Facebook’s new mission: buy all talent under 25 in the Palo Alto-Mountain View area. They are kicking it off by acquiring Sequoia Capital-backed Parakey, a company co-founded by the Firefox kid Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. Nice way for Sequoia to get piece of the Facebook action. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
While it hasn’t disclosed exactly what Parakey is doing, previously published reports hint that the company was working on technologies that would allow offline access to web applications. It wouldn’t be a surprise if Facebook made an off-line version of its social service. While I am thinking about the reasons, Ross, has a decidedly more light hearted take on the deal on his blog, including some thoughts about footwear. Facebook and Parakey were featured together in a Rolling Stone article about the young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
5 trackbacks so far
10:58 PM PT
[...] interesting speculation about why Parakey, from Facebook going into desktop apps to Facebook creating an offline version of Facebook. I think a more likely scenario is that Facebook will use Parakey’s technology to enable [...]
11:05 AM PT
[...] Facebook buys Parakey [...]
3:54 AM PT
[...] Normally, roll-ups of private companies are very difficult. But in this case, as we have seen in Sequoia’s willingness to sell its way into the Facebook action, other VCs will also play [...]
2:06 PM PT
[...] isn’t the first tiny tot to be gobbled up by a better-funded startup. Earlier this summer, Facebook bought Parakey; Slide.com, in order to get a bigger share of the Facebook ecosystem, acquired up Peeps.com; and [...]
8:20 AM PT
[...] is a web operating system created by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. Press Release | TechCrunch | GigaOm| Mashable | [...]
6 comments so far
3:38 PM PT
I thought Parakey was working on making it much easier to get data (media, docs, etc.) back and forth between web apps and your desktop.
That seems more useful to Facebook than enabling offline use.
7:05 PM PT
An offline version of Facebook? It’s funny how these things go full circle. As I remember, putting everything online and Software as a Service was all the rage not too long ago.
7:49 PM PT
no ilya, remember - wasn’t it ASP’s that were gonna change the world? you know, back before it had a cooler acronym (SaaS)…and didn’t we already see SUN try this years and years ago (project Corona, now the sunray server tools)? that is where the big boys are headed imho, toward a transferrable ’state’ that moves wtih you, ideally not requiring a small card or usb type device (please, no more key fobs google and others..)
10:19 AM PT
Well if it is about offline data then the killer app for Facebook would be for a Facebook user and their friend’s access to that user’s photos and videos directly stored on their computer without that person having to go to the trouble of uploading them into Facebook or Flickr or Youtube. So kind of a Youtube killer.
2:06 PM PT
You can find more info on Blake Ross and Parakey at IEEE Spectrum in the article “The Firefox Kid” (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/nov06/4696) from last November. Interestingly, Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook is a good friend of Ross’s. Synergy at work!
10:40 AM PT
I imagine Blake Ross doesn’t come w/this deal…
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