Firespotters, creators of UberConference, winners of TechCrunch Disrupt 2012. Photo by TechCrunch.
And the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt is...UberConference, a pain-free conference-calling app that takes out all the awful from group conversations for business or socializing. It's made by Firespotter, a company made up of former Google engineers.
So the question is why UberConference, which was made by Xooglers, as Doug Edwards calls them, was not made at Google, where it would presumably make Google even more popular, win back some of its skeptical public, and make lots of money for Google.
And the answer is...according to a source very close to the situation -- because Google's Marissa Mayer, VP for Location and Local Services blocked it.
As we know from the fascinating book by Xoogler Doug Edwards, I'm Feeling Lucky, if Marissa doesn't like something, it doesn't get done (well, unless somebody stays up all night to convince her). We learn from Edwards that she was dating founder Larry Page. But that wasn't enough to keep her on the L-team.
Not content to accept scuttle, even from very reliable knowledgeable birds in the rafters at TechCrunch Disrupt, I decided to go ask the Xoogler-Ubers -- the Firespotters -- themselves, who were predictably standing around in a circle in their identical blue t-shirts talking to each other instead of anyone else.
One of them began reciting essentially what they had said during their pitch on-stage, which was that in fact Google was still doing conferencing and that Google Voice was a great product and lots of people were using it.
Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch who left the blog last year but is still brought in by AOL as a "brand" to interview the stars of TCD, had really ridden on these Uber-Xooglers, asking defiantly, "Why should I trust you?"
Apparently, this was because Chris Walker, originally founder and CEO of GrandCentral, sold his company to Google, where it became Google Voice So, I guess if the founder already made one voice/telephony company he sold to Google, then left the Google Voice project to make UberConference, he wouldn't sound stable? And here I thought what Arrington meant was, "How can we all trust you notorious privacy-violators now with all our live voice business conversations?"
(It's kinda like the problem of real-life businesses trying to have a private group conversation in Second Life -- Linden Lab and its chosen voice platform would essentially own all that proprietary data and potentially have access to it -- that's why there was this demand at first from companies like IBM to have Second Life behind the firewall).
But Mike didn't mean that.
The UberConference founder responded bravely, "But I worked on it for several years and left recently and they are still working on it" -- i.e. it didn't sound as if he had left Google high and dry with the project.
I drilled some more in the engineering collective which was standing around in a circle, you know, like they have in G+, and making dead-pan statements with that meta-geek humour that is meant to tie the norms up in knots. Like in this thread where I argue with exasperating Google engineers on G+, which I shall call "The Mountain Lions and Gazelle Thread".
I asked how long it had taken to code the UberConference app to see if the time matched the time while those guys were still at Google. Does the 20% time include ideas that you then take out of Google to make as another start-up company? How does that work?
One of them said "a weekend." (I guess this was supposed to sound like Cory Ondrejka coding LSL.)
"Um, really? Like a hackathon?" I asked.
"No, just playin', it was actually several months." Hmmm.
So I kept up. "Why did you leave Google? Why couldn't you do this at Google? It makes no sense?"
"Google is only doing conference calls for enterprise," one of them began sagely. Yes, I've heard that one before.
"But why should only enterprise get to remove all the pain from conference-calling?" I asked. After all, it's usually the small businesses, the non-profits, the other smaller group conversations that suffer the most pain, because a wealthier organization could afford to have better video-conferencing equipment where calls wouldn't drop all the time as they do on Skype or you wouldn't hear somebody's baby crying or highway traffic.
Because each person is visually manifesting on a dashboard with their picture (dare I say "avatar"), name and information in real time, UberConference lets you identify the noise-maker, mute them yourself as the conference coordinator, and also lets you see who is speaking easily -- you can cut all that idiotic time introducing everybody -- then introducing them again as the call drops them all off and they all struggle to come back again.
It all takes place on a lovely wood panel background that looks like your family room in the 1970s, or maybe a mountain cabin where Google engineers go skiing. If they could add some nubby carpeting, I'd be even happier. In fact, if they gave me an avatar to dress, too, I might never turn the application off, ever.
By contrast, the Google Voice splash page looks like ass. Marissa is said to be a specialist in user experience and user interface, but maybe she wasn't put on this project. It's like a label on a medicine bottle. The UberConference page is much more warm and comfy.
Plus it has this really amazing value-add that is like having a PM or a DM or a "tell" in a MMORPG -- you can put "earmuffs" on some of the people in the conference, and then talk so that only the other people without the earmuffs can hear you.
Cool, eh? But it's bound to lead to problems, as it does in Second Life where everything like this was long ago prototyped in its social aspects. A business conference where some people are enabled to cybersex during the boring meeting or make snotty comments privately about the speaker unbenownst to her is a company where erosion of decency sets in and eventually a deep hidden malice.
There's another feature I found troublesome, typical of a lot of apps/SAAS these days. According to the company press release, UberConference is "adding value by incorporating public information on each participant from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+, making it easy to know who's on a call and to quickly gather information about the caller."
But I don't want a profile on a service which I didn't make myself, which is slurped up from every other profile I have all over hell's half acre. I want my Facebook information to be public to get attention for my blog posts from friends and colleagues, but I don't want that slurped into every business conference call with every client. Why? I don't even want all the Linked-In data there, which you're sort of forced to put up to try to get jobs on there. And why the hell would you put Twitter on anything?! This is not opt-in, but opt-out, like all creepy geeky Googly things. And they're simply going to have to understand this is a value-substract, not a value-add, and not keep arguing that the data is out there to be scraped, so they get to scrape it, period.
Source: PR Newswire (http://s.tt/1cuI3)
Anyway, I kept asking, and in a group, where it was public -- and they wouldn't say a thing about why/how they were blocked at Google.
"Google does social so well," one of them deadpanned again. This time I was ready.
"No, it doesn't. You can't mean that. G+ is only a place for Google engineers."
"We're ex-Google engineers," the UberCon guy explained.
"G+ is where gifs go to die," I persisted.
"Just kidding," the guy explained to me again.
It's funny, my source noticed what we all saw -- Arrington gave these guys a harder time than Marissa did.
Now, how does this work? This former-Google-engineer company works for a bit with the $50,000 they just won, and spiffs it up some more, then Google buys it back? Is that the plan?
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