Anso Labs is helmed by Jesse Andrews, the former lead architect at Flock, the Web-browser company that was recently acquired by Zynga, and Soo Choi, a former exec at Booz Allen Hamilton. Anso Labs is best known for its work on the cloud computing front with NASA, the U.S. space agency.

The move takes place against the backdrop of a surge in consolidation in the cloud computing and data center business. Last week, Time Warner Cable dropped $230 million for NaviSite. And on Jan. 28, Verizon acquired Terremark for $1.4 billion. That one-two punch in data center deal-making has led to persistent speculation that other data center companies, Rackspace among them, will be rolled up by larger companies–like Hewlett-Packard, Dell or Cisco Systems–that are eager to add cloud services to their portfolio.

Ask Rackspace executives about this–and I have–and they’ll tell you they’re not thinking about that. Rather than being rolled up by someone else, they’re focused on rolling up the assets they want to grow, and to remain independent. Late last year Rackspace acquired Cloudkick, a start-up focused on building cloud monitoring tools.

Rackspace did $629 million in revenue in 2009, and is expected to show annual sales of about $775 million when it reports fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow. It has 100,000 customers, and while many of them are small- and medium-size businesses, larger enterprise customers like Coca-Cola, Target and Vodaphone are tapping Rackspace for Web hosting and to run their cloud applications.

Rackspace wants Anso Labs for its expertise and devotion to OpenStack, an open-source cloud computing software project backed by Rackspace, Dell, Citrix, Cisco and Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu flavor of Linux.

Rackspace wants to create a bunch of inter-operable cloud services so that customers can move workload from one cloud service provider to another at will, giving them increased flexibility. It’s comparable in some ways to vCloud from VMware and Eucalyptus.

Flock, a five-year-old start-up that also has offices in British Columbia, Canada, was working on what it calls a social Web browser. And, despite never really taking off, received a lot of praise. A Zynga spokeswoman declined to comment.

We were not able to pin down a price, but the company has raised $30 million in venture capital over its lifetime, reports TechCrunch, which first broke the story. The company was founded by Geoffrey Arone and Bart Decrem. Decrem went on to be the CEO of Tapulous, which he sold to Disney. Shawn Hardin is now president and CEO of Flock.

Consider this an “acqhire” because we heard Zynga was particularly interested in Flock’s technology team, which will be joining the FarmVille and CityVille maker in its San Francisco headquarters.

This is Zynga’s first acquisition of 2011 after acquiring seven companies in 2010. The most recent was mobile-game developer Newtoy, which added additional mobile talent to Zynga’s staff.

At the end of this video interview with BoomTown about RockMelt–a new social browser that debuted in beta last night via yet another broken news embargo (thus, I have just joined the army of TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on this irksome issue)–the two founders politely tried to gloss over my calling it a “Facebook browser.”

Except, um, it is.

Sure, as Eric Vishria and Tim Howes correctly note, there are Twitter and other news apps present. And I even like the mantra for RockMelt, which “re-imagines the browser around friends, feeds, and sharing.”

But that would be–for the most part right now–friends on Facebook, feeds from Facebook and sharing with Facebook.

In fact, the whole shebang is essentially–as you can see from the screenshots below–a big wet kiss to Facebook.

Still, RockMelt certainly could cause a bang, since it is funded by Marc Andreessen, via his venture firm Andreessen Horowitz–along with a passel of Silicon Valley luminaries such as longtime exec and mentor to the tech stars, Bill Campbell.

Andreessen, of course, is the legendary entrepreneur who invented the browser and founded the first commercial Internet company–Netscape–16 years ago. (He is also, coincidentally or not, on the board of Facebook.)

Still, with all its pluses, the Mountain View, Calif.-based RockMelt could have a hard time breaking through the crowded browser software market to reach consumers.

Microsoft now dominates the market with its Internet Explorer, followed by other big players, such as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.

While not the first browser focused on social networking–that would be Flock, which is still around–RockMelt is trying to distinguish itself using these now-popular and innovative services.

