Motorola Snaps Up 280 North (YC 08) For $20 Million
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
pg, please, please get the people building awesome tools to become ridiculously profitable like Wufoo! I so wanted to use 280 North but I was scared they would get bought and vanish. My fear came true. EDIT: Half true. No word yet on what Motorola is going to do with them.
Congrats to the 280 Norths, YC, and their other investors. Let's all join hands and pray that Motorola allows development on Cappuccino et al to remain public.
Worst of all the attention that one development tool or team gets, reduces the attention that other teams get. As a competitor (former competitor?), I sincerely congratulate 280North, but to suggest that they're the only ones building awesome tools is the furthest from the truth.
Edit: No reason to down-vote this. No animosity should be read here. I was just saying there are other cool development tools. I congratulate 280North.
To me the post sounded as if the poster was suggesting they're were no other cool development tools that were on-par with Cappuccino, thus we should all mourn if they stopped developing. The poster if you recall was not a Cappuccino developer.
It's in my opinion, and I'm sure in many others, that there are many other cool development tools, some of which are on-par, if not better in various ways than Cappuccino, many of which don't get the attention or appreciation they should get.
Don't underestimate this effect.
I stand by what I said: Merely stating that there are "other cool tools" is empty. Somebody else may as well respond, "Nah, other tools suck." Since we're not talking about anything in reality, nobody will be right or wrong, and nobody benefits from reading any of it.
I really don't know of any comparable tools that are on par with Cappuccino. There's SproutCore, but at least last time I checked, it seemed to be the lesser in every way except not being dependent on that beast called Objective-J.
You can disagree with it, but I refuse to start any discussion with you. It's obvious from your tone and content that you don't intend to actually have a meaningful discussion.
I've recently been reinvestigating these Web app frameworks for a new project and not finding much that I loved, so I really did hope you had some useful insights. But oh well, I guess.
There are a lot that do a part of it, but none I've seen that are complete and are not plugins. And what about something that comes anywhere near atlas/interface builder+nib2cib?
I'm genuinely interested. Now, I need a backup plan in case atlas never comes out alive. :)
I didn't know of any but I haven't searched extensively (I was keeping it in mind for a future project). I just know that people on HN had given it universal praise, and HN can be a tough crowd.
I'm all in favor of a diversity of awesome development tools. Even though I use Ruby, I would be sad if Python went away. I use Lisp, but I would be sad if Haskell went away. I use emacs but would be sad if vim went away.
I'm dying to see that list of yours. I hadn't heard of noloh before but thank you for bringing it to my attention. Just remember, if you want your dev tools to be successful, you need to get people talking about them. Best of luck!
No offense dude, but I've tried using both noloh and Atlas, and you really can't compare the two.
Furthermore, I don't recall ever interacting with you in our IRC room, or through support, thus I'm a little suspect as to your development claim, I also don't see you as ever signing up for a sandbox or a download.
NOLOH has received significant praise from developers, and non-developers alike. We've had people with no programming background create complex applications with little help.
In any event, nowhere in my post was I promoting NOLOH, I was simply suggesting that there are in fact other tools, aside from NOLOH, that are pretty awesome. As a developer of one, we make it our business to see what else is out there.
[Edited] Removed Unnecessary Paragraph
As an example, I've been using Microsoft technology for the better part of 20 years now, and I've never sent them an email. I'm sure there are chat rooms for their stuff, but honestly I can't come up with a reason why any grownup would ever enter one.
My suspicion is that the developers you see on the support forums are not the best ones. The ones that simply get it immediately and start running are the ones you'll never hear from.
could you point out when this was suggested?
I can't see why a VC firm would argue against a huge exit that makes everyone a ton of money and leaves the founders working on the same product they built and love.
This led into a discussion that YC's policy is to just do what is in the startup's interest - if they want an exit, then YC will support that. And after slaving your guts out, pretty soon $20 million in the hand is starting to look pretty dang good! pg mentioned that instead of trying to calculate exactly what is in YC's interest, with so many startups going, the simplest approach is just to do what's in the startup's interest. I think everyone - including pg and future candidates - also feel a lot more comfortable with this approach.
But I have to say: $20 million! That's freakin awesome! It's presumptuous of me, but I feel really proud of you guys. Go go go! And thanks also for posting a figure; that's usually secret.
I have little doubt that it will. Will Motorola ever care as much about their platform as Apple does?
The obvious fit within their existing lineup would be for Motorola to relaunch-their-existing/make-a-new phone OS with superb Cappuccino support.
I don't get it: what could they do with them? 280North's main product is Atlas, a development platform that creates applications that run on Motorola's Droids, but on an OS that's not developed at Motorola... someone please convince me this isn't a desperate attempt for Motorola to appear somehow competitive.
But, yeah, I don't know why Motorola? It does seem desperate, but it's a good buy nonetheless cuz Capuccino is pure js (it's a superset of js after all) goodness.
Read point six in Steve's "Thoughts on Flash". Apple isn't interested in actively developing web platforms because, as Jobs said,
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. [...] This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool.
Apple was probably on to something, but realized that there was no money to be made. Motorola, on the other hand, wasn't making money on software anyway. So this approach could be good for them.
Ironic, since cappuccino is an implementation of Apple's Cocoa frameworks in javascript. Are we going to see a lot of Objective-j running on droids now?
The OpenStep specification is, well, open as far as I know, and nobody ever bothered GNUStep, who even seemed to extend from the OpenStep roots into Cocoa territory, but when it's Motorola, and not just a random bunch of hackers…
Still, congratulations to the 280 North guys. That seems like a neat bundle of money.
