While hanging out at the TechCrunch50 conference, I ran into Eric Marcoullier, who recently launched his second startup, Gnip. We were supposed to talk about Gnip almost a month ago, but for some odd reason it didn’t happen. I was curious, because Eric and I got to know each other when he was visiting San Francisco and had just launched MyBlogLog. I didn’t really end up using the service, but Yahoo loved it so much that they bought it.
Eric’s second company seems to be a tad less visible than MyBlogLog. It has raised $1 million in seed funding from First Round Capital, Foundry Group and SoftTech VC. Eric calls it an infrastructure play and an information router. Marshall Kirkpatrick called it the Grand Central Station for the social web. Here is a video of my conversation with Eric. (You can check out the Gnip blog for a better description of the service.)
Om — thanks for posting this. Nice to know I’m every bit as much as a dork as I fear.
I’d also like to make sure that First Round Capital is mentioned as an investor. Josh and Rob have been invaluable partners to us (as have Foundry and SoftTech) and they have our deepest thanks.
i think eric/gnip are on the right track. in a few years, tweetfeeds and the new new news of every kind has to be glued together at the backend of every major web operation that caters to consumers. a good analog may be how financial/trading networks behave where you can’t have every trading outfit ‘pinging’ to check prices/status etc.
“do something, really fckin cool w/ it…”– Eric, you are NOT safe for work!
Ken, I’m sure my team and investors will agree that only one f-bomb in a ten-minute interview is a minor miracle. This is as close to SFW as I’ll probably get.