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://dave.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.
3 Comments
-
Lloyd D Budd said:
Beautifully put together article!
Though I think it is a disappointing misquote that doesn’t really suggest anything. Like Matt, Blake does not seem like the type that would sell control of a product, and like Matt wrote smart investors are not really looking for that.
-
O. Haffar said:
What confuses me is Sequoia Capital is financing this project when the interface could be created quite quickly by Microsoft or even Apple? I think it was sincerely a bad move on behalf of Parakey to go public on this project already. It will be interesting to see who will win the battle of desktop and internet browsing connectivity.
-
Matt Marshall said:
O., remember they’ve been in stealth for a year, and have really tried to keep the wraps on this. My understanding is that the Spectrum piece was a tease to get the attention of engineers, so that they could attract talent. And since they’re about to launch, they probably felt it was time they could say something.
8 Trackbacks
7:34 am
VentureBeat Wire » Firefox Kid Blake Ross to launch Parakey said:
[...] See our story here. VentureBeat Community [...]
10:33 am
Scripting News for 11/2/2006 « Scripting News Annex said:
[...] VentureBeat: “Parakey is an application you download to your PC, which effectively becomes your personal operating system.” [...]
2:29 pm
Clicked : Mind the gap said:
[...] Posted: Thursday, November 02, 2006 2:10 PM by Will Femia Elephants and Evolution - How the Landscape is Changing for Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Adobe - “The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps…” It seems like everywhere I look lately I see commentary on bridging the gap between desktop and Web. More here about how Blake Ross, “the Firefox kid,” is working something called Parakey. “Parakey is an application you download to your PC, which effectively becomes your personal operating system. It turns your computer in[to] a hybrid Web site-hard drive, where you can choose what to make public online and what to keep private.” That post is in response to this feature piece on Ross. (Commuter Click) These are a little long, but if you don’t want to be playing catch up later, you might as well pay attention now. Yahoo is about to launch a big food section. “Das Rad” (The Wheel) - It’s an animated short from 2003, but since I don’t do a very good job of keeping up on animated shorts it’s new to me. Plot: Two stones watch the evolution of man. 8 minutes long. Outstanding. Looking ahead to Christmas, (w)rapping paper. Cool robot vehicle transports man around Tokyo - “You act as thought you’ve never seen Buzz Lightyear Tetrapodal robot out for a Sunday roll before!” The description of the guy not acknowledging anyone makes it sound like he accidentally arrived from the future. Will it blend? A take-off on Letterman’s Will It Float? it’s one of a series of videos in which a guy puts things in a blender to see what happens. I’m pretty sure this is part of an ad campaign for this particular brand of blender. Is this the future of advertising? Works for me. Speaking of the future of advertising, “Amazon … ranks books based on their sales over the previous 24 hours. This means that it is possible, through coordinated action, to hack the system by getting a large number of people to buy the book at the same time.” I didn’t see the post until it was too late, but it’s a clever idea for getting exposure. Primary and early e-voting problems point to gathering storm - A nice round up of problems with electronic voting machines. Also makes mention that “BlackBoxVoting.org has released “push this, pull here” instructions for multiple voting on a Sequoia DRE, no hacking skills necessary.” That’s here. Plus, 35,000 Questionable Registration Forms Plus, Jefferson County Voters Continue To Raise Concerns About Voting Machines (more of that automatic party switching) While we’re on election links, “In the YouTube era, stupid stuff a candidate did on tape four years ago doesn’t remain in the past. Instead, it becomes part of the campaign narrative, in this case showing how Mary Parker, Democrat nominee for the state Senate in Tennessee, was willing to abuse her power position as a lawyer to get out of a speeding ticket in ways that a normal person couldn’t.” Speaking of campaign ads, with all the buzz and hype going on I totally forgot to check in periodically with FactCheck.org. “Now we learn that one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq died by her own hand after objecting to interrogation techniques used on prisoners.” Speaking of members of the military finding themselves in tough positions, this compelling account of a Marine medic in Iraq is drawing a lot of link attention. Flickr’s best photographers The Kerry corner: The AP gets more specific in pointing out Kerry’s baggage on the question of the composition of the U.S. military. John Cole points out a curious picking-and-choosing when it comes to being offended on behalf of the troops. Keith Olbermann wants President Bush to apologize, and does some of that disparaging that NBC reportedly wouldn’t allow him to say in a commercial. I didn’t know that Kerry’s grades at Yale were worse than Bush’s. The 91st Carnival of Education - A regular round up of education bloggers. Transforming Transformer Costume - It actually transforms, sort of. NOTE: This site may contain unsafe material if you look around enough. If Aaron Sorkin wrote a show about baseball - This is a pretty good fake Sorkin script, but also it’s interesting to read a blog by an award winning TV comedy writer. Speaking of TV writing (and I cast no aspersions on Mr. Levine in making this segue), the Digg folks share a bootleg of a recent episode of the Simpsons. What made me note the link, however, was a comment that does a clear job explaining the decline of the Simpsons and the problem with most TV scripts. [...]
