(Photo: @Tolar)

Bad education? CampInteractive and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian are hosting an ed tech hackathon at General Assembly this weekend, inviting developers, students and ed tech influencers to tackle improve the classroom experience. Since gold stars are being offered for hacks that help engage students with “unusually compelling learning experiences," we'd like to suggest a K-hole of baby animal videos on YouTube—a learning experience of unknown depths.

Eternal sunshine of a spotless ... Facebook Tired of your ex and his new girlfriend/boyfriend’s endless stream of happy Facebook defaults? KillSwitch is a new app that erases fond memories of an ex-boo from your Facebook profile with a few swipes of the track pad. Scroll through your friends list, find your “target” and make them socially irrelevant as forever more (or at least until you get back together). Created by ClearHart Digital, it's perfect for all you singletons looking for a better way to spend Valentine's Day than drinking alone and meticulously un-tagging photos.

Shacking up Samsung is opening a New York City accelerator to support the development of software on their mobile devices and tablets—and perhaps in hopes that planting its flag in Chelsea is a step in overthrowing Apple claim as the hip marketer of mobile devices.

Making out at the movies Looking for a late, great V-Day idea? Moviepass says even bad movies are good for your relationship. One recent testimonial: “Even if my wife hated my guts after dragging her to Movie 43 last week, at least we were able to laugh it off afterwards. The worst films tend to bring us together more.” Nothing says romance like sitting last row in the near empty theater of a new rom-com.

Get with the TimesMachine The New York Times is launching a new advertising initiative that lets marketers incorporate articles from the Grey Lady's digital archive as a base. National Geographic is among the first advertising partner to take advantage of the plan, embedding archival articles into marketing for NatGeo's Killing Lincoln flick.

Too much information Annoyed at your friends for never having downloaded Foursquare? Let Foursquare help! Dennis Crowley's company has added a new feature that allows users to share maps, images, tips and venue locations with people who never wanted the advice in the first place. According to Foursquare's blog “When you Tweet, post to Facebook, email or text about a place with friends who don’t have Foursquare on their phones, they’ll be linked to a shiny new page showing all the most important info about it.” Grandpa will be happy to know which Lower East Side parlor your new tattoo is coming from.

Node regrets Node based platform service Nodejitsu is launching a "full expansion into the European market" with a partnership with Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica, according to a press release.

Sometimes WeWork And sometimes we do the Harlem Shake.

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.

Nodejitsu now has web developers working with node.js covered from application creation to hosting. CEO Charlie Robbins writes:

At its core flatiron is two things:

An initiative to build a collection of decoupled tools with the same standard of quality and performance that you would expect from anything built by Nodejitsu.

A full-stack web application development framework which packages these tools together to make isomorphic and stream-based application development easier.

The startup is really throwing its fortune in with the future of node.js, a relatively new tool for web development. Considering Microsoft just embraced the technology, doesn't seem like a bad idea. The framework should give Nodejitsu another advantage in competing with Y Combinator superstar Heroku, which released a node.js hosting service. Nodejitsu also competes with Y Combinator alum, NowJS.

(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:

A FEW MONTHS AGO, AN ENTREPRENEUR in the tri-state area was soliciting web development help via Craigslist. “I’m looking for a Meetup.com clone script,” the listing said. “It must have all the social community features that Meetup.com has, including the capability to add new groups, users events, polls, connect to other social communities, shopping cart, sponsors and sub sites.” Meetup, which was founded in 2002 and has about 80 employees, is reportedly valued at more than $50 million. The asking price for a replica was $300 to $600.

Last week, two ads appeared from the other side of the fence: a programmer-for-hire looking for something to build who claimed to have built a Facebook clone in four days, a Flickr clone in three days and a Google clone in two weeks. He noted that he’d also created a Craigslist clone, adding, “but no one visits it so we are posting this ad to Craigslist.”*

When it comes to internet startups, much is made of the entrepreneurs who first bring an idea to market—innovators or "first movers," in the parlance of market researchers. But vastly more common are “fast followers,” the ones who jump on a hot idea and dash off a carbon copy. After all, the first mover doesn’t always win the race: just look at the Mac, launched in 1984, versus the Windows PC, launched in 1985, or at Facebook, which came after Friendster, Myspace and the Winklevoss social network HarvardConnection.

Turntable.fm, a music streaming service that went viral immediately after its April launch, was built in about six months by three entrepreneurs based in Union Square. About two months later, a local trio of former Googlers launched a music streaming game called Rolling.fm.

