Betaworks Coming Out Of Beta?

John Borthwick indicates a major change of philosophy at Betaworks, the NYC start-up incubator, along with announcing the departure of his co-founder Andy Weissman to join Union Square Ventures:

via Ben Popper, Andy Weissman Leaves betaworks For Union Square Ventures, quoting Borthwick’s internal email

First, after four terrific years, Andy will be leaving betaworks to pursue a career in venture capital at Union Square Ventures.  This is a terrific opportunity – we are all very happy for him and look forward to working along side him at USV.  Second, over the last several months Andy and I have been working on what comes next for betaworks.  We have had great success since we started betaworks; we’ve grown and sold companies such as Summize, GroupMe, Mobly, and TweetDeck, we’ve invested in companies such as Tumblr, Kickstarter and Ideeli, and we continue to build and work with promising new ventures such as News.me and Findings.  This year alone we have completed five transactions/exits.

We are now ready to move into the next generation of betaworks, #betanext, which is betaworks as an operating company.  Though we will continue to do seed stage investments, our primary focus will be on building the core capabilities of the companies that we acquire and grow in-house.  We are excited about the path that we are taking and have a lot of thrilling work ahead of us.

Andy has been a valued part of the team since the day betaworks was sketched out on the back of a napkin.  He has done a terrific job of seed investing.  He will be around until the end of the month and looks forward to catching up with all of you about his exciting plans, but I wanted to share the news with you first.

Tomorrow, like today and every day, all 82 of us here at betaworks will continue to work on innovative ways to connect people to information and to each other, and we will move forwards towards #betanext.  We wish Andy a the best of luck.

I’ve been working with Betaworks for a few years, as an advisor on News.me and Bitly. I’ve gotten to know Andy very well, and he’s tops. I know that Union Square will be better for his involvement, and with that crew, that’s saying a lot.

Borthwick’s comments about a new stage for Betaworks is perhaps even bigger news. He intends to grow a software company with a large and growing number of software products, as a way to gain maximum synergy across the pieces. Considering how many of the companies fit together, like Chartbeat, Bitly, and News.me, this makes a great deal of sense.

Related articles

News for news.me - John Borthwick

News.me has been spun out of Bitly as a separate firm under Betaworks, as widely reported.

John Borthwick via

Over the past year, News.me has been incubated within bitly. Today, we’re pleased to announce that News.me has officially spun out of bitly into an independent company under betaworks. As I wrote earlier this year, with News.me we are seeking to rethink and reinvent the way that people discover news; I’m very excited that News.me is now set up and running as a standalone company with the resources it needs to fully pursue that vision.

Michael Young, who has been with News.me since its inception at the New York Times R&D lab, will continue to lead the development efforts as Chief Technology Officer. He’ll be joined by Rob Haining (of Epicurious, GQ, and Idea Flight app fame) who is leading iOS development, and Justin Van Slembrouck (from Adobe, where he designed the Times Reader application) overseeing User Experience and Design. Jake Levine, formerly Entrepreneur in Residence at betaworks, is joining News.me as General Manager. We’re looking for a few more developers to round out the team, so if you’re passionate about news and the social web and are eager to explore the boundaries of emergent devices, drop us a line.

Finally, in anticipation of a series of releases over the next few months, we’re excited to share that the News.me iPad app is now free. You can read more about this change, along with our plans for the next generation of the product, over at the News.me blog.

I spoke with Michael Young a few weeks ago, and candidly knew this was coming, so I am not surprised, but the team looks great. Now if I can only get my iPad back from my son.

This is an extremely promising area of exploration, and News.me is innovating very quickly in a rapidly expanding market, so becoming independent of Bitly makes a lot of sense.

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news.me - John Borthwick

John Borthwick announces (at last) the release of News.me, a social news app, for the iPad:

John Borthwick, News.me

Why News.me?

For a while now at bitly and betaworks, we have been thinking about and working on applications that blend socially curated streams with great immersive reading interfaces.

Specifically we have been exploring and testing ways that the bitly data stack can be used to filter and curate social streams.   The launch of the iPad last April changed everything. Finally there was a device that was both intimate and public — a device that could immerse you into a reading experience that wasn’t bound by the user experience constraints naturally embedded in 30 years of personal computing legacy.  So we built News.me.

News.me is a personalized social news reading application for the Apple iPad. It’s an app that lets you browse, discover and read articles that other people are seeing in their Twitter streams.   These streams are filtered and ranked using algorithms developed by the bitly team to extract a measure of social relevance from the billions of clicks and shares in the bitly data set. This is fundamentally a different kind of social news experience. I haven’t seen or used anything quiet like it before. Rather than me reading what you tweet, I read the stream that you have selected to read — your inbound stream.  It’s almost as if I’m leaning over your shoulder — reading what you read, or looking at your book shelves: it allows me to understand how the people I follow construct their world.

As with many innovations, we stumbled upon this idea.  We started developing News.me last August after we acquired the prototype from The New York Times Company. For the first version we wanted to simply take your Twitter stream, filter it using a bitly-based algorithm (bit-rank) and present it as an iPad app. The goal was to make an easy to browse, beautiful reading experience.  Within weeks we had a first version working.  As we sat around the table reviewing it, we started passing our iPads around saying “let me look at your stream.” And that’s how it really started.  We stumbled into a new way of reading Twitter and consuming news — the reverse follow graph wherein I get to read not only what you share, but what you read as well.  I get to read looking over other people’s shoulders.