9:25 pm
The Rotted Brain Podcast » Rotted Brain Episode 3 (Nov. 3nd 2006) said:
[...] 1. Microsoft partnership with Novell Linux (Link) 2. Blake Ross to launch new company - Parakey (Link) 3. Amazon to launch Pay-Per-Click from its shopping pages (Link) 4. Ohio Company Sues Internet Video Giant YouTube (Link) 5. Grunting Carries No Weight in this Gym (Link) 6. No Error Here: Rogers Wins Golden Glove (Link) Listen Now: [...]
1:35 am
Blake Ross on Firefox » So about that project… said:
[...] Thanks to the many people in the blog world who covered the story and offered input (positive and negative) about what we’re doing. I believe Matt Mullenweg was the first to break the story on the Web, and it was then graciously picked up by Matt Marshall, Dave Winer, Niall Kennedy, Om Malik, Aidan Henry, Ajaxian, Susan Mernit, Lloyd Budd, Alex Moskalyuk, [...]
5:26 am
Apollo, bridging the Web and desktop « SeoDensity said:
[...] 21 Mar, 2007 Uncategorized As widely reported, Adobe Systems released its Apollo software yesterday, which is expected to bridge the gap between the Web and desktop in all kinds of new applications — from video to word processing. Web-based applications are hitting their limits. Apollo’s appeal is that instead of running inside a Web browser, its applications run on the desktop. A failure in a network connection, therefore, won’t interrupt users who are using Apollo apps on their desktop. However, the Apollo platform detects if there’s a network connection available, so it can also interact with the Web if it wants. In other words, it makes the web browser optional. Even browser company Mozilla/Firefox has acknowledged this trend, and is moving to support offline applications. We’ve talked before about this online/offline mode, from Sharpcast’s vision to wrap in storage and mobility, to Parakey, a new start-up about which little is known. More on the subject: The Mercury News has a good overview here. Â [...]
3:12 am
mushup everything! » Parakey - 通往未来的道路 said:
[...] Apollo的出现让浏览器成为可选，它让网络程序可以很容易的留在桌面，之后连Firefox也宣称3.0将推出离线版本 ，紧接着Google推出Google Gear ，立即提升了现有浏览器的离线能力，Google Gear与Apollo的联手真的能解决一切问题么？暂时还看不出来。包括很早之前看到Blake Ross创立Parakey的消息，还没验到货，对这个神秘的浏览器插件没有什么感觉，此君crazy如此而已，突然，一切在Facebook收购Parakey后变得清晰起来，这种震撼从昨天开始，到今天仍然没有消除。 [...]
4:57 pm
VentureBeat » Facebook’s first acquisition: secretive start-up Parakey said:
[...] wrote about Parakey here, based on an early description of the company’s plans to Spectrum. It was backed with seed [...]