« Find Just the Right Neighborhood, with Schools Search | Main | Getting paid (back) with BBAuth: Buxfer makes it easy »

Renkoo visits YDN (Part II)

January 23, 2007

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

To post this video on your web site, use the following embed code:

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

Comments

Friendly feedback:
If you're gonna give the space to a beta site, make sure they treat it like they would a presentation at the demo conference. Bam, bam, bam.

I think the idea of these videos is good, but this one takes too long to get started. I watched 2mins before stopping, and barely heard what Renkoo was doing with YDN. More talking, faster, please. And more demos, earlier.

Either that, or post a transcript so I can read it in 30 secs, and decide if I want to watch it.

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

Thanks for the feedback. We've got more screencasts planned, so we'll definitely work on optimizing how we use the time.

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

Renkoo visits YDN (Part II) (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)

Renkoo visits YDN (Part II)

Comments

Post a comment

Comments: