Four NYU/Courant students are busy correcting a disturbance in The Force.

Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy stopped talking about the privacy shenanigans of dominant social networks and started building a better decentralized solution: Diaspora.

Their timing couldn’t be more prescient — The Social Network, a Scott Rudin/Kevin Spacey produced movie (IMDb) releasing in October based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, sheds light on the real genesis of Facebook — and it ain’t pretty:

There’s your deadline, Diaspora.

Charlie O’Donnell from First Round Capital offers an intriguing path forward.  Ping me if you need bitchin IP strategy/defense — I’ve yet to lose an IP battle and for your cause I’ll do it for free.

One of my earliest Ingk Labs SaaS spinoffs was sold this week. InstantService was acquired by ATG (NASDAQ: ARTG) and will be merged with their growing suite of enterprise e-commerce services.

Upon debuting InstantService, I recall AT&T, IBM and Motorola asserting, “We believe our customers prefer to [disconnect from what was then mostly dial-up and] call us in our call centers. And chatting is free.” ~ [ palmface ]

My how times change — they are all customers today and InstantService continued to grow through the dot-com collapse and our ongoing recession. As it turns out, customer support is among the last services that corporations consider on the recession chopping block. Sony reduced phone use by 50% and achieved over 90% customer approval. McAfee now handles 80% of all support through InstantService chat, cutting average wait time from 25 minutes to 40 seconds and reducing support costs by 86%.

At Ingk Labs, we call this an experiment in recession-proof technology. The exit will further fuel Ingk Labs investments supporting New York entrepreneurs.

http://bit.ly/isartg2

Posted via email from Damion’s posterous