News.me is a sort of reading triangulation tool. If someone you follow is a great curator, much of that is due to what they are reading, so ‘looking over their shoulder’ can be a great leg up on gaining a better understanding of the world, or some corner of it.

[disclosure: I am an advisor to Bit.ly and Betaworks, and have a financial interest in the company.]

Erich Schonfeld on News.me

Erich Schonfeld does a once over on News.me, the new Betaworks/NY Times collaboration on social news. He is likes what he sees:

News.me is a social news reading app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall. It pulls in data from not only Twitter but alsobit.ly, the betaworks company that shortens billions of shared links every month.

News.me is still a work in progress, and new features are being added every few days. but its basic skeleton is in place. It is more along the lines of Flipboard but with a few new twists. You sign in with your Twitter account, and you can see a stream of news stories and videos being viewed by the people you follow in their Twitter streams. Instead of just seeing the links, the underlying text and images are displayed inline. Not only can you see your own Twitter news stream, but you can also see the Twitter news streams of any other News.me users who you also follow on Twitter. These people should already be familiar to you, but instead of seeing what they are Tweeting out, you get to see the news that is being recommended to them by the people they follow.

That’s the fundamental hook of News.me. You get to see my upstream articles: those being recommended to me by those that I follow. You can already see what I recommend — just follow me on Twitter — but this shows what’s upstream of that.

As I have said many times, the most interesting aspect of curation is not what you recommend, but where you are positioned in the sprawling, worldwide, social network. Where you position yourself determines what you get to see, the raw material from which recommendations come.

I think News.me is headed in an interesting direction, but I agree with Erich’s recommendations for improvements:

  1. Merge the streams: It’s cool to be able to click on 20 different avatars of people you know from Twitter and see the social news stream through their eyes, but if you are anything like me, the people you follow pretty much all tend to be interested in the same things. The result is that Everyone’s News.me stream is very similar with the same tech news stories popping up in each one. There is an option to mute a story once you’ve read it so that it does not appear again even in other people’s streams. But a better solution is to show a unified stream with a little avatar icon for everyone who is implicitly recommending that story.
  2. Show more signals: In addition to showing everyone in whose stream a particular story appears, News.me could also highlight when someone you follow explicitly recommends something by retweeting it or sharing it themselves. Anything that allows readers to tell at a glance which stories are more important than others would be a step forward.
  3. Filter by topic: Right now there is only one “Big News” button based on bit.ly data, but that button could be broken up into categories like politics, international, tech, sports, and finance. Show me the best news stories in each category.

[disclosure: I am a consultant to Betaworks, and have a financial interest in Bit.ly, which is working with the NY Times on News.me. I am also a ‘featured reader’ on News.me: see my avatar on Schonfeld’s News.me.]

News.me

The hush-hush News.me development project at Betaworks — based on technology acquired from the NY Times — has been leaked to the press, by Mashable’s Jolie O’Dell.  Few details have been revealed, but John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks said “We’re building something wonderful and amazing in the social news space.”

No real details, just vague allusions to personalized and customized news. Seems like the news led Betaworks to launch the News.me stealth website on Thursday.

Update: I have been informed that it appears that Jenna Wortham at the NY Times (Betaworks and The Times Plan a Social News Service) was the first to break this story (thanks @mathewi).

[disclosure: I am an advisor to Betaworks, and have a financial interest in Bit.ly, one of the incubators product companies.]

Profile Of Betaworks

Jenna Wortham, In New York, a Tech Incubator Becomes a Hub of Collaboration

The company was founded by John Borthwick and Andrew Weissman, who worked at AOL in the ’90s.

“I was there when AOL bought CompuServe and Netscape and did the first content deal with Amazon,” said Mr. Weissman, chief operating officer. “You could start to see these new ways pieces of the Internet were coming together.”

He said he watched as one AOL project, MapQuest, gradually lost market share. Google Maps grew faster because it allowed other companies to add information to a map or use the service in other tools. “You could just see that model was going to be big,” “We said, ‘We think this is it, and we want to invest in these kinds of companies.’ ”

A little over three years ago, the two decided they wanted to create their own company aimed at that very idea. Thanks to tools like Amazon Web Services, Twitter and Google Apps, developers could more easily build and scale Web tools.

“We knew there was a big fundamental change happening on the Internet,” said Mr. Borthwick, Betaworks’ chief executive. “And we knew it was going to be social.”

They spent nine months deliberating over how to structure their company before settling on a hybrid of an investment firm and an incubator.

“The venture capital structure is banking on finding that one super-duper winner, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Mr. Borthwick. “But our goal is to create a network of companies with lots of connections between them that increases the likelihood of success between all of them.”

It’s not hard to see that spirit at work. The two dozen companies under Betaworks’ umbrella make a point of using one another’s creations and often incorporate them into their own services. At a recent meeting at Betaworks, about three dozen employees of Betaworks and its portfolio of companies crowded into a room, trading feedback, updates and the occasional good-natured zinger about their various products.

Betaworks has developed some Web tools from scratch, like Bit.ly, a URL shortener, and Chartbeat, a real-time Web analytics service. But the company is looking for entrepreneurs who have more than a vision.

“Anyone who shows up with an idea on a napkin, we’re going to tell them, ‘Thanks, but go build a prototype,’ ” Mr. Weissman said.

I find Betaworks to be impressively unorthodox, and more experimental in its outlook that conventional VCs, even the very smart VCs.

I hope that I will be able to twist John’s arm to join me in the fall as a guest of the planned Stowe Boyd Show, once I screw down details (and line up some sponsors).

[disclosure: I am an advisor to Bit.ly, and have a stake in it’s financial success.]