betaworks

"I love show-and-tell. I’m a sucker for any pitch that involves less talk and more demo. I love the..."

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:15:00 -0400

“I love show-and-tell. I’m a sucker for any pitch that involves less talk and more demo. I love the way people get emotional (excited, bashful, optimistic, etc…) about what they built. I love how raw alpha products can be, and I love the feeling of seeing a really compelling product peeking it’s nose out from behind the mess of awkward, early UI and bugs.”

- Andrew Parker

The Gong Show: Betaspring and Accelerator Programs

Outside.in is Hiring Ruby Devs

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:42:51 -0400

Work on cool stuff with smart people.

Tackle big problems and create innovative solutions.

Come join our team in our new Flatiron office.

Learn more here: http://bit.ly/cODzJK.

"Thousands of brands and bloggers are now up and running on the service. Yahoo, MySpace, The..."

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 06:17:28 -0400

“Thousands of brands and bloggers are now up and running on the service. Yahoo, MySpace, The Huffington Post, Politico, Pepsi, NPR, Scribd, Toys”R”Us, CSPAN, Dailymotion, IMDB, the New York Times, Bravo, Mozilla and Amazon are just a few of the great brands that have joined in the last few months. Search for yahoo.it, 4sq.com, huff.to, dai.ly, toysr.us, n.pr, scri.bi, politi.co, amzn.to, or bravo.ly and you’ll see thousands of impressions happening in real time.”

- bit.ly blog - Welcome to bit.ly Pro (via rafer)

"The whole notion of having “an issue” really underscores how publishers still don’t understand what..."

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 11:11:39 -0400

“The whole notion of having “an issue” really underscores how publishers still don’t understand what is going on with digital content. I, like most of the market, don’t want to read a compilation of content like I had to do with print. I want digitally connected content that brings together many sources topically or theme”

- Jeff Nolan, in a great essay

shotzombies: Scaling Issues

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:20:36 -0500

shotzombies:

Scaling Issues

Venmo: Say Goodbye to Cash (via shotzombies)

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:43:03 -0500

Venmo: Say Goodbye to Cash

(via shotzombies)

"These aren’t deals (one of my least favorite words in our business), these are companies run by real..."

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:10:47 -0500

“These aren’t deals (one of my least favorite words in our business), these are companies run by real people riding a very real roller coaster of emotions, adrenaline and unmet expectations”

- Truer words have never been spoken, from BRYCE DOT VC: Deal Fever

Bathroom in Miami airport gbattle: URL Shortened Custom Keyword...

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:37:00 -0500

Bathroom in Miami airport

gbattle:

URL Shortened Custom Keyword Graffiti Found In Bathroom.

shotzombies: Coffee (Ethiopia) from Square Mile (London) in the...

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:10:49 -0500

shotzombies:

Coffee (Ethiopia) from Square Mile (London) in the Hario v60 (Japan) meets the Bitly mascot (Manhattan) in Brooklyn. The mug is from Bisbee, Arizona. Happy snow day!

gbattle: The original MTV fish tank in the betaworks offices....

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:14:08 -0500

gbattle:

The original MTV fish tank in the betaworks offices. Those appear to be Neon Tetras if my tropical fish knowledge serves me correctly.

Lead Developer wanted for Twitterfeed (betaworks)

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:24:00 -0500

Twitterfeed is looking for a lead engineer to work with our distributed team and to take control of the roadmap, architect new features, and implement availability and performance guarantees.

Twitterfeed is by far the largest publisher to Twitter, with almost 500,000 users pushing 800,000 feeds to Twitter. When the web is changing from a place where you find content to where content finds you, Twitterfeed is well placed to do great things in this space. Twitterfeed is part of betaworks, the team behind Summize (acquired by Twitter), bit.ly, Tweetdeck and chartbeat.

