VentureBeat

FlickIM is a new lightweight chat feature designed specifically for the iPhone.

It’s more nimble than competitors, and lets you exchange YouTube videos and Apple movie trailers.

More significantly, it’s the first feature produced by a group of nine young developers led by two former UC Berkeley students, Darian Shirazi and David Macintosh, both 20 years old. Their company, Next3, seeks to make communications easier for the 20-something generation, and has just raised $1.6 million in a first round of financing led by Alsop Louie Partners.

The company is building a more ambitious application, to be released in September, though it remains quiet on details.

This chat application took them a week to build, but the diversion was worth it because it fills a void on the iPhone, they said. While iPhone handles SMS well, it doesn’t have a good chat application. The iPhone is the phone of choice for the super-connected generation, said Shirazi, and he already all his friends at Facebook and elsewhere are using it over competing chat products, such as Meebo, he notes. Whereas FlickIM takes four seconds to load using AT&T’s Edge network, Meebo can take more than 20 seconds — in part because Meebo seeks to support multiple features and IM clients. FlickIM is designed to focused on one thing, said Shirazi: It only supports AOL’s AIM, because that’s the biggest, most popular IM platform.

FlickIM lets you manage several chat windows at once, fitting six conveniently on the screen (you click orange bubble icons to select the window you want to participate in).

To send a Youtube video over chat, a user creates a link by writing /Youtube/movie name. Or for an iTunes trailer, you type /t/trailer name. It uses a Google API to find the video, a technology is good enough to find most videos being searched for on a first try. FlickIM will soon create a feature that gives you an easier way to determine whether you’ve selected the video you’re searching for. It is built using Amazon EC2, to help it scale.

Shirazi recently wrote a an opinion column for VentureBeat about the importance of “nationalism” as a driving force for start-ups. Earlier he worked at Fotodunk, which was sold to music service iLike (our coverage here).

[Editor's note: Darian Shirazi, 20, caught our attention last year, when he sold his company Fotodunk, to music social network iLike. His piece is especially relevant today, because he was inspired by Facebook's example. Facebook has momentum, and will be making news today at its developers conference.]

In 1830, Eugene Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People symbolized French Nationalism during the July Revolution.

Marianne, who represents liberty, is still France’s icon today.

In Silicon Valley, I see successful startups completely neglecting the importance of establishing an identity and workplace theme for their companies. I used to think it worthless for corporations to create identities — a distraction for employees. However, I’ve come to realize that running a startup is about much more than just building a product and then marketing it to the world.

When I started working at Facebook before my high school graduation, I was completely new to the startup world – I had no conception of how to start a company and how to build a product for millions of people. After working there for several months, it wasn’t watching internal stats about active users that motivated me to continue building product. I was driven because I truly believed I was building something that was revolutionizing how people communicated. This startup mantra of “revolution” and bringing a new era to the internet world was one that fueled me more than the dozens of Coke’s I was drinking per day to stay awake through the night.

The recent graffiti painting of the Facebook office is quite original – many people think it’s a waste of money but I happen to think that the replication of the iron fist – a symbol of revolution – is the greatest aesthetic statement that the company could have made internally to incite people to put their heart and soul into their work. This method of having people work towards a common goal is one that makes it practically impossible to leave a company.

I’ve worked for other startups that completely neglect or do a terrible job of purveying this nationalist identity and, consequently, the lack of such an identity and “old-world” methods of increasing productivity led me to leave those companies quite soon after joining.

It isn’t enough to just say “oh we’ll just throw a company party or do some company events”; it’s about how you convey the message and the statement the management makes about how the product affects people. I know it sounds just a tad corny, but everyday when I wake up, I’m not thinking about the intricate tasks that I have to complete – that’s the easy part. I’m instead thinking about how I can be sure that our product will change the world.

Now that I run my own venture-backed startup, I’ve been establishing an identity for our company. The identity (which I can’t really talk about since it has something to do with the product we haven’t released yet) is quite unique. Startups who fail to identify this identity and incite nationalism from their employees either are working on a vitamin or haven’t fully understood their target demographic. Good products change the world and those products require many people to live and breathe that product for that change to occur.

[Update: The Fotodunk purchase price was $120,000. Our previous guess of between $1 and $5 million stemmed from a confidential discussion that turns out to have been misinformed. Apologies]

You’ve been hearing a lot about iLike lately, and they have more coming.

It’s a fresh a way of seeing a list of the music your friends are listening to, and to get recommendations on independent artists based on your tastes (we wrote about it here).

VentureBeat has been tinkering with it, and we find ourselves headed down to the Apple store to buy an iPod for the first time. We’ve been reluctant to buy an iPod so far, in a futile effort to avoid getting locked in — but iLike has pushed us over the edge. Here’s why: Simplicity.

There’s a lot going on, but iLike keeps things straightforward. A partial screenshot of iLike chief executive Ali Partovi’s profile on iLike is shown below. (We’ve cropped away other parts, such as his friends and comments sidebars). But you’ll see the music he has recently played. If you click on the “California Girls” link, a short MP3 will play. But here’s the cool part. iLike has just added a “play video” option, which searches for a video on YouTube that matches the song, and plays one if it finds it.

Moreover, if you look at his most-played artists (lower down on his profile, not shown in image here), you can click on one, say Jack Johnson, and it will take you to Johnson’s profile, which lets you try out snippets of all his songs on iTunes. There’s a whole bunch going on, including the emergence of a social networking phenom — people commenting on a “comment bar” of friends, for example. There are compatibility scores, so that if your friends are highly compatible with you in music tastes, you can get more recommendations.

In a way, this reminds us of Facebook. It is a clean, structured site that is useful for a group of people with a common interest (in Facebook, it was college life; in iLike, it is music discovery), but is not open to the garish creativity you find at MySpace.

Finally, this company, which has no ties to Apple other than a trademark agreement to allow it use the similar iLike/Garageband name, is going to be doing a lot more.

For example, iLike is upgrading its mobile offerings, VentureBeat has learned. It has quietly purchased Fotodunk, a site that lets mobile phone users send photos via email to a its server, and which uploads the photos directly into a Flash widget on a MySpace profile. The company is now working for iLike on a secret project, to be disclosed later. Our guess is the purchase was for between $1M and $5M [this was wrong; see update above] — not bad for three guys who started FotoDunk in April while still at Cal: David McIntosh, 19, Daniel Kluesing, 21, Alan Rutledge, 21. A fourth co-founder, Darian Shirazi, 19, left Facebook after two years of work in September, and joined the team before the purchase. (These guys met with the iLike folks at in a Fulsom St. bar in SF to sign the documents, but were forced to go into an alleyway to finish the deal because there were underage).

The service itself wasn’t that profound, but was very easy to use (see Mobilecrunch review). Helio, for example has offered the service before; but Fotodunk expanded it for use on all cell-phones. It launched in May, and had thousands of users within two weeks. We’re wondering whether they may just upgrade the photo service to video, and integrate it all.