Any half-decent browser will run Objective-J applications. Motorola's move has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the people. As someone commented earlier, Motorola just gained one hell of a web team.
What I guess I'm asking is will motorola really use 280 North's tech for web based projects that any phone could access? Or will they be presented as bundled apps that appear to be native Android apps but really written in Objective-J using cappuccino?
I would bet that rumor is false, or that there was some sort of extreme extenuating circumstances that we're not privy to.
But, as I say, I could be wrong - I'm not an American so I haven't seen these forms too much :-)
If you get down to just numbers, the 'standard' way of valuing any enterprise is to calculate the current value of their future cashflow. This is why (many) V.C.s ask you for a revenue projection. It is debatable whether this is the right way of doing things; in the case of most startups it may be the wrong way, but if id Software was making, say, only 10M/year at the point they got bought, and left alone, if their cashflow would have stayed the same or stagnated, 105 million would be 10.5x their yearly profits which is decent.
motorola bought a hell of a web team.
I wouldn't worry about it too much though, because it's not really Beta quality. I wouldn't even call it Alpha. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing them one bit. I love it and am incredibly impressed with what they've accomplished!
Hopefully this will give them the resources to finish it!
Surely they mean "little web programming knowledge" and a lot of Objective-C knowledge. I don't really understand this page either:
http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/04/cappuccino-brings-cocoa-lik...
"There are other advantages to basing things in Objective-J as well: advancements in the Cappuccino frameworks don’t wait for the slow emergence of new standards, developers only deal with one language, and Cappuccino comes with useful language features simply not available in JavaScript."
Isn't that backwards? New features come out in Javascript and I have to wait until they're incorporated into Objective-J to use them?
Since everything gets compiled down to Javascript in the end (and Objective-J doesn't feature 100% browser compat either) I don't see how they can offer anything not possible with Javascript to begin with. Actually that's a question? I don't understand how it is different than, for example, CoffeeScript - but I would be happy if you could explain how it is.
You also shouldn't confuse the language (Objective-J) with the Cappuccino framework. Objective-J is just about providing certain language level features on top of JavaScript, the same way Objective-C implements features on top of C. It's also 100% cross browser, so I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Cappuccino is a full fledged framework for building apps which run in a browser. I'd argue that it's the best, but my opinion would hardly be unbiased. It does in fact implement an API for using Canvas (which also works in IE). Though, that isn't a JavaScript feature. And pretty much nothing in HTML5 is present in 50% of the browsers out there.
But if you don't like a particular part of the abstraction layer provided by Objective-J/Cappuccino, you're definitely free to use raw JavaScript. Just like in Objective-C you're free to use structs, function pointers, and C-style arrays.
Nobody even noticed.
At Apple, I did all OpenGL stuff (worked on Keynote), and Harvard was all C/C++.
The main selling points that drew me to Cappuccino at the time were 1) there was a live app using it (280Slides) that demonstrated doing a lot of the things I wanted to do with Mockingbird, 2) Even if there weren't tons of docs at the time, Cocoa documentation is very extensive and applicable, 3) Because it pretty much implements the Cocoa API, I knew I was getting an API that had been used successfully in tons of applications, 4) The promise of Atlas, 5) it made my app decent looking without my having to try very hard (though my co-founder Sheena did end up customizing the Mockingbird look and feel a lot), and most importantly (at least when picking a framework when you don't have time to get more than superficial knowledge of it) - 6) after spending some time in the IRC channel/asking a few questions on the mailing list, the creators and other members of the community were extremely helpful and welcoming, the 280North guys seemed to have a very good sense of where they wanted the framework to go and ideas for awesome features they wanted to implement, and because they were such good developers, I was pretty well convinced that they would actually ship their promises (and they have - Atlas, automatic mage spriting and app flattening options were all things that didn't really exist when I picked Cappuccino).
As for the other frameworks (and there were a ton, but I'll just talk about the ones you mention):
GWT - I didn't like the compile step, and I've done some Java and I don't prefer it. Also, bigger communities like GWT's have their pros and cons - you probably have more resources you can Google for, but it's not always as easy to just ping one of the core devs and get personalized help/get him to help you write your patch.
SproutCore - probably the closest competitor to Cappuccino back then. In this case, Atlas was a selling point for Cappuccino, and I thought Cappuccino apps looked nicer by default. I also don't remember seeing any impressive SproutCore apps in 2009 other than MobileMe, but I might be misremembering.
PastryKit didn't exist in the summer of 2009.
I believe Dashcode emerged as more of a web application creator with version 3.0, which was fairly recent. If not, I may have simply not looked much into it.
I don't remember looking at Coherence.
But, man this is a great deal for Motorola. These guys did two startups worth of work atleast and 280 Slides alone is a startup itself :)
I wish SproutCore dev could be faster - it's god awfully slow with dev server and preview. But, that's not a big problem for now.
Perhaps the founders will be so kind as to tell us if they manage to retire on $4.3m each :)
Not to say that the 280North guys aren't capable of that but Cappuccino certainly isn't geared toward that type of goal.
Until Apple changes the developer agreement to say that App Store apps may not be ported to other platforms, that is.
I know they had some revenue, but 500K across 4 developers + expenses for 2.5 years seems low.
Now go and kick Motorola into shape!!
The truth is that if the round was priced, then the investors took call it 25% of the company, meaning the post-money was $1mln and thus at a $20 mln exit there was a 20x return... which of course is still pretty good.