A Brief Intermission
Skydeck will be unavailable from Sunday the 18th of January at noon PST until Monday the 19th at 8 am PST. This is our first planned outage. We promise that it will be worth it.
Three New Apps Built On Skydeck
At Skydeck we believe that your phone records are your data, and that you should be able to take your data anywhere. That’s why we announced a set of APIs for accessing your data before we’d finished building our own service. Today we’re happy to announce the first three applications built using Skydeck’s APIs.
The first is from FreshBooks, the number one online invoicing service. Many of FreshBooks’ customers are consultants, designers, lawyers or other professionals who bill by the hour, and FreshBooks provides them with lots of tools for tracking their time. But it’s very hard to keep track of your cell phone calls, especially when you are away from your desk. When the team at FreshBooks read about Skydeck’s APIs, they realized that they could help their customers track and recapture all that time automatically. You can find the FreshBooks/Skydeck mashup here. (more…)
Mobile 2.0
I’ve been invited to moderate a panel at Mobile 2.0, a one-day event in San Francisco the week after next. While there are many brand new mobile-themed conferences in the Bay Area this year, Mobile 2.0 is now in its third year and is organized by people who are immersed in the industry, like Daniel Appelquist from Vodafone, Mike Rowehl from Skyfire, and Gregory Gorman from Tertius Advisory Services.
My panel is entitled “Platforms, Monetization & Third Party Applications”, and includes speakers from Yahoo, Google, Facebook, MySpace, and the mobile application store GetJar. The full schedule is here, and you can register for the conference here.
Skydeck Raises Venture Capital
Today we announced that Skydeck has raised $3 million in its first round of venture capital. If you’re one of our users it means that you’ve got lots of powerful new features to look forward to, sooner than we expected. If you’re an engineer looking for challenging work at a well-financed startup, it means that you should send us your resume.
When Mike Wells and I founded Skydeck, we were determined to work with investors who knew and understood the mobile market. Earlier this year we made a short list of VCs that we admired, and one of the names on that list was Craig Cooper at Saban Ventures.
Craig is one of those rare people who has been successful both as an entrepreneur and a VC. He co-founded Boost Mobile, one of the first MVNOs, and sold it to Nextel in 2003. He co-founded EBT Mobile Plc, the largest independent authorized retailer of mobile phones in China. As a venture partner at SoftBank and VantagePoint, he led series A rounds in mobile startups that we respect, including Thumbplay, YouMail, Nellymoser, and V-Enable. He recently formed Saban Ventures, the new venture capital arm of a well-known private investment fund called Saban Capital Group, and Skydeck is his first investment there.
Also joining our board following this round is Chip Austin. Chip is one of our angel investors and a co-founder and General Partner of i-Hatch Ventures, where he backed Thumbplay, m:metrics, WiderThan, and our first company, Vindigo.
Mike and I are delighted to welcome Craig and Chip to our board.
You can download the full press release here.
Turn OCaml signatures into RPC interfaces
At Skydeck we use ONC RPC to communicate between parts of our server infrastructure. ONC RPC is an old, simple, reliable remote procedure call protocol. It fits well with OCaml since it deals in values and functions, rather than objects and methods, and it has a good implementation in Ocamlnet. However, since all of our ONC RPC clients and servers are written in OCaml, it is a little annoying to have to write interfaces using the somewhat clumsy ONC RPC specification language. It’s nice to be able to stay in the OCaml type system from end to end.
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Skydeck is open to all, supports IE, and wins its first award
Tell your friends – Skydeck is now in public beta. Anyone in the US can now sign up for Skydeck at http://skydeck.com/signup
Skydeck is no longer restricted to Firefox either. You can use any browser running on Windows XP or Vista, in particular Internet Explorer. (Mac users still have to run Firefox for now. We hear the cries of Safari users and will get to you as soon as we can.)
We announced our public beta at last week’s MobileBeat 2008 conference, where Skydeck also won its first award: Boldest Idea.
Thanks to VentureBeat for organizing a great event, and thanks to the judges for recognizing that what we’re doing is very bold indeed. We want to help everyone in the world keep track of their phone calls, their text messages, and all the people that they call and text. As one of the judges pointed out, while lots of companies say they can help you to lower your phone bill, Skydeck wants to make every call more valuable – by making sure that you never forget a call, you know who you need to call back today, and you know who you really ought to call when you have time (hint: Mom).
And thank you – Skydeck beat more than 50 other companies to qualify for MobileBeat, because you voted for us.
Who Will You Call Today?
Today we’re launching several new features that make Skydeck useful every single day: daily data, so you can check who called you yesterday and who you need to call back; an easy way to share contact information with people in your network; and the ability to search your network for people that you don’t know.
As always, we wanted you to be first to know. Thanks again for your great feedback and support during this private beta. We’ll be announcing our public beta very soon!
Daily Data
You’ve told us that you love being able to see and sort your calls and text messages in Skydeck, but you’ve also asked us where are the calls you made yesterday, or last week? It’s our most requested feature.
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Skydeck API and OAuth for OCaml
The Skydeck API had only been out a few days when someone began a Ruby binding for it. We’re thrilled that there’s been so much interest already, and look forward to some great applications built against our API.
Of course, we like OCaml here, so we are pleased to announce the release of an OCaml binding to the API. You can find it on our developer downloads page.
As part of our API design we decided to use OAuth, so you can allow applications to access your data without giving away your Skydeck username and password. We are also pleased to announce the release of ooauth, an OCaml implementation of OAuth.
Ooauth implements both the consumer and service provider parts of OAuth (we use it in our server and in the API binding above), so you can use it to implement your own API or to consume the many APIs that use OAuth, such as the Google Data APIs. It is also available on the developer downloads page.
Vote for Skydeck : MobileBeat 2008
Skydeck is happy to say that we are a nominee for MobileBeat 2008: VentureBeat’s top mobile applications competition. Help us win!
If we get enough votes, we’ll be invited to speak at their upcoming conference on July 24, 2008.
VentureBeat is a top technology blog, and an appearance at their conference would give us a great opportunity to promote our service, bring more users to the site, and continue our mission of helping people get the most from their phone and phone bills.
Here’s what you need to do to vote for Skydeck:
1. Click here to register for a voting ID.
2. Once you’re signed up, click here to vote for Skydeck. Skydeck is listed under the “Infrastructure / Service Companies” section.
3. You get 5 votes, but you can only vote once every 24 hours. Please vote today and every day until June 24th, the cutoff.
Thanks for your support!
UPDATE: Skydeck has been selected to present at Mobilebeat! Thanks for your votes, we’re looking forward to the event.
Skydeck Origin Story
If you’re curious about how we came up with the idea for Skydeck and what we’re planning to do next, the tech blog ReadWriteWeb published an interview with me today that answers those questions and should raise a few more.