Monday, February 7, 2011

Finally: Facebook Co-Founder Opens the Curtain on Two-Year Old Asana

TechCrunch

Two years ago, when Dustin Moskovitz announced he was leaving Facebook to start a new company with fellow-Facebooker Justin Rosenstein most people thought one of two things: He’d had a falling out with Mark Zuckerberg or he was just crazy. What could be more exciting than Facebook?

Moskovitz, of course, was Zuckerberg’s college roommate and co-founder of Facebook. If you get your Facebook history from Aaron Sorkin, he was the guy coding away in silence while half-naked girls did bong hits. If you get your Facebook history from, you know, things that actually happened, Moskovitz outlasted any other co-founder and easily played one of the most pivotal roles in the company’s early years. As such, Asana will get more attention and scrutiny and maybe even hype than most business software startups.

But here’s the thing: Asana deserves it. As it turns out neither of the suppositions for Moskovitz’s decision to leave were right. Moskovitz and Rosenstein just had a really big idea: To fix how people collaborate on projects and work in teams. Something that has so far been unfixable despite billions spent on developing and implementing collaboration and communication software. Something that may be so rooted in the idiosyncrasies of human behavior that it may not be fixable.

But Asana’s opening salvo is pretty impressive. There’s a full demo of the software in the video below, from Asana’s recent friends-and-family open house, so I won’t belabor the features and screen shots here. Hear the pitch from the founders yourself. The company is still in private-beta, and it has a 1,200-company waiting list to get an invite. It’ll be opening up more over the course of this year. Asana has raised just over $10 million from several angels, Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

For me, Asana is the most exciting company to spin out of the early “Facebook mafia”– despite the runaway hype of Quora and Google’s jaw-dropping $120 million offer to buy Path. Then again, I’m sort of a business software nerd. I’ve been waiting for this “new generation” of enterprise software companies everyone keeps talking about and mostly feel like the open source and software as a service generations were a let down. These companies changed the way software was priced, delivered and implemented, disrupting old giants, and that’s no small feat. But product-wise, the reinvention of these categories wasn’t as dramatic as salesmen-oriented CEOs would have you believe. Yammer certainly got closer than most to delivering on that buzz phrase “the consumerization of enterprise,” but it was mostly by applying what was working for Twitter to a work-safe, secure app.

But Asana is strikingly different than other collaboration software. Part of that is timing. “I think that web technology has developed to a point where you can have a really great experience in the browser, better than you can have in a desktop app,” says Benchmark’s Matt Cohler. “The Asana team spent a fair amount of time investing in the underlying framework and technology to take advantage of what you couldn’t do a few years ago.” And part of it is because Asana is one of the first business software products re-thought from the ground up by twenty-somethings with no background in old-style enterprise sales and frankly, not too much experience using enterprise software in the workplace.

But here’s what jumped out at me watching it: You can tell Asana was co-created by one of the founders of Facebook. There’s that almost hubristic mission: To fix how people work together and make the global work place a better, more efficient, less frustrating place. “It was a precondition to leaving Facebook that I wasn’t going to start something that was just about chasing money,” Moskovitz says. There’s that Facebook-like obsession with efficiency, organizing inherently messy, social things with newsfeeds, updates and clean design. Pragmatism and data-driven decision making rule the company. Frugality is important but not everything. Asana’s engineers– the Gods of the company– get a $10,000 budget to pimp out their desks. Moskovitz shrugs and says he thinks it should be more, but couldn’t come up with anything they’d need that would cost more than $10,000.

And like Facebook’s early obsession with being a “utility,” Asana wants people to live in this app throughout their work day. Like Facebook did away with the clutter and needless page view clicks of the MySpace world, so too is Asana obsessed with speed. They know that if the software is the least bit cumbersome to use, employees won’t use it. Like Facebook, Asana sees its eventual customer base as, well, everyone. They hope people won’t just use Asana for work, but for things like wedding planning. The two wanted to build this product because managing teams at Facebook was such a chore. In a sense, Moskovitz says he’s still working for Facebook, because he’s still trying to solve the problem he was trying to solve there. It just so happens, he’s also trying to solve that problem for every company in the world.

But all that said, this is in no way another “Facebook for the enterprise.” There’s no list of friends, no events, no photosharing. Asana isn’t about making the workplace “fun” or making it social for the sake of social. Its not about organizing your social graph. It’s about helping people work together more efficiently– cutting out reliance on email, cutting down on the need for those endless meetings, easily assigning and tracking tasks in one instance that is always up to date, because unlike those lame corporate wikis, people are living in the app. Moskovitz and Rosenstein are clear: If they don’t accomplish that, they have failed.


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HBGary Federal hacked and exposed by Anonymous | Naked Security

Anonymous logoAs the coin was tossed to kick off Superbowl XLV, Anonymous unleashed their anger at a security firm who had been investigating their membership.

HBGary Federal had been working on unmasking their identities in cooperation with an FBI investigation into the attacks against companies who were cutting off WikiLeaks access and financing.

Unlike the DDoS attacks for which Anonymous has made headlines in recent months, this incident involved true hacking skills. Anonymous compromised the HBGary website and replaced it with an image explaining their motivation. In addition to the defacement, they downloaded over 60,000 emails from the company and posted them on The Pirate Bay.

