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Jason Shellen Returns With Plinky
On Friday I caught up with Jason Shellen, one of the members of the original Blogger team. Following Google’s February 2003 acquisition of PyraLabs, the company behind Blogger, Shellen joined the search engine giant, working first on Blogger and later on other projects, including Google Reader.
In July 2007, he became a member of the ex-Googler club, joining Six Apart spinoff LiveJournal for a brief stint as VP of product development. He has since left that gig and is now focused on a new startup, Plinky, which doesn’t have a web site just yet. (Now there’s a Web 2.0 name if there ever was one!)
Shellen has co-founded Plinky with CTO Simeon Simeonov, formerly chief architect of both Macromedia and Allaire, but now a partner with Polaris Ventures in Boston. Polaris has invested $1.5 million in the company; a handful of angel investors are looking to join this investment round as well, Shellen said. The company currently has four employees, though it plans to hire a whole slew of engineers as soon as it finds permanent digs in Berkeley.
“I think a lot of attention is being paid to the aggregation and new kinds of social media tools but not enough attention (has been paid) to creation (of the social media),” he said. “When blogging was getting going, there were lot of interesting ideas, and now the technology has progressed enough that we can try out those ideas.” So what’s the plan? Shellen wouldn’t offer any details other than to say that he’s working on “content encouragement.” In other words, they’re building something aimed at getting people who aren’t bloggers or content creators to participate and create.
How? I don’t really know, and he wouldn’t say. One thing I do know: Shellen is a smart guy and having known him for a long time, I trust that he has something interesting up his sleeve. I guess we’ll have to wait and find out when the company launches its first offering this fall.
FreedomSpeaks So Politicians Listen
Plenty of people get politically active during election years, but the issues don’t go away once the hanging chads have been punched and the Diebold source code is no longer being hacked. Aside from voting (or donating thousands to a campaign) the most powerful way to make your voice heard is to write your Congressman. We all know this, but a new site called FreedomSpeaks makes it easy (and digital).
You can sign on to existing letters, write your own and store them, and have enlightened political discussion with fellow site members. The site needs to add local government representative information and could probably integrate well with an organization like Project Vote Smart, but founder Jason Kiesel has his heart in the right place. He’s a freelance coder who put the site together in his spare timing hoping to create a social network for politically minded people. I’ll forgive him for the social network jargon and hope that anyone and everyone might join. After all, it is your country.
TechCrunch20 Now Live
While the startup-sphere was all knee-deep in DEMO coverage last January, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and Sequoia Capital EIA and Weblogs Inc cofounder Jason Calacanis talked up their plans to launch their conference TechCrunch20. Their idea is to bring together 20 new startups, which are chosen on merit alone, and don’t pay to present — “taking the payola out of DEMO-ing,” as Calacanis put it then.
Arrington tells us today that the site just went live, with more details about the event and the process. They are looking to talk to any startup that will be ready to launch or publicly demo by September 17, when the conference will start in San Francisco. The companies will be chosen by a panel of 20 experts, including GigaNet’s biased favorite Om. Arrington says the conference will charge for attendance and for sponsors, but that sponsors are not eligible to present a new startup.
Does the world need another American Idol-style pitch conference for startups? No, but the Valley does need a conference where the presenting companies don’t have to cross a huge financial hurdle to participate, but do have to cross a threshold of quality. Anyone who’s been to any of these launch conferences knows how unproductive they can be — hopefully TechCrunch20’s new model will be a better one. Good luck.
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