I’m very excited to share that Pulse has announced it’s series A funding round! All of us are still fired up about last week’s Apple Design Award at WWDC and our recent 4 million user milestone, not to mention that today is our co-founder Ankit’s birthday. Thanks to the team for their tireless work and to everyone who has helped us get here!

Check out some of today’s press:

Pulse Blog – Announcing Our Series A Financing
TechCrunch – 4 Million Users Strong And Apple Design Award In Hand, Pulse Grabs $9 Million Series A
WSJ – Pulse Taps $9M To Win Battle For Mobile-News Consumers
Forbes – News Reader Pulse Raises $9 Million
Mashable – Pulse Passes 4 Million Users, Raises $9 Million for Visual News Reader

Working for a startup usually means putting in more hours than others. Recently, I spent two days on less than 3 hours of sleep in order to push out our new Pulse.me release. This doesn’t seem strange to me and didn’t make me unhappy. In fact, it was one of the most exciting and fun things I’ve done in a while. However, after mentioning it to some friends, I realized not everyone understands why it can be good to spend so much time “working” to build something you believe in.

Upon hearing about my sleep deprived state, my friend sent me a link to the top 5 regrets people make on their deathbed along with the comment “you might need this.”  I appreciated the link and enjoyed the reminder to live life to the fullest, especially with regards to keeping in touch with friends and loved ones. I also realized that my friend didn’t understand that for me the long hours I put in are all about fulfilling my dreams of creating new technology and impacting the world in a positive way. According the article, not chasing after dreams is people’s #1 regret.

Continue Reading »

In addition to the regular Pulse Blog where we regularly share updates about our latest features and new content, Pulse now has an Engineering Blog!  The goal is to share some of the exciting engineering work that goes into bringing users the Pulse experience they’ve come to expect. To kick things off I added a post about Using Data Analysis to Discover Top Stories.  In the post I share a bit about how we use AWS to collect and analyse our data, along with how we serve up the feeds we build via AppEngine.  Check it out!

If you use multiple git repositories, it’s only a matter of time until you’ll want to refactor some files from one project to another.  Today at Pulse we reached the point where it was time to split up a very large repository that was starting to be used for too many different sub-projects.

After reading some suggested approaches, I spent more time than I would have liked fighting with Git to actually make it happen. In the hopes of helping someone else avoid the same trouble, here’s the solution that ended up working best. The solution is primarily based on ebneter’s excellent question on Stack Overflow.

Another solution is Linus Torvald’s “The coolest merge, EVER!” Unfortunately, his approach seems to require more manual fiddling than I would like and results in a repository with two roots. I don’t completely understand the implications of this, so I opted for something more like a standard merge.

Goal:

• Move directory 1 from Git repository A to Git repository B.

Constraints:

• Git repository A contains other directories that we don’t want to move.
• We’d like to perserve the Git commit history for the directory we are moving.

Continue Reading »

A few months ago I mentioned that I left the government/research world (Sandia Labs) and joined an exciting new startup.   I’d like to share a bit more about my experience so far and announce that we are hiring!

Those who have worked at a large company and then moved to startup can probably relate to my experience.  First, without a doubt, the most motivating and fun part about working at Pulse is seeing the impact of my work. And I don’t mean just having someone say “Good Job” or receiving a strong performance review, I mean seeing thousands of people USE the results of your work and submit feedback about how it benefitted their lives.  At Pulse, this experience is magnified by the fact that we release new product features every two weeks, and not ever quarter, or every year!

Continue Reading »

Google AppEngine is a great tool for building simple web applications which are automatically scalable. All of the basic building blocks are readily available and accessible from both python and java. This includes a database, a caching layer, and support for background tasks.

What about the big data analytics and informatics that made Google famous? Does AppEngine help us there as well? The answer is yes; although with some serious limitations.

Continue Reading »

After a year and half of big data research for the government and quite a bit of fun with Hadoop, I’ve decided to join some good friends at an early-stage startup called Alphonso Labs.

Pulse is currently the #1 news reader on the iPad, iPhone, Andriod app stores.  I’ll be leading the development of our backend data platform and working with a great team.

As we start to build out Pulse’s backend, I’ll be continuing to experiment with Google App engine.  Stay tuned for more posts in that regard.

Continue Reading »

There has been a lot of coverage in the news lately about payday loans and check cashing services. They routinely take advantage of people in hard financial times, charging them interest and fees up to 300% per year. Because of the predatory nature of these services, there has been a strong push for legal oversite.

But these types of predatory practices are much more widespread than one might think. Consider credit cards. The way a credit card company makes a lot of money is when someone can not afford to pay off what they charge and must maintain a balance for an extended period.

Large car manufacturers are also in the game.   Continue Reading »

Question / Pain #1:  Why must bills come in the mail and be paid by snail-mail check (or sometimes over the phone during business hours)?
Question / Pain #2:  Why must the bill payment workflow be manual, resulting in waisted time and forgotten bills?

Answer:  Legacy systems & dinosaur companies

Use Case:  Bill from medical lab arrives via snail-mail 6 weeks after appointment.  No further reminders.  Did the customer get/pay the bill?

Solution Idea: Continue Reading »

A few thoughts from my first test of Google App Engine.

My goal was to put up a prototype java web app for pushing email alerts based on RSS content (more to come on the full idea). Unfortunately, it took much longer than I expected to get things going (longer than my web app protoype took to write) – leaving me feeling a bit disappointed.  On the up side,  the app has been running quite well for about a week now.

Continue Reading »