January 23, 2007

Renkoo visits YDN (Part II)

In Part II of the interview with Joyce Park and Adam Rifkin, the Renkoo founders share details about their backend tools and share some thoughts on Yahoo!'s role as a startup enabler. Here are some excerpts, and the screencast of the interview is below:

On the Renkoo technology stack...

"The main framework is LAMP. The realtime part is a technology my partner Adam Rifkin and I are working on called mod_pubsub, an open source project. And Comet server. The UI is the Dojo AJAX server. Mod_pubsub is written in Twisted Python."

On Yahoo! as a startup enabler...

"It would have been impossible to build without Yahoo! APIs. There's just a wealth of data that takes tremendous sophistication to put together that only a company of your size would have the resources to do. For a company of our size, even a buddy icon maker would be a suck on our time.

Everybody has the same data, so the question is what do you add to the data? Our UI is unique. We put a lot of thought into how to expose the different parts of the data and using it differently."

On privacy and openness...

"I would love to let people export all of their social invitations. It's an interesting situation because due to the nature of the data it's not just private to you. You could be violating your friends' privacy. With anything where you might be potentially violating someone else's privacy, our legal position isn't exactly clear.

Do you want your whole social schedule available to anyone with an RSS reader or a web browser?"

On hiring at Renkoo...

"We're looking for sr backend dev(s), a front end dev, an interaction designer, but NO product managers!" Link: Renkoo jobs page

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You can also get Part I of the interview here. Joyce walked us through a demo of Renkoo.com and explained which Yahoo! services they were leveraging for their product.

Matt McAlister

Posted at January 23, 2007 9:56 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Posted by: John K at January 29, 2007 11:23 AM

Posted by: Jeremy Zawodny at January 29, 2007 11:28 AM