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Content
29 October 2006, 15:30
Parakey: A new startup by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt.
Details have finally emerged about Blake Ross secret new project, Parakey.
  The latest issue of IEEE Spectrum features Blake Ross on the cover and a few details about his new startup Parakey cofounded with Joe Hewitt. The desktop application is described as a personal organization, editing, and sharing application. It's designed to make the life easier for less technical users who would like to save, modify, and share information without too much hassle. (via Matt Mullenweg)
Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt have worked together in the past on the Firefox browser, breaking away from the application suite that was Mozilla Seamonkey and blazing a new path. At first there were mixed reviews and feedback about a stand-alone browser but the success of Firefox and its community has eclipsed the previous suite and its current components of Thunderbird, Sunbird and ChatZilla.
I think it's very cool Blake unveiled his new company in IEEE, a professional association for engineers, instead of a tech blog. The four-page format in the magazine lends itself well to telling a more complete story behind the company and the motivations of its founders even if there are a couple inaccuracies within regarding open source and business profitability. Given the extremely hot brand of the phoenix that is Firefox it will be a challenge for Blake, Joe, and others to stay focused on building the product instead of fielding premature inquiries.
Parakey is a publishing platform which lives on your desktop and connects seamlessly to the web for both permissioned and global sharing. The founders hope to create more publishers with easy to use tools and permissioning options. Data lives on your desktop but you can open up and share it with the world if you choose. The software can connect to local hardware such as a digital camera to retrieve and edit photos before storing locally or on a server. The article does not discuss a business plan but I imagine a certain level of service (storage, bandwidth) will be available for free with increased allocations available for a price. The app will have basic options likely aimed at a market sweet spot but enable extensibility through a programming language named JUL (similar in name to Mozilla's XUL but likely different in markup).
Content
28 October 2006, 17:30
Firefox Kid Blake Ross to launch Parakey — this could be big.
Details have finally emerged about Blake Ross secret new project, Parakey.
By Matt Marshall
 We first met Blake Ross at Silicon Valley’s Cafe Coupa more than a year ago.
As a teenager, the self-taught coder had been central to the launch of the successful Firefox browser.
When we met, he’d just co-founded his own company with Joe Hewitt, having raised seed capital from heavy-hitting venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. He couldn’t say much, but said his focus was on making the Internet experience dead simple for normal people, including his tech-phobic Mom.
Now we get a glimpse at what he’s created. Spectrum has just previewed his product, which will remain under wraps until later this year. We smiled at the writer’s description of Ross as a young Kafka — he does indeed have thick eyebrows. It’s too early too tell how his company Parakey and its product will be received, but the description is intriguing; it’s clearly aiming big.
Parakey is an application you download to your PC, which effectively becomes your personal operating system. It turns your computer in a hybrid Web site-hard drive, where you can choose what to make public online and what to keep private. Everything else is seamless between the Web and your desktop, letting you avoid the hassles that come with downloading photos, for example, and putting them up on the Web.
Even though Parakey works inside your Web browser, it runs locally on your home computer, which allows Parakey developers to do things inside your Parakey site that a traditional Web site could not do, such as interact with your camera.”
…Everything you encounter while surfing online—photos, videos, tunes—you can drag right onto your Parakey page, end of story.
…you can manage your content quickly and efficiently, even if you’re off-line. Again, it’s not that you’re making your hard drive’s contents available for the world; rather, you’re organizing your Parakey site, say, http://parakey.com, only some of which will be open for others to view. Whether you make your changes online or off, there’s only one interface (avoiding the Outlook/Hotmail problem); everything is ultimately stored locally, your computer being synchronized with remote servers whenever you are online. “You never have to care about the uploading process,” says Ross. “That just happens transparently.”
Matt Mullenweg mentions a dissappointing quote from the article, suggesting his investors are calling the shots, and resisting efforts to open-source the project. Ross responds that it’s a misquote.
Content
27 October 2006, 15:44
The Firefox Kid Continued(3)
The Firefox Kid Continued
By David Kushner
 Naturally, Firefox is the model in Ross’s mind of how he and Hewitt—who was one of the original Firefox engineers—ought to develop Parakey. “If it were up to us, we’d open source all of it,” he says, “but it depends on how the investors want to do this.”
This statement expresses the differences between the Firefox and Parakey business models. Firefox began life as an open-source, not-for-profit experiment and recently has begun morphing into a moneymaking enterprise under the Mountain View, Calif.–based Mozilla Corp. Formed in 2005, Mozilla makes money through sources such as Google ads included on the Firefox search results page. Parakey, on the other hand, is launching with profit in mind. While many of the details remain under wraps, the idea is to roll out initially with a single application, such as the photo system, which will demonstrate how the platform can be exploited. Once all the infrastructure is in place and scalable, they’ll make a more concerted play to involve outside developers, probably around January. Ross says that advertising revenues will come in differently from the way they do in Google or other ad-dependent businesses. He can’t say more about it for now. Although market analysts have yet to probe it, some are already unsure how well Ross’s new project might do. “I’m skeptical,” says Joe Laszlo, a research director at Jupiter Research, a technology-research firm based in New York City. “The vast majority of people who want to publish content at all prefer a best-of-breed shop and don’t want to do it all in one place.”
As Ross shuts down his laptop and digs into dinner, his mind turns to other matters—like Time magazine’s big event, scheduled for the following night. With Parakey development taking up his time, he hasn’t had much left over for parties or even his Stanford education. He’s taking time off from everything until he gets this project done. But, as always, he still makes room for his original muse—his mom. When she calls him up complaining about some new technology that’s confusing her, he knows there’s more work to do—and a new opportunity on the horizon.
About the Author
DAVID KUSHNER, a journalist in New Jersey, is the author of Masters of Doom (Random House, 2003), which is being developed into a movie for Showtime. His most recent book is Johnny Magic and the Card Shark Kids (Random House, 2005). Kushner has also written for Wired, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and other publications.
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