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Motorola Snaps Up 280 North (YC 08) For $20 Million
- smithbits 16y agoDoes this make it more or less likely that I'll see http://280atlas.com/ http://280atlas.com/ without paying for the beta program?
- swaits 16y agoI've paid for the beta program. It's $20 and that goes toward your purchase of the final product anyway. I wouldn't worry about it too much though, because it's not really Beta quality. I wouldn't even call it Alpha. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing them one bit. I love it and am incredibly impressed with what they've accomplished! Hopefully this will give them the resources to finish it!
- quux 16y ago"We believe 280 North will be instrumental in helping us continue to foster the Android ecosystem with innovative web-based technologies and applications." Ironic, since cappuccino is an implementation of Apple's Cocoa frameworks in javascript. Are we going to see a lot of Objective-j running on droids now?
- zitterbewegung 16y agoI agree. It doesn't seem like a good fit for motorola unless they start adapting their framework for the droid?
- mhd 16y agoIn light of the recent Oracle lawsuit and Apple's general litigious nature, I asked myself the same. The OpenStep specification is, well, open as far as I know, and nobody ever bothered GNUStep, who even seemed to extend from the OpenStep roots into Cocoa territory, but when it's Motorola, and not just a random bunch of hackers… Still, congratulations to the 280 North guys. That seems like a neat bundle of money.
- whalesalad 16y agoWhat do you mean are we? Objective-j does run on Android (aka, Droids as people are beginning to refer to them thanks to Verizon's marketing)... it runs on anything. It lives inside of the web browser. The "j" in Objective-J stands for JavaScript :) Any half-decent browser will run Objective-J applications. Motorola's move has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the people. As someone commented earlier, Motorola just gained one hell of a web team.
- quux 16y agoYeah, I know droid != android. But since I was thinking about motorola I said droid by accident. What I guess I'm asking is will motorola really use 280 North's tech for web based projects that any phone could access? Or will they be presented as bundled apps that appear to be native Android apps but really written in Objective-J using cappuccino?
- greendestiny 16y agoI think its everything to do with the technology. Web apps are a huge part of the future for mobile devices - this gives them a huge in. Frameworks are really important strategically - they can optimize Cappuccino for their devices and even add functionality specific to their devices.
- pchristensen 16y ago%^@&&(*%^@%@! pg, please, please get the people building awesome tools to become ridiculously profitable like Wufoo! I so wanted to use 280 North but I was scared they would get bought and vanish. My fear came true. EDIT: Half true. No word yet on what Motorola is going to do with them. Congrats to the 280 Norths, YC, and their other investors. Let's all join hands and pray that Motorola allows development on Cappuccino et al to remain public.
- js4all 16y agoI also wondered about the future of Cappuccino. The current version is LGPL licensed, but they may rerelease future versions under a different license.
- saikat 16y agoDon't be too worried. I'm pretty sure they are still going to work on Cappuccino, and the community is still very active and helpful.
- dstein 16y agoThere will be competitors. I can assure you of that.
- asnyder 16y agoThere are plenty of other awesome tools out there. The valley has a tendency to idolize certain people unnecessarily, this leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Worst of all the attention that one development tool or team gets, reduces the attention that other teams get. As a competitor (former competitor?), I sincerely congratulate 280North, but to suggest that they're the only ones building awesome tools is the furthest from the truth. Edit: No reason to down-vote this. No animosity should be read here. I was just saying there are other cool development tools. I congratulate 280North.
- woid 16y agoCongrats to 280 North guys.
- davidw 16y agoMan, I'd be willing to sell them Hecl for 200K :-) Congratulations, guys!
- JMiao 16y agohaha, i saw ross & tom last night and asked how things were going. "good." motorola bought a hell of a web team.
- pmjordan 16y agoWow, congratulations! You wouldn't know from the founders' twitter streams.
- Luecke 16y agoThat's because no official announcement has been made.
- JoeH 16y agoCongratulations Ross, Tom & Francisco - go YC08 Alumni ;)
- samratjp 16y agoWow that was fast! Congrats guys. I expected Apple to snatch Atlas for Objective-J and it would make sense for iOS Objective-C devs to jump ship easily. But, man this is a great deal for Motorola. These guys did two startups worth of work atleast and 280 Slides alone is a startup itself :)
- necubi 16y agoApple threw their lot in with Sproutcore, the other cocoa-inspired (though not Obj-C inspired) thick client framework by hiring the lead developer (who's now departed) and implementing MobileMe with it.
- samratjp 16y agoI am well aware of SproutCore, but Capuccino is more cleaner than Sproutcore in that you just write Obj-J, not worry about HTML, CSS. The Capuccino framework works well because it's exactly like iOS kit and the native app export option is way better than Adobe AiR - no flash, all JS! I wish SproutCore dev could be faster - it's god awfully slow with dev server and preview. But, that's not a big problem for now.
- ynniv 16y agoInstall "thin", and use the latest code - development is much faster than they used to be.
- _pius 16y agoThat's awesome! 80x return is pretty sweet ...
- rafaelc 16y agoJust to clarify, it's not an 80x return or even close. I think you may have gotten that by taking the money in ($250k) and looking at the exit price ($20mln). The truth is that if the round was priced, then the investors took call it 25% of the company, meaning the post-money was $1mln and thus at a $20 mln exit there was a 20x return... which of course is still pretty good.
- _pius 16y agoGreat point, I did some quick irrationally exuberant math and that's how I got the 80x. :)
- rythie 16y agoDoes anyone know what ycombinator got from this $0.4m to $2m (based on 2% to 10%)? or was it diluted in the later round?