You sign on to it using Facebook, natch, and the friends you choose are arrayed down one side vertically, while news and other apps are on the other.

It’s built on Google’s Chromium open source technology, which makes RockMelt a truly Silicon Valley creation.

It will be interesting to see how RockMelt does with its powerful and myriad social connections, but until we find out, here are Howes (who once worked at Netscape) and Vishria talking about their plans:

And here are the screenshots of RockMelt (click on the images to make them larger):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101108/heres-a-better-name-for-rockmelt-the-facebrowser-plus-boomtowns-two-dude-video/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20100713/seeing-all-your-social-networking-in-one-place/ http://allthingsd.com/20100713/seeing-all-your-social-networking-in-one-place/#comments Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:58:41 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1277 If you’re one of the many people who can’t stop checking Facebook and Twitter, you’re not alone. The more we rely on social networks for keeping in touch with friends and family, the more we feel glued to these social-networking services. Wouldn’t it be easier to have all of your updates in one place?

This week, I tested two free tools that track all your social networks right within your Web browser’s user interface, so you can avoid the hassle of visiting multiple websites or firing up a separate program. I used the newest version of Flock for Windows, downloadable at beta.flock.com (the Mac version is due out in late August). I also tried Yoono (yoono.com) for Firefox and Chrome browsers.

Even though these two programs operate differently—Flock is its own browser and Yoono is a browser add-on—they both give people shortcuts for keeping tabs on those with whom they share online connections. If, for example, one of your friends shares Flickr photos from a Keith Urban concert, they appear in a panel on the side of the Web browser, saving you a trip to Flickr.com. These programs also make it simple to simultaneously post a status or article on more than one social network.

Both Flock and the Yoono add-on for Google’s (GOOG) Chrome browser are still in their beta, or test, phases. A desktop version of Yoono is available for Windows, Mac and Linux PCs, but I focused on the browser add-on that built social networking into my Web-browsing experience. The Yoono browser add-on currently only works for Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome.

But there are some issues with Flock and Yoono. Neither program offers pop-up notifications that appear regardless of what program you’re using, like the way Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook’s email notifications or TweetDeck’s notifications work. This means you’ll need to be using the browser to know about friends’ newly shared content.

Another issue is that since Flock is its own browser, you’ll have to use it in place of your current browser, which could be frustrating if you don’t prefer it. Yoono floats as a standalone, thin panel that can appear to the side of any opened program, like Microsoft’s Outlook or Adobe (ADBE) Reader, as long as you resize the other program’s window. Firefox or Chrome must already be running for Yoono to work, and you have to open the Yoono panel each time you want to see it.

When I downloaded Flock, a notification explained that all of my saved browser settings, like passwords and bookmarks, could be imported. This spared me from re-entering my username and password for each social-networking account.

A closeup of the Yoono side panel.

Users can create a Flock account, which makes it easy to sign in and access that account’s settings on any PC after downloading the program. Flock settings include groups of friends that are manually created by dragging and dropping names from lists into groups. I created a “Best Friends” list for the people I communicate most often with, and a “Work” list for colleagues. I liked being able to create groups of names from all sorts of networks, not just from one place.

A drop-down menu at the top of Flock’s panel let me choose what groups’ information was displayed. I toggled between seeing just my Work group, just Facebook friends or a list of All Friends. A Flock representative said it will be out of beta in late August.

Sharing in Flock can be done by typing status updates into the top of the side panel or by clicking a cool “Talk” icon that appears on the left of the URL bar of the currently opened Web page. Clicking this instantly shares the page you’re viewing with a social network and lets you add a comment.

Yoono supports 11 networks in its browser add-on panel. I linked my Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, AIM and Google Talk accounts to Yoono and they all remained signed in and organized in a thin panel. Other supported networks include MySpace, YouTube, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, MSN and Yahoo (YHOO) Chat. Sharing from Yoono is done by clicking on a green icon, which prompts you to use one click to share “This Page” or “Selected Items.”