The similarity was more than striking. Both sites are designed to look like a cartoon night club where users can join a rotating line-up of D.J.s and play songs for a crowd of tiny avatars. Turntable listeners rate songs as “lame” or “awesome,” while users on Rolling rate them “weak” or “hot.” On Turntable, users appear as ambiguous elf-animals that get bigger as they accrue more D.J. points; on Rolling, the characters look like Homie dolls that get more bling as they level up. “I think it’s obvious that the initial version of Rolling is inspired by Turntable,” Rolling co-founder Tim Zhou said carefully in an email. “To say otherwise is not accurate.”

Fast followers have been around since the days of the first dot-com boom. Even Kozmo.com, the website that offered free one-hour delivery of almost any product and is considered one of the classic flame-outs of the 90's tech bubble, had, despite its dubious business model, an imitator.

According to Silicon Alley Reporter publisher Jason Calacanis, one venture capitalist Kozmo pitched—Ross Stevens of Integrity Capital Management—liked the idea so much he launched a competitor. “They started something called Urbanfetch, which was a direct knockoff,” Mr. Calacanis said. This led to a legal settlement as well as retaliatory mischief; at one point, Kozmo had five employees order packs of M&Ms delivered to the office every hour, “just to see if Urbanfetch would do it,” Mr. Calacanis said.

Me-too startups seem to be popping up with increasing intensity amid the current wave of social media–centric web-based businesses, in which easy programming languages, the availability of ready-made tools, open source code and a reinvigorated supply of capital has everyone aspiring to internet entrepreneurship. “It’s this whole cargo cult thing, where people imitate the things you see on the surface,” web developer and serial entrepreneur Kyle Bragger told Betabeat. “Foursquare does badges and they did them really well. And then all of a sudden everyone was like, ‘I want to add badges to my startup!’”

There are more than 200 variations of the “daily deal” group discount site Groupon (commonly referred to as the “Groupon clones") in the U.S. alone. In China, more than 1,000 have been launched and several hundred more are offering deals around the world, according to the New York-based deal aggregator and market researcher Yipit. These carbon copies range from bit-for-bit replicas to fairly creative takes on the concept of temporary group discounts.

Groupon’s wild success inspired Google to launch its own take on the daily deal site, Google Offers; at the other end of the knockoff spectrum, some intrepid entrepreneurs started offering a quick-and-dirty $350 software kit called Wroupon, which imitates Groupon’s daily deal conceit as well as the layout and language to generate “the perfect Groupon clone.”

Check Out A Side By Side Comparison of Fast Followers, From Wroupon to FreundeFeed

Meanwhile, the proliferation of "patent trolling," frivolous lawsuits brought against startups based on overreaching software patents, has been in the news lately. How can overzealous intellectual property prosecution coincide with a rise of the clones?

The reasons for both have to do with the country's overloaded, backed-up patent system. A startup’s design and branding can be protected with a copyright or trademark, which takes six months to a year to process. A new technology or method, like Groupon’s “tipping point,” would need to be protected with a patent in order for Groupon to take its clones to court. But a patent application usually takes two or three or three years to be examined—an eternity for a web 2.0 startup—and it’s never certain whether it will be granted, said Elliot Furman, a patent lawyer who has a masters degree in engineering from Stanford and specializes in software and web start-ups. And even if a company owns a patent, legal action is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Pursuing a case is often not worth it to a young startup, especially those in the earlier stage who are working with limited funds.

Groupon, for example, can’t sue for patent infringement: it doesn't own any patents yet. The startup filed for a patent on its flash deal mechanism, “a system and methods to mutually satisfy a consumer with a discount and a vendor with a minimum number of sales by establishing a tipping point associated with an offer for a good or service,” in 2009. That and five other applications are still pending. The patents are very specific: rather than attempting to patent the idea of a tipping point-based discount, the application describes a series of 10 successive actions that describe Groupon’s particular implementation. But Groupon has raised more than a billion dollars and therefore has the resources to pursue other kinds of intellectual property lawsuits. The company sued at least one of its clones, the Australia-based Scoopon, for registering the trademark “Groupon” and squatting on groupon.com.au. The case settled out of court. Facebook game-maker Zynga, another billion-dollar company, is suing São Paulo-based Vostu for copyright infringement while simultaneously defending itself against a lawsuit from Los Angeles-based SocialApps, which is suing Zynga for copyright infringement, violations of the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act and other claims.

SocialApps claims that Zynga used its code to build Farmville without adequate compensation. But most derivative startups don’t steal code—they look at a site and reverse-engineer what they see. “Most of these companies are using more or less standardized protocols,” Mr. Furman said. “They may even be using off-the-shelf software.” The service built on top of the technology, he said, is in most cases what companies want to legally protect with patents for the way the service works, copyrights for the way it looks and trademarks for the name and branding.

