Voices » Yahoo

Almost Famous: Aviary's Israel Derdik

Drake Martinet — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:21:07 +0000

By Drake Martinet, Intern, All Things Digital

A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: A Skype visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Israel Derdik and his high-flying media suite, Aviary, a Web-based media-editing platform that enables users to alter, save and present their multimedia creations, all in the cloud.

Who: Israel Derdik, or “Iz” to his friends.

What: CTO of Aviary.

Why: Aviary is a Web-based media-manipulation suite comprised of flash-based tools for in-browser image editing, pattern generation, image effects, image markup, screen capture and audio editing. Let’s call it Adobe (ADBE) Lite.

Where: @iz (Twitter); aviary.com/about (corporate bio); Hewlett, New York (analog place).

Who else: Sumopaint, Pixler, Garage Band.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Tech Support Intern, Prudential Securities.

Has a Geek Crush on: Gina Trapani, Lifehacker.com.

Gadget of the Moment: Chartbeat app for iPhone.

Wishes There Was an App for: Home automation. “I want to have little touchscreens in every room of the house to control lights, HVAC, alarms, all of it. Basically, I want the touchscreens.”

First Computer: Commodore VIC 20. “My dad brought home a VIC 20 when I was six or seven. We played these little games on it–it had a tape drive. I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Bio in 140 Characters

Born in Brooklyn. CS degree from Brooklyn College. Became an intern at ConEd. Bubble of Web 1.0 burst. Then co-founded Aviary.

The Five Questions

What makes Aviary different from Adobe CS or Garage Band?

Aviary can do lots of things, but there’s nothing to install. It’s flash-based and runs right in your browser. The benefit of running that stuff in the cloud is every time you save it, it saves to our servers, and you can access it from any computer.

We also make it easy to do the basic edits on Aviary. Then, for example, [you could] move the project to Photoshop for more heavy-duty stuff. You can also open other peoples’ works–if they haven’t made them private with a premium account–and see how they did something. We call it “creation on the fly.”

Are users ready for this?

Absolutely. We’re seeing it [cloud computing] more with Gmail; people are moving more of their applications to the Web. I think online image editing is still in its nascent stages, but it’s going to get there. [Aviary is] definitely building for the power user, the top of the pyramid, but it will trickle down.

You just completed a successful round of funding. How will Aviary expand?

Well, we’d love to get into bed with Flickr [Yahoo’s (YHOO) popular image-sharing site]. We can already pull images right from your Flickr account, and very shortly we’ll be able to push images back via their API. Currently, there’s a big hole for video editing and stuff for YouTube.

That’s a really, really tough problem to solve because of the file sizes involved. There is also music creation possibly, as opposed to just looping things together and adding effects.

Every geek has a memory where they saw something new and had to say to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

I’ll tell you exactly what it is because it really stands out. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Wannado City in Florida. It’s a kids’ amusement park that’s entirely indoors. It looks like a huge city, and the kids can do all the jobs–they can be police officers, and there’s fire trucks going back an forth that the kids can sit in, and there’s a bakery–it’s a really cool place. But what struck me as cool is that they give this bracelet to each person in the family when you walk in, and at any given moment you can walk to a kiosk, swipe your bracelet and see where anyone else in your family is in the building. I assume they are using some kind of RFID tags, but when I saw that I was like, “Wow, that’s really awesome.”

If you could change one thing about the Internet, what would it be?

The worst would have to be bad advice in tech support forums. Sometimes, I go on there, and there is just really bad advice. I look at it and think, “I could do that better.” Incompetence drives me crazy.

The In Living Color Interview

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Swap Yahoo! for Google

Tiernan Ray — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:05:53 +0000

By Tiernan Ray, Blogger, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily

YAHOO! (YHOO) is using every power at its disposal to improve its fortunes. Unfortunately, it’s missing the market while doing so. The advertising market, that is.

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MySpace Tries to Recover Its Cool

Emily Steel — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:00:30 +0000

By Emily Steel, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

A new executive team at MySpace is trying to reignite the brand by focusing on areas like music, videos and games as users abandon the social-networking site for cooler destinations.

