Mr. Robbins at the mic.

The small talk sounded heavy as Betabeat stopped by the beer counter last night at General Assembly's Demo Night. "We just A/B test, A/B test" one young gentleman explained to his companion. "Meetings and meetings," a young lady said to hers. Thankfully the younguns had a few hours of respite from the pressures of the startup world in front of them: critiquing other people's babies!

The charming Richard Blakeley, "man about town, man about the Internet" was the evening's emcee as nine startups demoed their products and then asked for feedback from the audience, an assemblage of Mac-wielding guests--quick to whip out a smartphone if the presentation lagged--covering nearly every available inch of floor and banquette space within view of the projector.

The startups in question were all founded by GA members and the ninth presenter was General Assembly itself. The urban campus, whose London expansion is now official, had its principal product designer on hand to demonstrate its "hybrid education" model: an 90-minute online lecture coupled with a livestreamed "On Campus Discussion." That way, students can watch the lecture at their leisure, but still have the social element of either meeting in person for the discussion, or log-in through a live interface to pose questions to the instructor or the group. We liked the idea of a sliding suggested price scale as a way to determine value from consumers, although the cheapskate in us wondered if that wouldn't get GA low-balled.

The other startups that presented were: VHX, Nodejitsu, Paperlex, Contnu, Makom, PostHelper, Spotster, and Tred. The most exciting concepts were from VHX (a social video sharing site) and Paperlex (a Quickbooks-like legal document creator for entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small business). Although Contnu (like a Yelp for continuing education classes, a $15 billion market), Makom (which makes travel guides and literature accessible and customizable on mobile phones), and Tred (which solves the problem of having to buy whatever car model is in stock at a dealer, by letting users pick the features they want, pay 2 percent down, and then have nearby dealers bid on giving you the car) all piqued our interest for going after markets that see little disruption.

Hands down the most swaggerific presentation last night goes to Charlie Robbins from Nodejitsu, but we'll get to that a little later.

Betatbeat has told you about VHX before, but co-founder Casey Pugh explained to some first-timers how the site pulls videos from Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, Google Reader, and the like and lets you watch it on your computer, TV (through Boxee) and various mobile devices. Currently, said Mr. Pugh, "Video is a second class citizen in tiny embed" and YouTube is the last place people go to discover new content. VHX intends to solve that problem by being "Like the Tumblr for video, or Twitter," said Mr. Pugh. Later he called it a "Google Reader for video," since, for example, VHX lets you subscribe to Reddit's video feed. "I can watch it all on my home in bed or on the toilet." Good to know!

Playlists features lets users create a steady stream of videos around whatever subject they want. "It seems like the ideal place for Skittles to exist," said Mr. Pugh, a fan of the candy company's bizarro ads. The VHX site was built on top of the startup's API, which also powers the Pandora-like Music Video Genome, that helps predict what you might like using discovery algorithms. Mr. Pugh responded to a question about whether advertising would sully his clean interface by using the Skittles example as a home for brands to showcase videos they want to go viral.

Readers familiar with TechStars's Shelby.tv will no doubt notice some overlaps. When Betabeat talked to TechStars managing director David Tisch awhile back, he mentioned thinking about VHX as the Shelby.tv founders pivoted into a similar social, video sharing arena. "It was just at the start of the pivot. I think me and Fred [Wilson] had known about VHX from our Boxee relationship and so we were like, 'Oh shit.'"

Paperlex, which advertises itself as "dead-simple legal documents" caught our attention for creating a customized NDA and getting a verified signature on it during the 5 minute demo, with roughly 3.5 minutes to spare merely by filling in the blanks for the recipients and length of contract. Co-founder Michael Gruen said the company's strength is structured data, which makes it more than just a PDF or Word doc of a contract. He gave the example of being able to use structured data to generate a term sheet contract from just the numbers. Betabeat has previously worked with Mr. Gruen's co-founder Alison Anthoine at Inc. magazine, where she was the legal counsel for both Inc. and Fast Company. Mr. Gruen said she has been practicing contract law as long as he's been alive. "It's a little scary to think about."

According to Mr. Gruen, Paperlex is different than Legal Zoom, which is currently facing a class action lawsuit for unauthorized legal practices, because "We're providing the tool, the contract is generated by you," although that distinction was unclear. When an audience member inquired about the Legal Zoom lawsuit, Mr. Gruen thought it had been settled. It hasn't. [Ed. note: Legal Zoom settled a class action lawsuit in Missouri, although the company itself is suing the North Carolina State Bar as part of a longtime legal standoff.] Paperlex already has a client who uses the service for the 1,000 NDAs it has to generate daily. Mr. Blakeley astutely pointed out that it Paperlex could make a killer Mad Libs. I will _____ if this isn't over soon?