Fast-follower startups are an international industry, much like the “fast fashion houses” such as H&M and Zara that spot a new design on the runway and place cheap knockoff in stores just months later. China has its own versions of most successful startups—which, conveniently enough, tend to be blocked by the government’s censors—including Twitter, Facebook, Google, Quora and a score of Tumblr clones such as Dian Dian, which differentiated itself in its first iteration with Chinese writing and a darker shade of blue. German entrepreneurs Oliver, Marc and Oliver Samwer are notorious for producing copycat start-ups. The brothers attempted to partner with eBay to launch the German version of the auction site; when eBay didn’t respond, they made their own--which they sold to eBay for $50 million four months after it went live, according to the New York Times. Oliver Samwer co-authored a book in 1998 called America’s Most Successful Startups: Lessons for Entrepreneurs. One of their incubated startups, Wimdu, is a mirror image of the short-term rentals site Airbnb which is valued at $1 billion dollars. Airbnb said of Wimdu: “These scam artists have a history of copying a website, aggressively poaching from their community, then attempting to sell the company back to the original.” Wimdu told us it’s building a business, not angling to be bought.

Check Out A Side By Side Comparison of Fast Followers, From Wroupon to FreundeFeed

But unlike the so-called patent trolls—companies that exist solely to extract money from new start-ups via broad, vaguely-worded software patents—the fast followers are considered an acceptable part of the web ecosystem rather than contemptible parasites. Like the fast fashion houses, fast follower startups serve different markets, iterate on the originals, and keep first movers moving fast to stay ahead.

As University of Washington professor and former Microsoftie Scott Berkun says in his book The Myths of Innovation, all new inventions are basically collaborative. Technology evolves by group effort. Even the Chinese clones, safe in their protected market, eventually start innovating on the original ideas. “Zhihu [Quora clone] and DianDian [Tumblr clone] are following a common pattern of Chinese internet companies. Copy first, innovate later,” Kai Lukoff wrote on the Chinese tech blog TechRice. “Clones though they may be at present, I personally find myself rooting for these upstarts.”

In January, Match.com introduced a feature called DateSpark, which Aaron Schildkrout, co-founder of the local dating site HowAboutWe, thought looked familiar. “The Match implementation was, like, a very overt copy of HowAboutWe, the language, the design,” Mr. Schildkrout said. “It was kind of like an ugly, poor duplicate of what we had built. I felt like it was a little lame but I understand why they would do it and felt simultaneously that it was really affirming.” Match.com did not respond to a request for comment.

Hitting back, HowAboutWe offered Match.com subscribers a three-month subscription for free, though Mr. Schildkrout sounded decidedly unthreatened by the larger company. “The core outdated lameness of Match persisted,” he said. “It would have been cool if they did what we did and did it better, so we could learn from them.”

Does HowAboutWe copy other people? we asked.

“Yeah, constantly,” he said, citing Twitter and OKCupid. “I wouldn't say copy but we have taken huge pieces of ideas from other people and their great implementations—that’s part of what being a great user experience designer is. I think that’s a healthy dialogue that exists between competing companies.”

HowAboutWe has not attempted to patent the idea of a dating site built around proposing date ideas. “Our task is to be incredibly innovative, creative, try things quickly and figure out what works, kill what doesn't work, continue to iterate on what does, and therefore beat out anybody that's trying to copy us,” he said.

Entrepreneurs do often have identical ideas independently as technological evolution makes new things possible. The emergence of services like Twilio, which makes it easy for developers to send text messages and make phone calls from mobile apps, inspired a staggering number of group texting startups around the same time, including GroupMe, Groupie, Fast Society and the recently-folded Freespeech, and that’s just in New York. Mr. Furman gets waves of clients who ask him about patenting the same thing. “In a month, six or seven people come to me with virtually the same idea!” he told Betabeat.

But it’s a different story when there is a possibility of consumer confusion. A trademark application takes only six to 12 months to process, and it only costs a few hundred bucks to send a cease-and-desist letter, as the New York-based founders of the application-hosting service Nodejitsu did when an Arizona startup offering the same service launched under the similar name NodeFu.

At the time, the NodeFu website referred indirectly to Nodejitsu: “We started this project because the ‘other’ node.js hosting services were not sending out coupon invitations.” But NodeFu’s founder Chris Matthieu said the branding was unrelated. “There is a trend in the software industry now around ninjas and apps/sites ending in the suffix ‘fu,’” he said in an email. “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, Mr. Matthieu later changed his company’s name to Nodester.