MySpace, which is holding a conference this week for its global ad-sales staff, needs to lure visitors back and kick-start advertising revenue, ad executives say. Research firm eMarketer estimates U.S. ad spending on the site will be $495 million this year, down 15 percent from $585 million in 2008.

The basic challenge is similar to the one facing big Internet companies, such as Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL and Yahoo (YHOO), that are under pressure to reinvent themselves for fickle audiences.

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Yahoo Needs A New New Homepage

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 07:00:39 +0000

By Nicholas Carlson, Blogger, Silicon Alley Insider

Now that Yahoo’s (YHOO) search deal is done, the company can finally focus on making itself a better Yahoo. The first step: Build a better homepage.

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Yahoo Committed Seppuku Today

Jason Calacanis — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:41:14 +0000

By Jason Calacanis, Founder and CEO, Mahalo.com

The once proud warrior of the internet space laid down its sword, knelt at the feet of Microsoft (MSFT) and gutted itself today. There was no honor in this death, it was one brought by the shame of losing to Google (GOOG) and a lack of faith in one’s ability to compete in the space they created. To be clear, Yahoo (YHOO) didn’t need to do this deal, Microsoft did. Ultimately Yahoo will look back at this moment as the second–-and perhaps fatal-–mistake in their epic history.

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Is the Economy Really THIS Bad?

Jim Goldman — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:00:20 +0000

By Jim Goldman, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, CNBC

This was a strange earnings season. But it has been a remarkably strange economy. But when you look at the big names in tech, including Intel (INTC), IBM (IBM), Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), eBay (EBAY), Microsoft (MSFT), and the big names on Wall Street, there was a bizarre disconnect over what was expected, and what was realized.

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Most-Searched Term On Microsoft's Live Search is … 'Google'

Joseph Tartakoff — Fri, 01 May 2009 07:03:27 +0000

By Joseph Tartakoff, Reporter, ContentNext

Microsoft’s Live Search revamp apparently cannot come soon enough. Hitwise data shows that the most commonly searched term on Live Search over the last four weeks has been ‘Google’, accounting for 1% of all queries. Number two? ‘Yahoo’.

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It Was Beast That Killed the Beauty?

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:00:26 +0000

By Nitrozac and Snaggy

Startup Tries to Rally Publishers with Ad-Sharing Proposal

Jessica E. Vascellaro — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:39:16 +0000

By Jessica E. Vascellaro, Technology Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

A Silicon Valley startup and handful of publishers have a new plan to bring peace to the war between Web sites and media companies accusing them of stealing their content.

The group, which includes Reuters and smaller online publishers like Politico, wants companies that broker advertising to Web sites to give them a share of the revenue from ads they sell alongside full copies of their content. Companies like Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT), along with many more specialized players, operate advertising networks that carry out this brokering role.

Reponsibility for policing the program would fall to Attributor Corp., whose technology identifies copies of articles and videos on the Web. Up to now its clients, which include the Associated Press and the Financial Times, have often used the information to request their content be taken down.

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Is the Mobile Web Coming of Age?

Maggie Shiels — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:03:35 +0000

By Maggie Shiels, Technology reporter, BBC News

The strategies of companies ranging from Google (GOOG) to Microsoft (MSFT) and from Apple (AAPL) to Yahoo (YHOO) suggest they believe the future of the internet lies in mobile phones – but many in the industry believe the mobile web is still a long way from realising its potential.

EBay’s (EBAY) senior director of platforms and mobile Max Mancini told the BBC: “The first hype cycle on mobile failed because people wanted to recreate the desktop on the phone.

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Start-Ups Juggle Platforms, Prioritization

Jessica E. Vascellaro — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:27:15 +0000

By Jessica E. Vascellaro, Tech Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Moves by major tech companies to open up to outside developers have been a boon for small start-ups. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo (YHOO), Apple (AAPL) and Intuit (INTU), to name a few, all allow developers to build software that hooks into their services.

But the cascade of companies opening up has created a new question for cash-conscious start-ups: which ones do you build for and which ones do you build for first?

“A lot of start-ups are wrestling with prioritizing their relatively scarce resources,” said Jim Hornthal, a partner at CMEA Capital and chairman of Triporati, a travel destination discovery service.

In the “not-too-distant past” companies could justify tackling most available platforms, said Hornthal, who founded online travel company Preview Travel, which Travelocity bought in 2000. “More likely today, the answer is something less than that,” he said. The decision often boils down to which ones a company “can’t afford not to support.”

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Furl Changes Hands

Marisa Taylor — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:26:23 +0000

By Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

This week Diigo acquired fellow social-bookmarking service Furl from LookSmart, a San Francisco online advertising company. Terms weren’t disclosed, but LookSmart said in a statement it would receive “a potential equity position” in Diigo in exchange for Furl.

LookSmart bought Furl in 2004, and while it reached one million users, it didn’t quite catch on like Delicious, which has five million users and was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.

LookSmart’s unloading of Furl isn’t the first consolidation made in the social bookmarking space this year. Yahoo (YHOO) recently closed down MyWeb in order to focus on Delicious, and Google (GOOG) just shuttered Shared Stuff.

Yesterday, as LookSmart discussed its earnings with analysts, CEO Ted West said the company faced several challenges with Furl. “We did see substantial commoditization of social bookmarking services and their availability across the web–commoditization in terms of numbers of providers,” he said.

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MySpace: Pali Sees Big Rev Drop; Expects Layoffs

Eric Savitz — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:15:34 +0000

By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily

The time has come for big changes at MySpace, according to Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield.

In a research note this morning, Greenfield asserts that, with just over a year to go on the News Corp. (NWS) unit’s search advertising deal with Google (GOOG), “it appears as though Google simply does not care about social search.” He contends it is difficult to imagine Google paying anywhere near what they were previously shelling out to MySpace, “especially as the inherent functionality of social networks is diminishing the importance of search.” The current deal expires in June 2010.

Greenfield estimates that MySpace will get about $300 million in revenue from Google in both the June 2009 fiscal year and in FY 2010, or about 35 percent of revenues in each year. He says there could be some competition for a new deal from Yahoo (YHOO), AOL (TWX) and MSN (MSFT), but he nonetheless sees a 50 percent drop in search fees. He also notes that Fox Interactive Media, the NWS unit that includes MySpace, is seeing costs increase even as revenues shrink.

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eBay: Hope Its Forecasters Are Better Than Yahoo’s

Eric Savitz — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:00:52 +0000

By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily

It was almost exactly a year ago, in mid-March 2008, that Yahoo (YHOO) laid out its once-secret three-year growth plan for the Street as part of its strategy to demonstrate that Microsoft’s (MSFT) takeover offer for the company was too low.

Here’s hoping that the soothsayers at eBay (EBAY) are a little more accurate that the ones at Yahoo.

Yahoo’s plan, which was more detailed that the one eBay offered up today, provided revenue guidance for 2009 and 2010 that was far above the estimates then being used on the Street:

For 2009, the company projected revenue ex-TAC of $7.1 billion; the Street at the time was then looking for $6.4 billion.
For 2010, the Yahoo plan projected revenue of $8.8 billion; the Street had been targeting $7.1 billion.
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"Search is a Pencil"

John Battelle — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:05:03 +0000

By John Battelle, Blogger, John Battelle’s Searchblog

I will never forget that quote, from Alta Vista founder Louis Monier, as he bemoaned the devolution of his creation into Yet Another Portal. He was devoted to the idea that Alta Vista would do one thing–search–and do it well. But Alta Vista was instead turned into a bawdy image of Yahoo (YHOO), AOL, Lycos, Excite, and all the other portals of the late 90s.

And along came Google (GOOG), which by 2000 had gained a reputation as the Best Search on the Web. And Yahoo, eager to appropriate all things Best on the Web, was more than happy to give Google what Netscape had given Yahoo in the mid ’90s: a front row seat to Becoming the Next Big Thing.

Oops.

This is all a throat-clearing to Think Out Loud about Twitter and Facebook. (Like I’ve been doing anything else lately.)

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