issues out of the way, we’re able to spend most of our time thinking of ways to make Jamglue fun and easy to use.

Q4: As stated above in Question #2, we all know you have the smart investor backing you. This question is usually reserved for you telling everyone a bit more about the company. Where you are located, how many of you are there, if you are looking for new employees, etc… If you think you can reveal it or to help people to understand your company, go ahead and let the readers know.

Jamglue is located in Seattle, WA. There are four of us working on the project now, but we’re always looking for more good people!

Q5: I want to thank Matt Rubens from Jamglue for spending a few minutes of his time today to answer the questions. Now, it’s your turn Matt. Anything you wanted to say or want the readers to know - say it here.

Thanks for having me, Rex!

I hope that your readers will take a few minutes to check out Jamglue. We’re currently holding a remix contest with Nettwerk recording artists The Submarines ( http://www.jamglue.com/contests/thesubmarines), and even people who haven’t tried remixing before are having a great time making their own mixes for the contest.

Technically Speaking, I still have a few more interviews that I’m waiting on return answers. Hopefully we will have them online in 2007.

If you are going to put out a new video site, you really need to have something unique. Yes, you will survive, but with YouTube being the dominant site, you won’t be noticed. There are a number of video sites that have come alive this year. I saw this a couple of days back, and I definitely think that VideoJug is a nice niche site.

This site has “how to” videos on there. It answers questions in video form on such topics as:

How to tie a full windsor knot?

How to perform the perfect Golf Swing? <--- this should interest my bud in Addison, TX

I think that this site will become more popular in 2007. You can never have enough help when you are trying something new, or even if you would like an opinion on how to do something correctly.

Well I’m sure you have seen Steve “Superman” Rubel’s post by now, as well as Mike “Green Lantern” Arrington’s post, and probably Jason “Green Lantern” Calacanis’ post too. I had to also take the superhero test. It’s quite interesting that a few of us end up being the Green Lantern.

Green Lantern 95% Hulk 75% Supergirl 65% Iron Man 60% Catwoman 60% Superman 60% Batman 60% The Flash 55% Robin 45% Wonder Woman 45% Spider-Man 35%

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Q1: Today we are speaking with Benjamin Mestrallet of eXo Platform. This is a webOS that I talked about briefly right here.  First off, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions. Let’s get started - How long has your company been around? I’m talking about total time here, as in when you came up with the idea or who ever did, and how you came on board with running with it?

Hello Rex, the company was created in November 2003. We sell an Open Source product line that goes from Portal to Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Our products have been deployed in quite large companies and organization mainly in the military market (our first customer was the US department of defense) and in public organization (such as the Venice tourism portal in Italia). The funny thing in our story is that we had customers even before I created the company with Tuan Nguyen!

Hence, we have been around for quite some time, building mission critical application in portal environment where data can be classified and security issues are extremely important. We also leverage the Java Enterprise Edition stack and we collaborate to the Java standards such as the Portlet API or the Java Content Repository which is extremely important for Fortune 500 companies that want to avoid vendor locking.

So we have spent quite some time building a strong server environment and now thanks to technology like AJAX we have been able to apply all our experience on also implementing a powerful and beautiful user interface…but once again this is just the top of the iceberg, building an operating system is a complex and hard work!

Q2: What distinct advantages do you feel your webOS offers over rival webOS startups? I’ve talked about quite a few here on this blog, so make sure you tell the readers exactly “why they should use your exoPlatform webOS” over the other players in the game.

If you look at the existing WebOS on the market that are mainly flash based or with and AJAX front end but a PHP backend. Those are built for quick UI experience and server side work is not the main concern (they maybe hope to be quickly bought by Google :)). Hence integration in existing IT systems will be a big problem if they want to also target the enterprise market.

eXo Enterprise WebOS is taking a different path. We have spent 3 years to build a strong server side platform based on Java standards (Portlet API and Java Content Repository) and we now apply AJAX and other web 2.0 technologies to the UI to provide a strong new paradigm for our existing Portal customers. And they like it, so other portal companies will go that way too (IBM, BEA…) which will make a much faster adoption in the enterprise than we can imagine.

For example the Java Portlet API is used as the backbone for our WebOS windowing framework which allows extensibility, modularity and portability of WebOS applications. Our WebOS File System is based on the Java Content Repository specification which standardizes content structures, search, versioning, locking and export. Furthermore, existing applications like ERP or CRM already have JCA connectors that can be reached in portlets and hence in eXo Enterprise WebOS windows.

Of course pure JavaScript components like MacOS widgets or Vista gadgets are useful, especially for simple mash ups where services are exposed through web services or REST APIs but that is not the case of most enterprise applications (and I do not talk about mainframes). That is why we are also building a widget infrastructure à la MacOS, built as a portlet application to aggregate different existing JavaScript gadgets (Mac OS, Netvibes, Google, vista…).

Hence, for a WebOS to be really used in enterprise, it will have to be based on what corporation already use and are familiar with. The server side makes the difference and it is a huge one if we want to see that type of technology inside medium and large corporation. As we come with a new paradigm, we can not lock user data and applications with new middleware.

That is our main concern when building eXo Enterprise WebOS.

Q3: What would be the main goal of the company in 2007?

We are building a full OS stack from the kernel to the most advanced applications.

We already have the windows while still supporting older portal layouts, we have a strong File System with JCR and we leverage it to build our Enterprise Content Management (ECM) offering. That one includes BPM, DMS, CMS, Records Management and WCM.

Furthermore we are integrating BI solution as we were already doing in our previous web 1.0 portal.

We also work on a full groupware suite that includes forum, email, shared calendar, wiki, contact management and much more.

The only part we are not building yet is the office application like a text editor or a spreadsheet as we look more for an OEM solution. If we don’t find one, we will do it too.

On the business side we have just opened an office in US (Houston) and we truly think that this market will be the main driver for the adoption of WebOS in enterprise.

So as you see we have quite some work for 2007!

Q4: Tell us some more about the company. Are you growing, looking for new people, how many there are currently, etc… Whatever you can release to the public at this time about your company would be great information to share here.

eXo Platform Inc is a profitable venture that employs 35 people in 5 offices in US, Brazil, France, Ukraine and Vietnam.

We are still a private company owned by 4 individuals with no VCs and a huge growth!

Q5: It is truly a fact and a pleasure to interview people that are true cutting edge players. I have loved learning more about every person that I have had these 5 questions interviews with. Once again, thank you Benjamin for taking the time to answer these for the readers here. Now, as usual, it’s your turn - you can say whatever you would like everyone to know that I didn’t cover above.

Thank you Rex for covering such a new market but still a very exiting one!