Check Out A Side By Side Comparison of Fast Followers, From Wroupon to FreundeFeed

*UPDATE: This ad turned out to be a parody. "This can't possibly generate any responses, I thought," writes Ted Dziuba, the listing's author. "Nope. 31 replies in about 2 hours, before Craigslist pulled the post."

A version of this story appeared in print in the New York Observer the week of Sept. 2, 2011.

It sounds like a Mortal Kombat match-up: Heroku vs. Nodejitsu! The former, one of Y Combinator's biggest exits, recently launched support for node.js app hosting--the gold rush that New York-based Nodejitsu jumped in on a year ago.

Nodejitsu knew this was coming, it was just a matter of when. But node.js is still relatively unknown, and the highly-visible Heroku could end up sucking up the air before the younger start-up can get its own lesser-known, albeit catchy, name out. We asked CEO Charlie Robbins how he plans to handle competition from the Silicon Alley giant.

Is Heroku's product a direct competitor to Nodejitsu?

Yes, Heroku's offering directly competes with our personal and small business node.js cloud hosting offers. I have used Heroku in the past when I did some Ruby development, and their workflow doesn't change switching over to node.js. I've heard feedback from some of their customers in the IRC room(s) that it is still somewhat rough around the edges, but clearly their new stack is a big step forward for them. On the lower-level, the work they've done with LXC process virtualization is very interesting when one considers trying to fully utilize available resources.

Did you guys expect Heroku to come out with node.js support?

Heroku's experimental Node.js support came out in April 2010, and their first beta support was released at Node Knockout last year. We've known about it from the beginning thanks to our friends in the community.

Are you worried about it? Scale of 1 to 10?

Putting something on a scale of one to ten suggests that it is a one-dimensional problem and our considerations around the market are far from that.

Does this change anything for Nodejitsu's strategy?

We always had a diverse strategy with a strong focus on a public PaaS offering. In other words, the breadth of our product scope has always exceeded that of Heroku. I'm not really at liberty to talk about the specifics right now, but we've got some tricks up our sleeves that (among other things) really harness the power of building a cloud platform on top of node.js and upcoming releases will demonstrate this to the public more clearly.

Does Heroku's size and visibility give them a leg up on you guys? Or does Nodejitsu's laser-focus on just node give you guys the advantage?

That's what being a start-up is all about right? To put it another way: do you think that the size and visibility of Microsoft Azure gives them a leg up on the AppHarbor guys? Cloud infrastructure is a very competitive market and the fact that we're still here has nothing to do with our competition and everything to do with us, the team we've built, and the community we've help support over the last 18 months.

On their blog, Heroku says they "must balance the goals of being a curated, erosion-resistant platform against keeping pace with extremely active developer communities such as Ruby, Ruby/Rails, and Node.js."

At its core, that statement is something that a lot of companies struggle with. That is, how to balance and prioritize the time and resources of the business between its core product and any open source efforts it may have. Open source moves extremely fast, and it can be difficult to find the diamond in the rough so to speak.

Nodejitsu is a company that couldn't have existed without the amazing open-source community around node.js, and we knew it would continue to be a big driver for us which is why we've made so many core components of our production stack open source. If I had to put a number on it, I would say that over 75 percent of our production stack is open-source software that we have built, maintain, or someway contributed to.

Releasing so much of our stack as open-source software makes building the core product and supporting the open source community one in the same; win-win for everyone. On one side, the node.js community is enriched because there are more battle-hardened, actively maintained libraries to use and on the other side Nodejitsu gets the benefits of all the feedback and diverse usage scenarios of the open-source community at large. A great example of this is haibu, our open-source node.js application server that runs on every one of our drone instances. It's core to our business, but it's also open source. Win-win.

What kind of awareness/penetration does node have at this point? I'm still seeing 'what is node.js' blog posts in various places. Is it still growing at the same rate? Does Heroku's node move mean more exposure for node (seems like a good thing for Nodejitsu).

Node.js has continued to onward and upward: year over year growth in all of the relevant community metrics (mailing list, IRC, Github) is well over 100 percent, sometimes exceeding 500 percent. There are over 2,600 open source modules on npm, the node package manager (think Ruby gems). Companies like Microsoft are stepping up and supporting the project instead of trying to reinvent it on the CLR. Libraries are starting to mature, and I think in the next 6-8 months some kill tools will be released that will cannibalize more developers from other communities.

Is there anyone else you consider a competitor at this point?

I don't think that there is anyone else who is both focused on building cloud infrastructure for node.js and supporting the user space (or as we affectionately call it "user land") through open-source contributions like Nodejitsu. "User land" is everything that is not shipped with node.js core, which is an exceptionally large area of applications, libraries, and frameworks that we love building out and supporting.

What's the status of Nodejitsu right now?

Nodejitsu has been growing steadily since we last spoke. We've made some really great hires from both inside and outside the Node.js community. We're really excited about having Saadiq Rodgers-King as our new COO, his last company's successful exit to Facebook last year really rounds out the executive-level skill set.

We have continued our maelstrom of open source projects; across the entire team we have almost 100 projects and more than 60 just between the founding team: Marak, Paolo and myself. Three of our team members (Marak, myself, and Dominic Tarr) are on the top 10 list for most npm modules. That's not to say that we haven't grown and gotten the same feedback on our core product (which has been great), but there is an extremely strong focus on open source software at Nodejitsu. Honestly, what I enjoy most is the random "thank you" emails and GitHub messages I get from developers using our open source software.

GAWKER CONSORTS WITH HACKERS. Gawker's Adrian Chen has been tirelessly tracking the story of Lulz Security hack attacks. Mr. Chen spoke to a member of the collective via Skype, he claims, and although we're not sure how Mr. Chen would know one way or another if he was Skyping with a Lulz hacker, the quotes are amazing.

"As an arrogant and violent sociopath driven to a frenzy by the sense of my own power, I can't divulge the upcoming releases," he said. (Earlier in our chat, Topiary had brought up a March Gawker article that he said portrayed him and his crew as "arrogant sociopaths.")

After all this bluster, we asked if Topiary was worried at all about being caught. His response: "Worrying is for fools!"

MOAR TECHSTARS! The line-up of TechStars start-ups and hackers should be coming down the pike soon, but we'll just tease a few more: Add a content platform/marketplace, a closed social network, and an SMS-based queuing system in addition to the ad tech start-up, food delivery start-up and fashion start-up we teased last week.

RUMBLINGS FROM THE HACKER NEWS MACHINE. Nodejitsu could be in big trouble as Y Combinator rival Heroku rolls out its competing node.js support this week, several sources told Betabeat. The New York start-up had a headstart and benefits from its singular focus on once type of hosting, while Heroku "must balance the goals of being a curated, erosion-resistant platform against keeping pace with extremely active developer communities" in different languages. Hard not to picture the rivalry as a Japanese martial arts fight scene in the snow, arewerite?

COMPETITION. Fortune is seeking a tech writer--a certain graying newsosaur is ramping up its tech coverage--and now TechCrunchers are coming to New York? Let's get out before this thing jumps the shark.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE FACE. Facebook has [edit: not acquired, hired the people behind] pretty, pretty Daytum, the two-person New York-based start-up that has been helping users organize and make spiffy all that data we create: check-ins, runs, hot dogs eaten. The app will live, the company said, but the team is moving out West.

THAT WAS FAST. Is there a talent crunch? We thought we had heard something like that. But the engineer-centric, General Assembly-headquartered start-up Nodejitsu, which just raised its $750,000 Series A, has hired three developers and one social media junkie. Three of the hires are in New York. "Spend funding, acquire ninjas," said co-founder Marak Squires. "And I got one in Texas and one in SF, so thats five total... It's easy to hire good developers when you have cutting edge technology and you are awesome." And they're still lookin'.

OBLIGATORY HACKATHON NEWS. Betabeat quoted designer Cemre Güngör in a post about hackathon fatigue this morning. About an hour later, we received word that Mr. Güngör is involved in organizing one! "I'm helping launch an awesome event (way more awesome than any of the hackathons running in NYC)," he said. "Basically a hackathon for designers.. nobody's doing it yet. It was very successful in SF so we're trying to bring it here." The hackathon will bring together experienced designers in product, interaction and web to co-work on hacks or personal projects for a full day in small groups. May 7, Pivotal Labs, apply here at the Product Design Guild.

DEALS. New York-based deals site BuyWithMe announced that it has hired a new CFO, Scot Rosenblum. Scot comes from Brightcove.

"YELP FOR HOTNESS." Talent Fare uses geo-location to find the "talent" or attractive people at local bars using crowd-sourced ratings. Available for Android and as of today, the Apple App Store. Apple rated it 12+ for Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity, Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References, Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor and Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes. Dunno, we use Color. Siiiike. We don't use anything, because this is shameful!

ALSO: Location-based Leetto launches new beta with "blasts." Bravo creates Top Chef tour on Foodspotting. Crisp Media launches platform for building HTML5 ads and will announce funding soon for expansion to Asia.

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.