- lyime 16y agoPretty sure YCombinator's stake would be diluted, unless the 250k was raised part of the YC round. Which is possible but unlikely.
- rythie 16y agoCrunchbase says the 250k round was only 2 months later, so maybe no dilution? http://www.crunchbase.com/company/280-north http://www.crunchbase.com/company/280-north
- superk 16y ago"Developers we’ve spoken with have praised the framework, calling it one of the best ways to make applications with little programming knowledge." Surely they mean "little web programming knowledge" and a lot of Objective-C knowledge. I don't really understand this page either: http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/04/cappuccino-brings-cocoa-like-programming-to-the-web/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/04/cappuccino-brings-cocoa-lik... "There are other advantages to basing things in Objective-J as well: advancements in the Cappuccino frameworks don’t wait for the slow emergence of new standards, developers only deal with one language, and Cappuccino comes with useful language features simply not available in JavaScript." Isn't that backwards? New features come out in Javascript and I have to wait until they're incorporated into Objective-J to use them?
- boucher 16y agoWhat new feature has been released in JavaScript in any widely usable way in the last decade?
- superk 16y agoFunny you should ask that because the internet is just now taking a big lurch forward with Canvas and everything in HTML5. Would Objective-J quickly adopt new features in Javascript or stay closer to developments in Objective-C? Since everything gets compiled down to Javascript in the end (and Objective-J doesn't feature 100% browser compat either) I don't see how they can offer anything not possible with Javascript to begin with. Actually that's a question? I don't understand how it is different than, for example, CoffeeScript - but I would be happy if you could explain how it is.
- boucher 16y agoIt's very similar to CoffeeScript. It is a strict superset of JavaScript, so all valid JavaScript remains valid Objective-J. You also shouldn't confuse the language (Objective-J) with the Cappuccino framework. Objective-J is just about providing certain language level features on top of JavaScript, the same way Objective-C implements features on top of C. It's also 100% cross browser, so I'm not sure what you mean by that. Cappuccino is a full fledged framework for building apps which run in a browser. I'd argue that it's the best, but my opinion would hardly be unbiased. It does in fact implement an API for using Canvas (which also works in IE). Though, that isn't a JavaScript feature. And pretty much nothing in HTML5 is present in 50% of the browsers out there.
- saikat 16y agoI'm so incredibly happy for these guys. Deciding to use Cappuccino has been one of the best technical decisions I've ever made. It's an incredibly fun and impressive framework. But what really made using Cappuccino so rewarding was interacting with Ross, Francisco and Tom. The 280North guys have consistently gone out of their way to help me out, and it's very obvious that they are incredibly talented developers. They have also managed to create a great and very active community in a very short period of time, and are just very nice, great people. They deserve this like none other. Congrats guys and looking forward to where you go from here!
- cameldrv 16y agoBased on the Motorola guy's comment, I can't help speculating that they will retarget their system to parse Objective-C, implement Cocoa Touch, and emit something that can be run on Android phones -- maybe Javascript. If there were an easy way to port iPhone apps to Android, Android would have a lot more apps.
- hammerdr 16y agoFrom a technical perspective, this isn't likely the purpose of the acquisition. Cappuccino does relatively nothing in terms of making headway in parsing Objective-C, implementing a (native) Cocoa Touch or integration with the Dalvik VM system except by way of a browser. Not to say that the 280North guys aren't capable of that but Cappuccino certainly isn't geared toward that type of goal.
- alextgordon 16y agoIf there were an easy way to port iPhone apps to Android, Android would have a lot more apps. Until Apple changes the developer agreement to say that App Store apps may not be ported to other platforms, that is.
- irons 16y agoNobody else is having visions of Metrowerks? Lucky you.
- krevis 16y agoExactly. Motorola doesn't have a great track record at successfully integrating software companies that it acquires. It feels like where software goes to die.
- Keyframe 16y agoCongratulations, great news for guys that worked hard on it. May I ask what is the reasoning/breakdown of $20 million valuation? For example id Software was sold for, rumor has it, 105 million dollars - only 5X the amount, while they generated over $2+ Billion in revenue with their products over time.
- erikpukinskis 16y agoid Software was sold?
- mediaman 16y agoThat price seems very low for an incredible brand franchise and IP rights to Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein, Rage -- only $105mm? An article I picked up on it indicates they had 105 developers at the time of acquisition. I would bet that rumor is false, or that there was some sort of extreme extenuating circumstances that we're not privy to.
- Keyframe 16y agoIt was indeed $105 million as SEC filing showed http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1092835/000109283509000004/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1092835/00010928350900000... I am pretty sure there were some additional benefits, as in "you don't tell us what to do, ever" or something.
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- richcollins 16y agoIs this YC's biggest exit?
- nl 16y agoDid they really only take 500K in funding? (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/280-north http://www.crunchbase.com/company/280-north) I know they had some revenue, but 500K across 4 developers + expenses for 2.5 years seems low.
- daniel_levine 16y agorumor from a very good source has it they actually took less
- thingsilearned 16y agoCouldn't have happened to better or harder working guys! Congrats!
- gmosx 16y agoMotorola snapped a word-class team
- mattmaroon 16y agoGrats guys! Perhaps the founders will be so kind as to tell us if they manage to retire on $4.3m each :)
- niccolop 16y agoAgree with everyone else! Couldn't have happened to a better group of guys! Well done! Now go and kick Motorola into shape!!