I really liked the way Yoono identified new status updates with a yellow highlight that faded after a few seconds. This made it easy for me to identify, in just a glance, which content was new. Yoono did a nice job displaying shared photos in Twitter; these images appeared in-line with tweets, saving me the hassle of clicking on links to Web pages where the photos were posted. Thumbnails for videos shared on Twitter also appeared in-line with tweets.

While some people may not want to be distracted by updates while they’re browsing, for those of us who can’t quit socializing online, Flock and Yoono are a good way to stay in the know.

—Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100713/seeing-all-your-social-networking-in-one-place/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090211/using-foxmarks-on-different-computers/ http://allthingsd.com/20090211/using-foxmarks-on-different-computers/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:07:02 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/20090211/using-foxmarks-on-different-computers/ Here are a few questions I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

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I have Firefox on my home laptop, but Internet Explorer on my office laptop. Can I transfer my Firefox bookmarks on my home computer to IE on my office computer using the Foxmarks bookmark-synchronization service you recommended? And how would I go about doing it?

Yes. You start by uploading your bookmarks from Firefox at home to your Foxmarks Web account, using the Firefox version of Foxmarks. That will establish the bookmark collection on the Web site as identical to your Firefox collection. Then, you install the IE version of Foxmarks on your office computer, and, when it prompts you to sync, you can either merge the Web-based bookmarks you previously uploaded from Firefox with the ones already on IE, or choose the option to overwrite the IE bookmarks entirely with the ones online.

Does the Foxmarks service work with AOL’s browser bookmarks?

AOL’s browser is not supported. Neither are some other browsers, such as Opera or Google’s Chrome. Foxmarks currently comes in versions only for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari (Mac version only). The Firefox version also works with Flock, which is a browser heavily based on Firefox.

Do you have any idea what the realistic hardware requirements will be to run Windows 7?

Microsoft hasn’t announced these yet. But the requirements for the current beta version are likely to be similar to those for the final release. The beta hardware requirements are: a 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor; 1 GB of system memory; 16 GB of available disk space; support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory available for graphics; and a DVD-R/W Drive.

In the past, Microsoft’s minimum requirements have tended to understate what’s needed to run Windows well, even when doing typical tasks. It’s too early to say if this will be true of Windows 7. But I can say that, in my testing so far, the beta of Windows 7 runs much more quickly and smoothly than Vista on the same hardware.

• You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090211/using-foxmarks-on-different-computers/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20080806/flock-web-browser-eases-multitasking-but-has-drawbacks/ http://allthingsd.com/20080806/flock-web-browser-eases-multitasking-but-has-drawbacks/#comments Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:26:44 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20080806/flock-web-browser-eases-multitasking-but-has-drawbacks/ Even with the advent of tabbed browsing, which allows you to keep multiple Web pages open in the same window, Web multitasking can be a pain. You have to constantly click back and forth among tabs if they contain fast-changing material you check often, like the status of your friends in social-networking services, or updates to news feeds.

Trying to share information with people on your Web-based networks can introduce another layer of digital jujitsu. It can be awkward to snag a photo or a snippet of text from one Web site and send it to a friend in a social network on another, or post it to your own blog.

But I’ve been testing a little-known Web browser that attempts to solve these problems. It’s called Flock, and it bills itself as “the social Web browser.” I found that it worked well, but it isn’t for everyone, and it has some important downsides.

Flock is a modified version of the excellent Firefox Web browser that tacks on some special features for social networkers and bloggers. It’s available free at flock.com in essentially identical versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Flock adds a special vertical “sidebar” at the left of the browser that keeps your social networks, photo sites or news feeds visible at all times, regardless of what page you’re viewing in the main browser window.

For instance, with Flock, you can see that you have a new friend request in Facebook, or that a pal has posted new photos in Flickr, without clicking away from reading this column in the main browser window.

But, wait: There’s more. With one click, you can display a horizontal “media bar” across the top of the browser containing thumbnails of all of a friend’s photos or videos from a social-networking or photo site, again without changing what’s in the main browser window.