Let's get to that ego swagger, shall we? "Are you ready for some Javascript motherfuckers?" is how Nodejitsu's Charlie Robbins began his demo. After offering a brief explanation of his startup, a node.js (Javascript) platform, Mr. Robbins conjectured that only three people in the dwindling audience understood him. "For most of you that sounded like whomp whomp." Mr. Robbins then revealed that Nodejitsu node.js is the most popular project on GitHub as of last week. No small achievement. He followed that up "If you don't know what [GitHub] is go home and look it up, your developers will thank you." He polled the audience as to how many people were familiar with Javascript. Those who didn't raise their hands, "Made me die a little inside," he said. The fact that more people knew what Ruby on Rails was, "Also made me extremely mad inside," he admitted.

Is shamegramming a word? You know, like coders who try to make you feel less than elite for not sharing their expertise? If not, we might try to make it one.

Referring to the investors in the audience, Mr. Robbins said, "If you tell them you use node they'll probably give you some money. You think I'm kidding but I'm not." He pointed out that LinkedIn recently switched to Node.js and can now handle four times the request with one tenth of the infrastructure. Mr. Blakeley's attempts to usher Mr. Robbins offstage were met with resistance. "I'm gonna keep going because I can." But eventually, after throwing out some free t-shirts, Mr. Robbins relinquished the mic.

"Was I being a real asshole? Too much or too little?," Mr. Robbins asked Betabeat when we inquired about the tone of his demo afterward. He said he was just trying to liven things up and then gleefully repeated his opening line for the circle of people around him. "I would have done a very diff demo if it had been a crowd of developers," he said. Betabeat talked to one onlooker who resented the implication that he didn't know from Javascript. Why did you assume no one would know what you're talking about, we asked Mr. Robbins. "C'mon," he replied, "It's General Assembly."

CORRECTION: This article originally said Nodejitsu was the most popular project on GitHub last week; that is incorrect. Node.js was the most popular project on Github last week. Betabeat regrets the error.

(paulgraham.com)

Notorious Nodejitsu just got a big fat "get out of jail free" card from Paul Graham. The New York-based startup has been persona non grata on the influential geek forum Hacker News since . . . well, we first heard about the drama, oh, back in December?

Mr. Graham, who runs Y Combinator and Hacker News, says Nodejitsu was banned for spamming; Nodejitsu's founders suspected it was because they compete with Y Combinator alum Heroku. But as of Sunday night, Nodejitsu's back in the game.

Heroku and Nodejitsu both host apps for developers, although Nodejitsu does it only for apps written in node.js, while Heroku has a wider range of offerings, including Java and Ruby. Heroku launched "experimental support" for node.js in April 2010, as Nodejitsu was just getting started. The race was on.

Yesterday, a Hacker News user posted an alternative to the forum called Lamer News, inspired by all the kvetching and conspiracy theory surrounding the opaque moderator policies of Hacker News. Some users say the site is "a shill for Y Combinator companies;" "why did Hacker News remove my blog post," and so on. Foursquare's Eric Friedman's personal domain, marketing.fm, was mysteriously banned after a post about VC breakfast etiquette; others have been mystified as to why their submissions did or didn't show up.

The site provoked a discussion about Hacker News policies in general. "We don't ban sites of competitors of companies we fund," Mr. Graham said in the thread. "Even if we wanted to do something like that, how could we ever get away with it?" Then he leapt to a conclusion: "I'm guessing you're referring to Nodejitsu.com. They're banned because they created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts."

The accusation brought a fiery rebuttal from Nodejitsu's clear-eyed CEO Charlie Robbins, a coder who was recruited out of college to work at Microsoft, did his time coding in the finance sector, and also serves served until recently as the CTO of General Assembly. "Your claim that Nodejitsu 'created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts' is outrageous. Let me enumerate the issue here," he wrote, and proceeded to pick apart Mr. Graham's statement and attack Hacker News for its lack of transparency in four arguments.

Mr. Robbins explained that banning Nodejitsu meant that not only was the company's blog blocked, any developer using Nodejitsu would run into trouble if he or she tried to put an app on Hacker News--something that is commonly done to get users or feedback.

