By Myles Tanzer 9/26/12 11:00am

startup rundown

(Photo: flickr.com/classicchanelhandbags)

Startup News: Barry Diller Brings Back the Big Dog and Lauren Conrad’s Site Is Sold

Healthy Hills? Everyday Health, the SoHo-based and more successful version of WebMd, has acquired EQAL, the creators of Lonelygirl15 and the owners of LaurenConrad.com. Everyday Health’s ad revenue grew 40 percent in the first quarter, compared to WebMD’s decline of 20 percent. This coincides with Everyday Health’s announcement that they’re moving beyond YouTube and launching a version of it’s web show “Recipe Rehab” for ABC stations around the country.

Diller Brings Back Dog Ben Silverman’s multimedia entertainment studio Electus, part of Barry Diller’s IAC, just sold ten episodes of a new show starring Dog the Bounty Hunter and his wife Beth to CMT. “Dog and Beth are not only great television characters,” said Electus CEO Chris Grant, ”They are the best bounty hunters in the world, and this show is a natural evolution of their life story.” Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 4/11/12 12:55pm

The Third Degree

Mr. Horowitz

10gen CTO Eliot Horowitz on the Rise of MongoDB, Partnering with Red Hat, and Hiring in a Talent Crunch

Earlier this week, 10gen, the promising AlleyCorp startup launched by DoubleClick cofounder Dwight Merriman, announced a new partnership with an eye toward helping developers who work with big data and cloud technologies. The boost in market share probably doesn’t hurt either.

10gen both develops and sponsors the open source NoSQL database MongoDB, which is used by companies as diverse as Foursquare, SecondMarket, and Bit.ly on up to MTV, Intuit, and Disney.

On Monday, 10gen revealed that Mongo will be partnering with Red Hat, a software provider focused on larger enterprise clients that crossed the billion dollar revenue mark—the first for an open source company—in March. As Seeking Alpha notes today, the Mongo connection puts Red Hat “on a collision course with the toughest guys in tech, Oracle.”

Betabeat recently talked to 10gen CTO and cofounder Eliot Horowitz, who’s been known to freestyle on tech topics for eager 10gen staffers, about the Red Hat partnership, how Mongo started attracting big name clients, and 10gen’s plans to hire 100 people this year, announced shortly after the company picked up $20 million from Sequoia and Union Square Ventures. Read More

By Ben Popper 11/10/11 8:42am

Let's Talk Trolls

(Illustration by David Saracino / New York Observer.)

The Trolls Come Out For 10Gen

Don’t play with matches in a dry wooded area. Don’t put a detailed rant on Hacker News unless you’re prepared to start a fire.

An anonymous pastebin post from this weekend slammed the MongoDB database architecture and in particular the support from 10Gen, the AlleyCorp company with deep ties to MongoDB. It quickly raced to the top of Hacker News and from there around the developer community.

The screed got a ton of attention, to the point where 10Gen CTO Eliot Horowitz jumped into the comments on Hacker News and addressed the complaints point by point. Mr. Horowitz conceded that a lot of the issues where known complaints about MongoDB, but also highlighted the fact that many details from the post didn’t match up to any of what 10Gen offered or any of their customer records.

In fact, deep in the comments on the Hacker News post, the “originator” of the pastebin post appeared to claim he was just a troll testing the masses to see who were sheep. Read More

By Ben Popper 10/10/11 4:15pm

Image via Business Insider

10Gen CEO Dwight Merriman Still Writes His Own Code

It’s easy to stop sweating the small stuff once you get to the top. As a recent New York magazine article pointed out, Mark Zuckerberg used to be a coding machine. These days, not so much:

But, as the Groups team was adding the finishing touches to its product, Zuckerberg said he wanted to write a few lines. “Everybody was like, Ohhhh, Zuck’s gonna write code,” says Feross. Someone set up an easy bug for him to fix—adding a link to a picture, or something—and he went to work. Five minutes passed. Twenty minutes. An hour. “It took him like two hours to do something that would take one of us who’s an engineer like five minutes.”

Dwight Merriman, one of the original founders of DoubleClick, was that company’s CTO for a decade, helping to create the DART ad serving technology which currently powers Google’s profits. Now he is founder and CEO of 10Gen, one of the leading developers and service providers for the MongoDB database language.

Betabeat was chatting recently with a 10Gen engineer who was impressed by how closely Mr. Merriman worked with the staff. “Dwight is drinking beer with us and writing great code.” Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 10/06/11 11:30am

Hack Hack Hack Hack It Apart

Brandon-Diamond

10Gen’s Brandon Diamond Tells Us Why New York City Needed a Hackers Union

At a town hall for NY Hackers this week, its founder Brandon Diamond announced the creation of the Hackers Union, a unifying non-profit resource for all engineers in New York City.

“We’re still sort of in the early stages of a self-sustaining engineering culture like you might find in San Francisco,” said Mr. Diamond, who also serves as associate director of NY Tech Meetup and a database kernel engineer at 10Gen (the company behind MongoDB). “Our goal is not to become the next big meetup. We want to consolidate all the activities into a central hub.”

The effort has already attracted a potential sponsor–a hedge fund, no less. Read More

By Ben Popper 9/12/11 8:36am

Starship Enterprise

Dwight Merriman

Dwight Merriman’s 10Gen Raises $20 M. From Sequoia and Union Square

10Gen is not a startup you hear discussed often at cocktail parties, even the kind full of engineers. But Kevin Ryan has told Betabeat on more than one occassion that he believes 10Gen –which provide commercial support for MongoDB,  the increasingly popular open source NoSQL database– is the AlleyCorp company with the most potential in the long term.

10Gen has just raised a $20 million series D from Sequoia, FlyBridge and Union Square Ventures. Read More