These two special bars also allow you to take action. For instance, you can just drag images and text from Web pages into the sidebar to share them with friends listed there. And any photo on the media bar can be quickly emailed or posted to a blog.

There’s also a “Web clipboard,” which can save any text, image or link from a site in the main window by merely dragging it to the Flock sidebar. Once an item is in this clipboard, it stays there until you delete it.

Flock has its own built-in blog editor, which allows you to quickly compose, edit and publish blog posts containing interesting items you encounter on the Web. And it creates a special personal Web page, called My World, which combines your social-networking updates, news feeds and photos.

I found Flock productive and fun to use. I tested its special sidebar with my Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube accounts, and with my favorite news feeds. I also used another of Flock’s features, which let me check my Gmail and Yahoo Web-mail accounts without navigating to their main pages. And I published several posts from within Flock to a test blog I maintain. All of this worked as promised.

In my tests, I used the latest edition of Flock, version 2.0, which is built on the new Firefox 3.0 browser. Even though this latest iteration of Flock is still in beta status, I found it to be quite stable.

But Flock isn’t for everyone, and it has some significant drawbacks. For one thing, you’d need a fairly large or high-resolution monitor to accommodate the Flock sidebar and media bar without reducing the size of the main browser window so much as to require too much scrolling. Even with a big or high-res screen, you will see fewer toolbar links and browser tabs than normally.

And, Flock has a busy, even frenetic, look that can be distracting and annoying. So many things are going on at once that it can be hard to concentrate on the main attraction: the Web page you are reading in the main window.

Also, while Flock does indeed spare you from clicking back and forth as often among tabs in your browser, it doesn’t entirely eliminate clicking around. Its sidebar can display only one type of information at a time — social networks and photo-sharing sites in one view, news feeds in a second, the clipboard in a third, and Web bookmarks in a fourth. So you’ll have to click the sidebar’s own controls fairly often to check all of these, or keep going to the special My World page in the main window.

Finally, Flock works with only certain social networking, photo-sharing and blogging services. While it does support most of the main ones, there are some glaring omissions. MySpace isn’t yet on the list, though it’s expected to be added next month. But Hotmail, Windows Live Spaces and SmugMug, among others, are missing. And it doesn’t support any instant-messaging services at all.

Flock does a good job at the tasks it sets for itself, but I would recommend it for only the heaviest and most impatient social networkers. For most others, Flock is overkill.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080806/flock-web-browser-eases-multitasking-but-has-drawbacks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20070917/techcrunch-community-collaboration/ http://allthingsd.com/20070917/techcrunch-community-collaboration/#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2007 23:44:33 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070917/techcrunch-community-collaboration/ Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski is blogging from TechCrunch40 in San Francisco. Technical difficulties at the conference site prevent him from live-blogging, so he summarized the third session on community and collaboration.

The third round of presentations and expert reviews comes off more as a series of infomercials than evaluations. Fitting, I suppose, since as panelist judge Ron Conway notes, “M&A is the most vibrant liquidity path today.” All these presenters are likely looking to be acquired.

Paucity of hard questions from panel, although Don Dodge (once of Napster) does pose the copyright violation question to a MusicShake, a venture that seems destined to run afoul of copyright law.

Interesting. Conference organizer Mike Arrington comments on the softball questions being asked and puts a harder question of his own to Flock, noting that the social Web browser, which has been in development for years, has only launched its 1.0 version today. Why should someone who uses a browser as well-supported as Firefox switch to Flock, which hasn’t proved its reliability? Can the community depend on support and regular updates? CEO Shawn Hardin says yes, rattles something off about the company’s commitment to its software.

(Wondering now if conference might be more effective presented in a “Gong Show” format. Expert panelists scrawling their scores and interpretive drawings on oversized white notecards, with a big ‘ol gong behind them just waiting to be struck. Rip Taylor and Yossi Vardi. Onstage. Together. Agh. My head hurts.)

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