"The problem with that is you are also penalizing Nodejitsu customers (like myself) that host their projects on their platform," Frank Denbow, a local founder and coder, wrote in the thread. "I support the Nodejitsu guys but I'm not an employee and don't share all their viewpoints; I was just working on my first Nodejs project for NodeKnockout and wanted to get some feedback from the HN community, but my site was blocked also."

"I didn't realize users' stuff was hosted on subdomains. Ok, I'll unban nodejitsu.com," Mr. Graham responded. "We don't ban sites lightly. We only do it when people make repeated, deliberate efforts to bypass lighter weight protections ... I'm happy to unban nodejitsu.com if you promise to stop trying to game HN. In your case I recommend the following standard for what counts as gaming HN: if you're not sure, don't."

Mr. Squires.

"That's our support team and investor," Mr. Squires told Betabeat. "Our team is so agile I was able to pivot our support team into a Javascript boy band in six hours last Friday. But that wasnt working out, so we pivoted back to node.js hosting."

Check it:

The Stack Trace Boyz - Sexy Script by marak

Rough transcript of lyrics:

im on our standup right now
yo nodejitsu in the building
sexy script and we making a killing
i got millions with will-millionaire
yo i really dont care
throw the money in the air
when we writing that code
write that shh down we write it in node
when i hit your server ill make it explode
OH MY GAWD THAT LEET SOURCE CODE

it aint like no script you ever seen before
its the sexiest script that you ever saw
they call it sexy script because its sexy yall
the sexiest script that you ever saw
assembles to byte code yoo ( uhh ) its raw
its used by facebook google gmail and all
bringing sexy back to javascript owhhhhh
it aint like no script you ever seen before

yo my script be the leetist around
you know around town they know how the investor get down
i like to drop the petal of my beemer to the floor
crack the windows light my L and we be ready for y'all

Bonus! An old video, CouchDB man:

The Nodejitsu team is building a platform that takes advantage of the buzz around node.js, a relatively new technology that's rapidly gaining popularity with developers. RRE Ventures and First Round Capital also participated, after Mr. Robbins was introduced to investors there through contacts at General Assembly.

If Node.js is as essential as Mr. Robbins, his co-founders and their investors believe, Nodejitsu could be looking at a major market and therefore a major exit. (Heroku sold to Salesforce.com for more than $200 million, for example.)

Nodejitsu is selling the picks and shovels in the current app goldrush--by letting Nodejitsu take care of the backend support, developers have time to focus on writing code. Nodejitsu is a cloud-hosting platform--similar to Heroku for Ruby or Google App Engine--that makes it easy for developers using node.js to host and scale their apps. It also acts as a marketplace for apps built with Node.js.

The company has had 2,600 beta testers eager to start using the early version, but Nodejitsu couldn't afford to let them in. Now Nodejitsu is able to sponsor conferences and hire more developers, and the beta testers will start to see invites show up in their inboxes.

"Having the gun off my back is nice," Mr. Robbins said.

Nodejitsu has a team of technologists: Charlie Robbins, who was recruited out of college to work at Microsoft; Marak Squires, one of the most active JavaScript  programmers in New York; and Paolo Fragomeni, who spends his free time doing research for MIT. The investors they worked with were more technical, he said, but they were mostly interested in the strength of the technology the team has built (Mr. Robbins doesn't have a count for how many lines of code they've written, but he estimates they have something like 2,000 unit tests).

"They saw the technical merit in what we're building and how things are changing. The technology is what I've been pitching," he said. "It wasn't so much a market play. People are starting to build more on Node.js because it's superior and it solves these problems that have always existed. I/O has been done wrong for the last 30 years," he said, referring to the fact that Node.js allows servers to react to specific events.

Nodejitsu is hiring senior JavaScript developers in New York who have experience with Node.js and they're also looking for interns.

Nodejitsu was founded in April 2010, almost exactly a year ago. Betabeat gave Mr. Robbins and Mr. Squires the third degree a few months ago, before funding had been secured, and got their thoughts on JavaScript, Node.js and building a start-up.

Charlie Robbins and Marak Squires

Charlie Robbins and Marak Squires are high school friends, now all grown up and united by their passion for Javascript. Their company, Nodejitsu (also Paolo Fragomeni, who joined as a later co-founder) just raised $750,000 after about a year of basically bootstrapping. They've been writing hours of open source code and building a platform to help developers who want to use a relatively new technology, Node.js, to build faster, stronger apps.

Betabeat interviewed these guys back in January, when they were still scrapping hard at General Assembly. Since then, Mr. Squires moved to San Francisco because they decided they needed a presence there, and has set up shop at the West Coast Hack Haus in the Lower Haight. He is in the process of developing a series of raps that teach people about Node.js.

Q: What's the layperson's pitch for Nodejitsu?

Marak: JavaScript goes in, money comes out. We provide a service by packaging up a utility into a nice neat consumable package. We buy a utility for a nickel, apply some JavaScript magic, and resell it for a dime.

Charlie: We help expedite the time-to-market for web applications and services by handling all the stuff that developers don’t really want to do. There are other companies that do this for other server-side technologies (Google App Engine is for Java and Python, Microsoft Azure is for .NET, Heroku is for Ruby), but Nodejitsu does it for node.js. We believe that node.js is the future of the web and web development.

Q: Do you remember the moment you had the idea for Nodejitsu? What was the spark?

Marak: Charlie and I had been working on a cloud platform as a service and application marketplace idea a few years back. Our original business plan encompassed all major languages, platforms, and open-source libraries. It was an ambitious task and we never quite got it off the ground. It was our first time dealing with any sort of real fundraising and after having a negative experience with Owen Davis, our team was demoralized and we all kind of went back to the monotony of our regular jobs.

Fast forward to April of 2010 when I just got back from JsConf and was going on and on about how awesome it was to Charlie. Charlie sort of said something like, “Hey why don’t we do a cloud hosting company only for node.js,” and I think it took me all of two seconds to respond, “Yes.” We started hacking on a rudimentary proof of concept pretty much immediately.

Charlie: Marak and I have both been developers for a long time, both had our fair share of failed half baked consumer products. When we came up with our first idea we wanted to build something that appeal to developers. They were the people that really mattered to us.

I think Nodejitsu really blossomed out of my love affair with Javascript and node.js. I’d been working with .NET since I was 19 when I was recruited by Microsoft out of a career fair at McGill University and in those 5-plus years I got more and more disenchanted with the offering and community. I think this article sums up the .NET community best in that “the .NET community operates in a non-collaborative vacuum.” So basically, it was like night and day switching from .NET to node.js and I wanted to make something that helped secure the success of the then nascent technology.

Q: What excites you about node.js? What makes you think it has enough staying power to build a company on?

Marak: I get asked this question a lot. Right now, I usually state three facts:

1. JavaScript. It’s everywhere. The computer or mobile device you are reading this article on right now already supports JavaScript. Since the language has been around for over 15 years, there is a large pool of developers and software already available.

2. Community. The node.js community is amazing. Almost everyone I have interacted with has been friendly, helpful, and really smart. I’ve been involved with a lot of open-source projects and I can tell you this is a rarity.

3. Power. Node.js is fast. Really fast. The core technology that node.js is built on is called “v8”. v8 is the same virtual machine that powers the Google Chrome browser. Google has literally invested millions and millions and of dollars into v8 research and development. Node itself it built by Ryan Dahl, whose is somewhat obsessed with performance. His hand written http parser ( which node uses ) is widely considered the fastest C http parser available.

Charlie: I think that there is fundamental shift going on right now in two ways. First, we are seeing technologies that were once seen as “bleeding edge” become accepted in the enterprise (such as Ruby). Likewise, cloud computing is shifting from early adopters to enterprises at an exponential rate. This shift is leaving a vacuum for new technologies that question paradigms and truly innovate that node.js is filling exceptionally well.

Second, the traditional set of enterprise technologies is going through what I view as a mid-life crisis. You are probably aware of the controversy in the Java community over the way Oracle has run things since they took over Sun. This leaves a lot of uncertainty over the future of Java and may have some companies looking for new alternatives. Node.js could be one of those possibilities in a few years since it outperforms Ruby and several other up-and-coming enterprise level technologies.

Q: What's your previous start-up experience?

Marak: Numerous start-ups as both a founder and employee for about six years. I’d say all of my homebrew start-up were not very well thought out and more for fun. One of my start-ups which I don’t care to name started getting over 30k unique hits a day. I had to shut it down since our back-end code was MediaWiki (a php solution that couldn’t handle the high-load ) and we had no real budget for hosting. The most notable start-up success I had would be working for “I Stand For” under the tutelage of Andrew Weinreich. We built a cool product, I got introduced into the start-up scene and we eventually got acquired by a large company.

Charlie: Been deeply involved in start-ups and the start-up community since I moved back to NYC in 2007. They were all side-projects really though, looking back on it. None of them really gathered the critical mass where I could justify leaving my full-time position. That is, except for Nodejitsu.

Q: How do you two know each other?

Marak: Charlie and I met each other over ten years ago in highschool at a party. We didn’t go to the same school, but I had dated some girls from Charlie’s school and we had a few mutual friends.

Charlie: Yeah, that’s pretty much the deal. I grew up in Sag Harbor and Marak grew up in East Hampton. Pretty small towns, you get to know people. And people with similar interests always seem to flock together irregardless of geography anyway.

Q: Who were your first investors?

Marak: We pitched to a few our of peers and some close family friends. Our first investor was a long time friend of mine. I had been keeping him informally informed about the project as it progressed over the first few months. When I had mentioned to him that we had started to look for funding, he actually volunteered.

He wasn’t entirely convinced at first, but ultimately he told me his decision to invest was based off of a few factors:

1. Since we were long time friends, he knew I was technically qualified for the task.
2. How excited I was about the idea and the company.
3. The fact that I had partnered with a “serious dude” like Charlie.

Q: Marak moved out to San Francisco because you felt it was necessary for Nodejitsu to have a presence out there, and Charlie and Paolo are in General Assembly. What's the work day-to-day like?

Marak: For me, pretty much every single hour of the day is related to Nodejitsu or node.js in some way. There’s always another ticket to be done, a decision to be made, or a library to apply a patch to. Community building is a non-stop job which you have to stay on top of. Lots of research, lots of testing, lots of talking. My snack of choice is cigars and sugar-free Redbull, I’m pretty terrible.

Charlie: A good day is when I can code for 12-16 hours. As we’ve grown the business out of the townhouse where Nodejitsu was born, I’ve had to take on a lot of CEO-type responsibilities which has changed the number of hours I’m coding, but I’m adjusting to that accordingly. I try to stay as healthy as someone can when they’re working 18+ hours a day, so I cook a lot. It gives me a little down-time to organize my thoughts and I love doing it. I used to cook dinner for the Nodejitsu team pretty regularly when we were working out of my apartment.

Q: What kind of failure experience does the team bring? How do you define success for Nodejitsu?

Marak: I could write entire essays about my failures. I think one of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt over the years is settling for employees and co-founders. Since day one everyone associated with the Nodejitsu project has been an expert software developer. We’ve maintained a very high level of scrutiny for our employees and founders and this refusal to settle for anything but the best has yielded us some amazing results.

For me, Nodejitsu will be a success if we can become profitable while delivering a useful service to happy customers.

Charlie: I’ve had two pretty spectacular start-up failures before this that gave me a lot of insight into how to manage expectations of founders and create roles that work effectively in such a rapidly changing environment.

For me, success for Nodejitsu is building something that lasts (both for us and the node.js community) and withstands the onslaught of new technologies and competitors.

Q: You're all about open source now, but you've both worked in finance. What was that transition like?

Marak: It was an amazing transition for me. It started off slowly, but eventually I started getting a steady stream of support requests and feedback for my libraries. It feels really rewarding being able to help someone with some code you wrote. I’ll never forget helping the first person who emailed me about a jQuery library I released. It was in very broken English from Taiwan and the person was using Internet Explorer 6. I was so excited I had the patch ready and sent out within an hour.

Charlie: Night and day. I honestly can’t go into it too much and that should be a leading indicator about why working in a thriving open source community is so much better.

Where were you working immediately before Nodejitsu? What made you quit and how did that conversation go?

Marak: I was working at a start-up building out some rich user interface stuff in JavaScript. I was during Nodejitsu nights and weekends and it was gaining a lot of momentum. I had just helped deliver a major milestone for the company's product and we split on pretty amicable terms. I think the management did not like seeing my name pop up on their Hacker News feed.

Charlie: I’m not really at liberty to talk about that, but lets just say that I had some disagreements with my previous employer about my post-employment work restrictions and decided to leave abruptly.

Q: While we're at it, how did you get kicked out of prep school?

Marak: I was having some family issues at the time and really just wasn’t adjusting well. I was spending too much time hacking the schools network and learning how to cheat in LAN games for money then go do my homework. I’ll also have you know I was “asked to leave”, way classier then getting kicked out.

Charlie: It’s kind of a long story. Basically, I had a lot of freedom at home with respect to managing my time and schedule. Freedom that I resented giving up at boarding school which manifested into a serious chip on my shoulder. Ironically it was my choice to go there in the first place, but that’s another story. So I talked back to one too many people and got expelled. Looking back on it now, it was honestly the best thing that ever happened to me.