The Twitter account of HBGary's CEO, Aaron Barr, was also compromised and tweeted multiple offensive messages, as well as his home address, social security number and cell phone. According to Forbes, the LinkedIn accounts of other HBGary executives were compromised "in minutes."
Aaron Barr's hacked Twitter feed

The research, which HBGary was preparing to sell to the FBI and which allegedly contains names, addresses and other information on Anonymous, was also posted as part of the attack. Anonymous maintains the information is largely bogus and says they are providing it publicly to prove it.

A writer for the DailyKos claims that, in addition to the other damages, Anonymous also deleted the firm's backups.

From a legal perspective, Anonymous had better hope they remain anonymous. The criminal activities outlined by their own bragging could get them some serious prison time in the US, UK and other countries with strict cybersecurity laws.

While we do not know the methods employed (perhaps Anonymous will tell us that as well) it is a good time to review the basics of security. Audit your own sites, never use the same password on more than one site and try to maintain separation of privileges to prevent the compromise of one account from affecting all of your services.

As of the time of this post hbgary.com is still offline.

Update: According to information from krebsonsecurity.com it appears HBGary was victimized by a combination of social engineering and a shared password between systems. Training employees on the proper verification of identity before exposing secure systems is an essential part of a corporate security program. Staff who feel they need to take any action when someone important like a company executive is apparently asking for help can create disastrous results. The CEO and founders must be subjected to the same rules as everyone else. Employees challenging their superiors should be praised rather than chastised when they follow the policy.

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EA Simulation Correctly Picked Super Bowl Champs in September

Slashdot
Just_Say_Duhhh writes "Before the NFL Season started, the guys at EA Sports simulated the entire season using Madden 2011. The sim told them the Packers would win the Super Bowl. If only we had listened. What's even more interesting is that according to the article, they've picked the winner 6 of the last 7 years. Make that 7 out of 8!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tech Super Bowl Ads Didn’t Hit Home – Salesforce And Go Daddy Most Disliked

TechCrunch

I’ve witnessed the media frenzy that comes with the Super Bowl – and the commercials that air on TV before, during and after the event – from a distance (from Belgium, to be more precise) several times now, and still can’t be anything but baffled by its sheer ferociousness. TechCrunch also did its part by listing all tech-related Super Bowl ads.

Question is: did people dig them? Not really, says Hulu, which had its users cast votes on their favorite commercials across all 69 Super Bowl ads on its AdZone site.

Ads from technology companies were nowhere to be seen, save from one category: ‘Overall Most Disliked Ads’. Salesforce makes up 2/3 of that particular top 3, which I guess is also an achievement. Go Daddy‘s “The Contract” rounded out the list of most disliked commercials.

The ‘most liked’ category was led by Volkswagen’s “The Force,” edging out Bridgestone’s “Carma.” Number 3 was Volkswagen’s “Black Beetle”.

We give you the top three most disliked Super Bowl ads on Hulu:

1) Salesforce: Chatter.com Launch: Still Doing Impossible Things

2) Salesforce: Chatter.com Launch: Do Impossible Things

3) Go Daddy: The Contract

Information provided by CrunchBase

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Solar Wind bridge concept could power 15,000 homes, grow vegetables

Engadget
Why just use solar power or wind power when you can use both? Designed by Francesco Colarossi, Giovanna Saracino and Luisa Saracino as part of an Italian design contest to re-imagine a decommissioned bridge (for which it placed second), this so-called Solar Wind concept would have solar cells embedded in the roadway (an idea that's already catching on) and an array of 26 wind turbines underneath, which the designers say could produce enough energy combined to power 15,000 homes. To make the design greener still, the designers have even included a "green promenade" that would run alongside the road, which they suggest could be used to grow fruits and vegetables that'd then be sold to folks driving by. Incidentally, while it's less focused on technology, the design that placed first in the contest (a so-called "vertical village") is pretty impressive in its own right -- check it out after the break.

Continue reading Solar Wind bridge concept could power 15,000 homes, grow vegetables

Solar Wind bridge concept could power 15,000 homes, grow vegetables originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Feb 2011 01:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We Have A New Uber Boss, And She’s Greek: Aol Buys HuffPo For $315 Million

TechCrunch

You know who won the Super Bowl? Arianna Huffington.  This afternoon our parent company Aol bought Huffington Post for $315 million according to a press release. Gah.

The Huffington Post, with its 26 million monthly unique visitors is huge, one of the most prominent media properties on the Internet because of its aggressive SEO stance. And the company has gone through the acquisition motions before, most notably Yahoo. Apparently this time it stuck.

In this video, Armstrong and Huffington recall the acquisition process: The two met in November and Huffington was impressed with the “surprising merger” of their vision. And no doubt the sizable amount of the Aol offer, which at $315 million is just under 5x Huffington Post’s expected revenue for next year.  The talks took three months. “This is my last act,” Huffington said.

Back in June we pegged a possible Aol and Yahoo deal at around $360 million, Aol paid $45 million less than that at $315 million this time.

To all of you making HuffingtonCrunch and Crunchington Post jokes, Huffington’s official title will be Editor In Chief in charge of all Aol properties, including Engadget, Urlesque and yes us. Welcome to the family, Arianna.

You can read more about how we feel about this acquisition here and here.

This news was first reported by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.


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