We’re looking for

+ experienced web developer
+ strong experience with dynamic languages (python, ruby, etc) and web
frameworks (django, rails, etc)
+ expertise at managing mysql, legacy data models, and schema migration
+ experience ensuring mysql availability and redundancy -
multi-master, mmm, replication, partitioning, drdb, etc.
+ know how to properly normalize a data model as well as when to denormalize
+ strong unix/linux background
+ conversant in html/css/javascript
+ experience with non-relational data stores (mongo, tokyo, etc)
+ experience with asynchronous processing and message queues
(rabbitmq, gearman, starling, etc)
+ experience with caching infrastructure (nginx, varnish, squid, etc)

obsessions:
+ performance
+ caching
+ availability
+ measurement

a resume is helpful but would love a link to your blog and linkedin profile.

Tony Haile
email tony (at) betaworks (dot) com

"There is the possibility that a true musical underground, in the archaic sense, could only really..."

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:17:00 -0500

“There is the possibility that a true musical underground, in the archaic sense, could only really exist if it was offline. But that seems utterly beyond imagining, doesn’t it?”

- Simon Reynolds (via newspeedwayboogie)

Rafer sez:
It is beyond imagining, but it’s also unnecessary. Underground culture movements are a restricted accessed system like any other. The ‘net does that well. It’s what invites, registration, and passwords are for. I heard some smart guys invested in something analogous called Ideeli.

"History doesn’t mean shit and the great companies always emerge from completely orthogonal plays on..."

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:28:15 -0500

“History doesn’t mean shit and the great companies always emerge from completely orthogonal plays on what all the smart people predict will happen.”

- Jeff Nolan, Venture Chronicles

"In a discussion about the importance of distribution, some start-up guys – each the creators of new..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:25:42 -0500

“In a discussion about the importance of distribution, some start-up guys – each the creators of new enterprises that took off like gun shots – were asked by a representative of the big, old club which company they would most want to do distribution deals with. The start-up guys cocked their heads like confused puppies. Why would we want to do that? they asked.”

- Jeff Jarvis

ie, no business development

"Advertising, like tourism, tends to kill the thing it loves over time because it suffers from..."

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:43:07 -0500

““Advertising, like tourism, tends to kill the thing it loves over time because it suffers from tragedy of the commons effects … and its usual response to the lessening impact of Ads is to increase the volume. Which upsets more people….””

- Alan Patrick

"Our blogs are already affiliated-linked up to the eyeballs, our TV shows are product-placed to hell,..."

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:28:07 -0500

“Our blogs are already affiliated-linked up to the eyeballs, our TV shows are product-placed to hell, radio has succumbed to payola, even our schools are brought to you by the letters COCA COL and A. Human conversation is the last area of communication to hold out against the relentless march of commercialisation and it’s our duty, as humans, to make sure it stays that way. So, screw consensus. And shame on me for starting to lean towards it yesterday. Give me ad-free conversation, or give me death.”

- Paul Carr

Check out pictures from our annual Betaday09!

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:09:17 -0500

Check out pictures from our annual Betaday09!

Looking for a Flash Developer

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:57:00 -0400

betaworks is looking for a Flash Developer for some contract work. Please email jessica @ betaworks.com.

"Existing search engines (which thought of themselves as portals) believed that search quality..."

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:28:06 -0400

“Existing search engines (which thought of themselves as portals) believed that search quality wasn’t very important (regular people can’t tell the difference), and that search wasn’t very valuable anyway, since it sends people away from your site. Google’s success came in large part from recognizing that others were wrong on both points.”

- Paul Buchheit, Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. “Hacking”

"Social media doesn’t mean the death of TV advertising, but it does place it into context. Broadcast..."

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:52:05 -0400

“Social media doesn’t mean the death of TV advertising, but it does place it into context. Broadcast is a powerful medium for rapidly raising awareness, but the reality of media fragmentation means that to get real engagement requires your customers to do the distribution for you. And that, quite frankly, is not easy. The trick of turning audiences into advocates requires more than just savvy media planning or bribing people with free iPods.”

- Mike Walsh, Be Sweet, Please Retweet