Zingku Flips to Google: NO Dodgeball Hacker Lessons Learned!
Google Engineering powers on.
Rich Skrenta hails “Kosmix releases Google GFS workalike ‘KFS’ as open source.”
At the same time, Google is taking over the technology of Zingku.
More and more it seems that Mark Zuckerberg really is unique in having started as a hacker and wanting to build a company, rather than merely flip software to one of the big guys. Where IS the engineering glory in being absorbed by the Googleplex, hook, line and hacker, for pennies on the future dollar?
After all, Google is NO angel!
Contrary to popular perception, Google’s ”acquisiition” of Zenter was not the epitomy of the American entrepreneurial dream come true, it was the culmination of the efforts of two detmermined hackers to woo Mountain View via Google Apps product development on spec.
How valuable was the Y Combinator backed Zenter to Google? Chris Sacca, Google biz dev guy:
Y combinator comes down to two kids in a room with two computers and ramen noodles for a summer.
Google may be making billions by enticing advertisers to blindly bid up their own rate cards, but it is highly unlikely that Google itself would bid up the value of a few thousand man hours of ”ramen noodle” sponsored coding.
The Zenter duo invested a few months of their lives in non-stop hacking with the goal of winning over Google, and they did. Grand prize? Engineering jobs at Google!
Mountain View directly wooed the founding hackers of Dodgeball to the Google engineering team in 2005, with promises of even greater mobile social networking glory. Today, Dodgeball remains an unwanted stepchild of Google while the hackers behind it have long declared their emancipation from the world of Google “rocket scientists.”
What about Zingku? Still in “private beta,” Google is acquiring “certain assets and technology” of the mobile social networking service, undoubtedly on the cheap, and most likely with the founding engineer(s), hook, line and hacker!
EXCLUSIVE: READ MORE in Zingku Backstory: Founder Sami Shalabi Newest Google Engineer?