Q: What's the biggest challenge facing Nodejitsu right now? What would you isolate that will make or break the company -- developer engagement, the quality of your code, the success of node.js?

Marak: My biggest fear is just being out-done by another company. Nodejitsu is in the top position for a node.js cloud hosting start-up and we need to hyper-focus on maintaining that position and delivering a kick-ass product. The biggest challenge is just executing as a team to deliver that product.

Charlie: My thoughts exactly.

Q: What are your favorite web or mobile apps right now?

Marak: I’m a bit of a luddite when it comes to web or mobile apps. I’ve been training a bunch of Pandora channels for a few years and I’m constantly using the Netflix browser based app. I also spend most of my day on Github.com

Charlie: I’ve never been an Apple or iPhone fan-boy, and waited a long time for a good Android device to come out that I liked. I was recently introduced to Instinctiv, a New York startup, that offers a better music experience on the desktop and Android. I’m on Nirvana, a great task management solution made by a team in Montreal, all the time. Oh yeah, and Github, lots of Github.

The fact that the service was similar wasn't the issue; there are several companies offering the same thing. Nor was the fact that the new platform used some of the pair's code, which was open-source.

What bothered Mr. Squires and Mr. Robbins was the name — NodeFu, which sounds like a ripoff of their startup, Nodejitsu.

Nodejitsu and NodeFu are both hosting services for apps that use Node.js, a Javascript development tool.

Mr. Matthieu said the name derives from his love of ninjas and has nothing to do with Nodejitsu.

"There is a trend in the software industry now around ninjas and apps/sites ending in the suffix 'fu,'" he said in an email. "This is my second product/service launch in the past year with a ninja based theme. My last one, Teleku, was acquired by Voxeo.

"In addition for my fondness of ninjas, my son is also a black belt in karate and a red belt in kungfu. I have been surrounded by martial arts for 14 years now. There really isn't that much in common between the Nodefu and Nodejitsu sites other than being oriental. I didn't see any ninjas on their site. Not sure what the big deal is nor do I see any concerns with copyright."

Still, Nodejitsu worries that its users will get the companies mixed up. "People think NodeFu is our product because its so similar and uses several pieces of our technology stack," Mr. Squires said.

There does seem to be some confusion: "Logo and company name seems very similar," one user wroteon the Hacker News forum. "Are NodeFu and Nodejitsu the same company?"

Mr. Robbins responded diplomatically: "I am founder of Nodejitsu. Nodejitsu and NodeFu are not related in anyway, although based on reading these comments it looks like NodeFu does use open source software we wrote, which is great to see."

The names are especially confusing for developers for whom English is a second language. "I've misunderstood Nodejitsu changed their name to Nodefu. They look alike so much," one Japanese userwrote on Twitter.

The NodeFu website does refer at least indirectly to Nodejitsu: "We started this project because the 'other' node.js hosting services were not sending out coupon invitations." Nodejitsu has been working hard to get its platform ready for release and have been holding back on letting users in.

Nodejitsu has been using its name and branding for almost a year and has filed for a trademark.

"I'm probably being emotional, but I think at the end of the day, aside from the legal issue, there is a moral issue," Mr. Squires said. "A lot of people thought we had re-branded and NodeFu was us. I spent a good portion of day telling people we were not NodeFu."

In another twist, Mr. Matthieu's work on NodeFu is being sponsored (but was not initiated) by Tropo, a San Francisco company that offers voice and text messaging support for apps. Tropo's service is similar to that offered by New York and San Francisco-based Twilio, and the companies' websites are also eerily similar.

UPDATE: Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Tropo's parent company, Voxeo, responded to this post in an email: "It's very important to us and to myself personally that Voxeo always 'does the right thing.' Yesterday we sent a very nice email to Marak Squires literally asking him what we could to do make things right. He has not responded. Perhaps he's lawyering up, deleting his Facebook account, and hitting the gym. We'd still like to do the right thing and resolve any concerns - but that's not possible when they won't respond.

"...You implied Voxeo/Tropo copied something from Twilio. Nothing could be further from the truth.  Voxeo is part of a group of companies including Motorola, TellMe (now owned by Microsoft), BeVocal (now owned by Nuance), and Telera (now owned by Alcatel) that invented and created the XML and web-based telephony industry ten years ago. We have been focused on enabling web developers to create telephony applications for over 10 years. We have over 200,000 registered members in our developer programs - 10 times more than Twilio - including over 23,000 developers who signed up last year alone."

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries