Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

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Posted May 8, 2006
eHub Interviews adaptiveblue

Thanks to Alex Iskold of adaptiveblue for this email interview.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

adaptiveblue: The blueorganizer is about the next generation of the Internet browsers. Today browsers sees the web as just code and markup. They do not recognize actual objects like movies, wines and cars. The browsers do not know what you like and can not personalize your web experiences. This is about to change. The new browsers will be context-sensitive and focused on semantics. They will cross-pollinate your personal information with best web services to make you more productive. The smart browser will help you get things done faster and better. The blueorganizer is bringing us a step closer to the semantic web browsing technologies of the future.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

adaptiveblue: I launched adaptiveblue because I saw a need to bring semantics into the browser, to help people get things done online. There is also interesting pre-history here. My previous startup, Information Laboratory, developed structural analysis tools that found architectural problems in software. So my previous startup was really about the power of structure. adaptiveblue is about the power of semantics.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

adaptiveblue: Most of my time and energy is devoted to adaptiveblue. I also do consulting and write articles for Read/WriteWeb, Ajax World and Web 2.0 magazines.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

adaptiveblue: We are a 4 people startup. I am the founder and CTO, with 12 years of experience in software industry. As I mentioned before, this is my second startup. The first one was acquired by IBM in 2003. I also recently worked as a Chief Architect at the leading grid computing company, DataSynapse, where I helped build GridServer and FabricServer virtualization technology. Through my career, I’ve been very passionate about complexity science and technology. I enjoyed building ambitious complex software, which exposes simplicity inside complexity.

Anderson Parker, our Chief Quality Officer, has been a huge help getting this business of the ground. In addition to tremendous effort on testing the blueorganizer, Andy helps me think through the business strategy and marketing. Douglas Rockhill from 4eleven is our designer. He has been busy recently redoing our web site and creating whole new hot look for the blueorganizer and bluemarks.

Dominick D’Aniello works is an outstanding software engineer, even though he is only a junior in college. He has been able to plunge through the jungles of web 2.0 tooling and deliver amazing code in a short period of time. Another outstanding engineer worked with us this summer, John Demme He is now back at college and unfortunately does not have much spare time.

We are looking for VP of Business Development and for software engineers. If you are excited about what we are doing, please email me at alex [dot] iskold [at] adaptiveblue [dot] com.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

adaptiveblue: Most importantly, reduce the element of surprise. Make sure the application is consistent. Even if you are introducing new methods and new ideas, people can grasp them, if they find your stuff useful. But if you are not consistent, people are not going to follow.
Then, of course, there is 37signals’s less is more. At times its difficult to stick to it, but I try. Finally, I believe in design for everyday use not for the initial wow factor. If the user is not willing to give the tool a try, the chances are she does not need it and will not use it anyway. So it is better to think about UI from the perspective of everyday use.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

adaptiveblue: Front end is JavaScript and XUL. On the back we have PHP and very small MySql database. We store the user data using Amazon S3. We also use Ant to do our builds.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

adaptiveblue: Blueorganizer is highly extensible. Particularly, people constantly ask for new collections and actions. Recently people have been asking us to add the blog collection and it will be available in the next release. Quite a few people have asked us for the ability to import amazon wishlists and listmania lists, thats coming too. Lastly, we are going to make happy the users who asked for ability to run complex queries against their collections. The auto tag feature in the next release will help them do just that in simple and elegant way.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

adaptiveblue: Currently it is mostly English-speaking countries with majority of users from US. This is primarily because we have not added support for other languages yet. We are planning to do it, and actually reached out on a few non-English speaking blogs to people who’d like to help us translate the organizer and add support for other sites.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

adaptiveblue: The major things in the next six month will be support of microformats, more integration with various web services, more sharing and recommendation features, personalization of RSS feeds, more new collections and the blueorganizer extension tool kit. We are very excited about the toolkit, which will enable enthusiasts create new blueorganizer collections, actions and site integrations by simply configuring XML files.

Two years is more difficult to predict, simply because things move so unbelievably quickly these days. Our goal is to develop smart browsing and personalization platform which would encompass broad spectrum of services and technologies. The blueorganizer is our first product and we are planning to build more.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

adaptiveblue: Right now it is user acquisition. Lets face it there is a lot of things going on. Regardless of the quality judgment, the sheer volume and speed of the news simply makes it very hard to get people’s attention. We have had a fortune of pretty good press coverage, but about a day after the news comes out the traffic stops. Its like now famous TechCrunch spike on Alexa. So we have to invest into continuous PR to get the users.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

adaptiveblue: We are doing fine, actually, I consider our product to be pretty mature and well defined at this point. There is not one thing to get us to the next phase. We are going to reach a major milestone once we launch our second product, related to personalization of RSS feeds.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

adaptiveblue: Absolutely. I believe that you have to have one in order to start a company. We have planned a few major revenue streams. First one is affiliate programs. We have infrastructure to quickly add any affiliate program out there. With that stream, we only make money if the users buy things after finding them through the blueorganizer. Another stream will be coming from custom integration with different web sites. We are going to start exploring this towards the end of the year, once we grow the user base. There are other major revenue sources that we have mapped out, but I am not at liberty to discuss them here.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

adaptiveblue: The fact that we wrote so much code in JavaScript. Okay I am kidding. I have to say I am proud of how much we accomplished in a very short period of time.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

adaptiveblue: I see a few distinct trends. First one is speed and it scares me. There is so much information and the news comes and go so quickly that it is hard to fathom how we are going to sustain this pace and volume. Second one is user generated content. I think that there are good things and bad things. The good thing is that we are building information communities. The bad thing is that a lot information is not really of great quality. The third and last trend is towards more sophisticated web. To me, and probably other techies, this is super exciting. But it begs a question when and how do you take Flickr to the main stream. Thats not a simple question to answer.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

adaptiveblue: The top two are Read/Write Web and TechCrunch. I also catch myself looking at alexaholic a lot, but I have excuse, I do research for articles.  Fairly regularly I end up on del.icio.us, Digg and Technorati. I also enjoy Peter Rip’s EarlyStageVC blog and analysis articles on ZenRob’s blog, but unfortunately they don’t post daily.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

adaptiveblue: Depends. Between 4 and 7, most often 6. I also have small kids so all bets are off.

Thanks to Alex Iskold of adaptiveblue for this email interview.

Visit adaptiveblue
Originally added to eHub on May 12, 06

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan