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(Sorry it’s been awhile since my last blog – it took me several days to figure out how to get my Flip video imported and exported to and from iMovie. To make a long story short, if you want to export from iMovie and have both picture and sound, you must import your source as something other than MP4 or AVI.)

This is the first article in my “Utah Startup Series“. Starting today I will be circling Utah to find the best and most innovative startups in Utah, and featuring them here on Stay N’ Alive. If you have a hot startup (early to even late stage) and would like to demo for me what your product can do, please contact me – if I have the time and like your idea I’d love to come out and take a look at it!

While at Web 2.0 Expo I had the opportunity to meet with Bungee Labs, a local, well funded Utah company who had “Platform as a Service” down before Google even started thinking about their App Engine. In our meeting they demoed their Bungee Connect “IDE” (written entirely on the web). You can see the video below.

My thoughts – you have to see this stuff in person to understand the full ramifications of what they’re doing. One of the cool things about their service vs. Google’s is they actually integrate with Amazon’s EC2 service (which was announced during Web 2.0 Expo), so you can actually host your other stuff on Amazon’s EC2 platform with the same licensing as your Bungee Connect account. Their licensing structure is very appealing as well – Bungee only charges based on the number of registered user sessions using their platform, not traffic, not bandwidth. If I understand correctly, it’s all based on the number of users actively using your application on their platform. For Facebook and Social Media developers this is appealing, as most Applications are rated based on Application use, not number of users or traffic. With Bungee you only pay for the users that actively use your system.

Overall, the guys at Bungee were Rockstars at Web 2.0 Expo. With their announcements about EC2 integration, flexible licensing terms, features on TechCrunch, EWeek magazine, and a dozen other publications, you can bet Google has a watchful eye on them. Ironically, it was interesting seeing Kevin Marx, head guy over the OpenSocial (and other) efforts at their party on Thursday evening.

Bungee will be presenting at our Social Media Developers meeting this coming Tuesday, showing us a simple “Hello World” example on how to build a Facebook App using their platform. Follow me on Twitter and if we can stream it live you can watch it via my Ustream channel. After demo I may just write my own Facebook App to try out their system – it should be interesting.

Bungee Connect Demo – Web 2.0 Expo from Jesse Stay on Vimeo.

Unfortunately I only have a Flip which gives me just 30 minutes of storage so you’ll be able to see the first 30 minutes below. I’m currently watching “Comparing Social Platforms”, with Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager for Facebook, Allen Hurff, SVP Engineering for Myspace, Jessica Alter, Dir. of Platform and Business Development for Bebo, Patrick Chanezon, Google OpenSocial Evangelist, and David Recordon, Open Platform Lead for Six Apart. It’s fascinating to see the leaders of all 4 areas, including a developer standpoint from Six Apart all talking about ways to improve the Social Graph.

I’ll continue from where the video left off:

Allen Hurff said a great point when it comes to focus on Platform Development: “I love developers, but I love users ten times more”. That’s a great point and something we need to remember, and not be too demanding on as developers. In the end it’s all about the users of our applications.

Dave Morin talked about the Causes application. If the user can’t get the message to the friends that they care about such a cause, that’s bad and needs to be taken care of. Facebook is trying to focus on this, while finding balance with Applications that perhaps aren’t as impacting to ensure they aren’t being spammy and user experience is protected.

Patrick Chanezon says Google prefers the term “organic growth” to “viral growth”. Dave Morin brought up that ultimately, creating the best product is the end goal. Those applications that just focus on Viral growth grow fast, but ultimately die out. In the end you want the best experience for the user.

Dave Morin: “A lot of the times we’ll see viral but no ‘social'”. Being able to see what your friends are doing with your application, how they interact together makes it social and not just viral.

Dave Morin: Social Commerce is the future of how people do business on the web. Working on a commerce engine for Facebook. He likes the applications that are doing virtual currencies (I agree).

David Recordon: Building applications has to be easy. Extensibility is important. It has to be easier than it is today – if more successful than today next year, technology still isn’t easy enough.

Questions:

Matt from SocialThing: will there ever be a premium model with guaranteed uptime, extended support, etc.?: Myspace says they haven’t thought of it. Facebook says they are committed to their platform – says it’s a good point and also haven’t thought of it.

How liberal are platforms going to be in sharing data?: Six Apart is one of the creators of the ATOM standard – bloggers should own their content. Facebook is committed to enabling people to take data where they want to. What exactly does “data portability” mean? Dave Morin posed that question to OpenSocial… “data portability” might not be the right word for it – “privacy portability” might be a better term for it. “It’s all about the user – it’s not about technology.”

What are the thoughts on creating an even playing field for viral channels?: Myspace will have a hard time

In conclusion it looks like the theme for this was putting focus on the users in the end vision, not the application. I’ll upload the video in a minute if it isn’t showing yet.

Category: w2e

Utah Startup Series: Bungee Labs