april showers bring may flowers

Most of you know that we had planned to launch a week ago. Well, we were ahead of ourselves. We decided to take a step back and let the new site burn for a week just to make sure everything was up to snuff. It’s been a week, no major issues and we’ve entered a new month. We’re psyched to launch sphere. Here’s what is new in the V1.5 release:

• custom range histogram;
• sphere it bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you’re reading on the Web;
• top queries this hour/ this week;
• RSS;
• community feedback buttons throughout the site;
• expanded related media verticals including podcasts (Yahoo! API), books (Amazon API), and photos (CNET Webshots API);
• expanded related news articles coverage (over 50 mainstream news sites such as CNN, NYT, ESPN, Fox, USA Today to name a few);
• expanded profiles;
• featured blogs for over 12,000 keyword search terms for broad topics including venture capital, baseball, anime, food, web 2.0, tech news, knitting, culture, etc.; and
• a brand new back end that scales.
  

Our two favorite features are the 1) custom range feature (you’ll find it in the drop down box that says “last week” - do a search on mohammed cartoons and hit custom range - it really illustrates it’s utility) and 2) the sphere it bookmarklet.

Give it a spin and let us know your thoughts. We hope you like it.

Sphere: Related Content

we’re flush now

At Sphere we want to completely change how people search and discover blogs. We started sphere by raising a small angel round last Spring some angel investors with halos — Doug Mackenzie, David Mahoney, Kevin Compton, Mike Winton, Phil Black, Vince Vannelli and Will Hearst. We worked like crazy over the summer to build an algorithm that helps readers more easily discover great blog content — and perhaps inspire more people to read blogs and maybe even become bloggers. It’s a simple idea but very hard to do.

The feedback from our beta launch gave us a lot of confidence that we’re on the right path so we decided recently to raise $3.75 million from a select group of partners. Our core group of investors are joined by new investors Trident Capital, Hearst Publishing and Scott Kurnit. We’re very psyched about this group, a mixture of individuals and firms with deep passion to build great, ground breaking consumer technology companies.

We’re very fortunate to have an A+ team around the table. Our investors are complemented by the talents of four advisors starting with our cofounder Toni Schneider along with Mary Hodder, Matt Mullenweg and Scott Kurnit - an exceptional crew to save us from ourselves from time to time.

The growth of the blogosphere has outpaced anyone’s expectations. With this financing, we’re in position to provide bloggers and blog readers with a great blog search/ discovery experience. We’re using the money to build a rock solid infrastrucutre, add features that people want and need (check out our custom range searches, related media, featured blogs and sphere it bookmarklet - all of which, I dare say, are great stuff) and hire a few very talented biz dev and engineering rockstars.

Stay tuned as we get ready to go live.

Posted by Tony

Sphere: Related Content

enuf to get rolling

Automattic announced last night they’ve raised a seed round of capital - Matt explains the thinking behind it here. VCMike, one of the board members and investors, shares his thoughts here. The investor group is very seasoned, including Polaris Ventures (Mike Hirshland), Blacksmith Capital (Phil Black & Jon Callaghan, now at True Ventures), Radar Partners (Doug Mackenzie), and CNET (Shelby Bonnie).

Ever since meeting Matt a few year agos and becoming a WordPress user, I’ve been more and more drawn in by the product and its incredible community. To make it even more exciting, Toni Schneider, a good friend and co-founder of sphere joined forces with Matt beginning of this year. Great Product + Talented Team/Investors + Good People = Exciting/Great Opportunity. As part of their financiing, I’ve joined the Board of Directors - I couldn’t be more excited about supporting them and playing a role in how Automattic leads the blogging software space.

Posted by Tony

Sphere: Related Content

c’mon already!

I read a blog post by Michael Air tonight asking what happened to Sphere so I thought this was a good time to come out of a self imposed hibernation and let you know what’s going on.

We’re very much alive (and well!) Our private beta has been really great, awesome feedback along with some excellent constructive guidance. And, as Michael noted, the very positive blog reviews by some really great bloggers (John Battelle; Om Malik; Michael Arrington @ Techcrunch; Jeremy Zawodny; Paul Kedrosky @ Infectious Greed, etc) created a lot of excitement early on - a little too much perhaps. We spent December putting in place a new data center that can now handle substantial amounts of traffic. We can launch tomorrow if we want so our only hold up is ourselves.

End of December, we made a decision to add some very cool, advanced features to the site that we believe pushes the quality of blog discovery to a very different level. Delaying our launch was a very hard decision, one in which we went back and forth on for weeks. Ultimately, despite the great beta feedback, we felt it important to take a step back and work towards our larger goal. I’ve been involved with a number of start ups (Oddpost; Post Communications; Iconoculture; and Automattic/ Wordpress - by the way, this is my first post on the wordpress platform - very nice!) and I believe you need to trust your instincts. In this case, our instincts tell us we can do something really great so we’re focused on getting there. Once we launch (soon), it gets harder to develop, especially with a small team (we’re 4 people). So, we’re in that mode right now, hyper focused, making real progress at a fun rate.

In addition to version 2, we’ve had some excellent achievements that we look forward to sharing with everyone as we get closer to launch. In fact, we’re psyched to go live and get your feedback. Stay tuned.

Posted by Tony

Sphere: Related Content