18 ms·

Beam has raised $9.5M to reinvent the browser

142 points by cpeterso 6y ago

ChuckMcM 6y ago
Personally, I see this as an opportunity for Apple to actually invest heavily in Safari. But Apple's walled garden is no different than Chrome or Edge from a risk perspective and poor Mozilla is so captured by the search traffic payment they get that I really don't see any progress here for many years to come.
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  Why would this be an opportunity for Apple to spend time and money on something that isn't going to change their marketshare?
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    As we return to "browsers with an editorial opinion" market differentiation is based on that opinion. Apple has been pushing privacy really strongly to move people to the Apple ecosystem. As the "browser that won't let you be tracked or compromise your privacy" they have an opportunity to further "choke" the data/advertising streams of competitors. It is the advantage of having a weapon that you can use that damages your competitor but not you. Chrome started out that way[1] as a way to attack Microsoft (and to some extent Firefox) When you see things like Tim Cook saying he will "end" Facebook, you might reasonably ask, "Wait how could he possibly do that? He doesn't control the web." And you would be right, with the exception of understanding that Facebook makes its money on data extraction[2], and a lot of Facebook users are also Apple device users. So on the Apple device Apple can build a browser that lets their users access Facebook while taking away as much data as possible from Facebook. This damages Facebook revenue, forces them to invest in counter measures, and doesn't change Apple's revenue model hardly at all. As a result, from a business perspective, I think Apple could justify investment here in a browser that puts forward a point of view that makes it harder for Google and Facebook to make money. [1] FWIW I worked at Google when Chrome was launched and understand that there was the 'open standards' narrative but there was also a pretty obvious 'hurts Microsoft/Apple' narrative. So the technical reasons to invest aside, my opinion is that the real reason any large enterprise invests in anything is because they have a reason to believe it will make their business stronger, more difficult to attack, more profitable, or with luck all three. [2] I think the term 'surveillance capital' a bit too inflammatory.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  From which risk perspective?
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    Well perhaps if we talked about browser perspective? Chrome - we own the world so use our browser with its proprietary extensions and only works completely if you hand over a Google account. Firefox - we try to follow standards and be good to users as long as we don't piss off the people who are paying our salaries too much. Edge - So much faster and better than Chrome all you need to do is let us know all about you and what your doing and use our services that give us more 'stickyness' over your use of our browser. Safari - Oh hey, we need a web browser so uh, here is a web browser. Brave - Crypto currency is the best, oh here's a browser. Chromium/Konquerer/etc/etc - Opensource is the best! Only we don't do what all the other browsers do, and half the time you'll find the web page is rendering weird but you can fix the code and send us a PR and we'll look at it and contemplate it. Sure that is a cynical view, just trying to share what it feels like that to me.
    - threeseed 6y ago
      > Safari - Oh hey, we need a web browser so uh, here is a web browser. It is also the browser that has the best battery life on a Mac. Also I find it to have the fastest UI.
      - ChuckMcM 6y ago
        Oh I agree it is an excellent browser for many things, and it is nicely "unOpinionated" on many things. It really only trips me up with web sites that are trying to "guess" my web browser and they guess wrong and then Safari ends up doing something stupid because the webdev thought it was firefox or chrome.
    - gnicholas 6y ago
      > Chrome - we own the world so use our browser with its proprietary extensions and only works completely if you hand over a Google account. I've never logged into a Chrome browser with my Google account. What am I missing? I know you do have to log in if you want to purchase certain Chrome extensions, but now that Google killed their payment infrastructure, this seems not to be an issue anymore.
lern_too_spel 6y ago
This sounds like a browser extension.
- smt88 6y ago
  It should be one, but you can't raise money as easily by pitching an extension. I also doubt that the state of the art of ML can achieve his vision of taking meaningful notes from websites.
- dingaling 6y ago
  Yes, if be very surprised if it wasn't built on top of Blink. It reminds me of a Mac program that a work colleague used, Devon Agent, that consumed the web content that he browsed and indexed it along with local content. There also used to be a functionally simpler Recoll plugin for Firefox that indexed web text. I really should look to see if that has migrated into the new plugins model.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Yeah, but if you brand it like a browser and if you're french, you're pretty likely to get EU funds to burn. From a nordic perspective: - We could have gotten our vaccines quicker outside of the EU. - Insane amounts of our tax money is spent on idotic programs, often favoring France and Germany. Somehow, an EU membership seems a lot lot less appealing now.
  - fabrice_d 6y ago
    From having worked at a large French mobile operator, I can tell you that the EU money granted in European projects was/is not solely favoring France and Germany: we had a couple of people working full time to put together proposals for EU funded projects; they had a very high success rate and one of their tricks was to always include partners from small/poor European countries, because EU wanted to help these countries. So for a while, we had a bunch of projects with greek partners, even if they didn't bring much to the table from a project perspective. I hope this genuinely helped them. You reaction is typical of small, rich nordic countries unfortunately.
smt88 6y ago
Article doesn't mention rendering engine, which I was most curious about. The answer appears to be WebKit: https://startuparound.com/read/1603209607.9733047/Beam-is-building-a-web-browser-that-gathers-knowledge-from-your-web-activity-%E2%80%93-TechCrunch https://startuparound.com/read/1603209607.9733047/Beam-is-bu...
- tgv 6y ago
  But that limits use to macOS, period. > and is working on a Mac app for now Indeed. And $9.5M is a bit too much money for a mac app, IMO.
amelius 6y ago
> “So if I’m into guitar making and a Japanese guy has an 80% overlap of links on guitar making, it’s highly probable that I’m going to enjoy looking at what he’s done and enjoy navigating into his knowledge base. This is still very far away, but it’s basically a cultural search engine.” ...
- hinkley 6y ago
  That interesting bit was first uttered at least a dozen years ago, and for the most part we've collectively decided that following that thought to its conclusions is exactly how Facebook got into the Current Troubles with farming dissent. What it doesn't take into account is that the reason I only think 90% the same things as someone else is that I've accidentally or consciously avoided going down certain rabbit holes that are likely to break your brain. This concept that 'there are no dangerous thoughts' is directly at odds with, "there are some things you can't unsee". If you believe both things at once, then you're fooling yourself. We protect our lizard brain from stuff that is rationally objectionable all the time so that we don't horrible things in the spur of the moment. A lie is best concealed between two truths, and cults of every kind know that they have to find common ground with you. And on the internet there isn't a door for you to hide behind and "don't make eye contact" doesn't work as well. And then you add social networking algorithms that build the cult for you. You don't even have to decide to build a cult to end up running one.
- mft_ 6y ago
  This would be a huge moderation task, I suspect. Maybe solvable... but probably very difficult. (Wasn’t there a startup a while ago that let you add notes to any website, and they were visible to all... but it was horribly abused?)
  - huntermeyer 6y ago
    Might you be referring to Dissenter? I think it started as a browser extension, now it's a browser: https://dissenter.com/download https://dissenter.com/download
- dan-robertson 6y ago
brundolf 6y ago
Seeing as the article is almost 100% focused on UX, the browser is almost certainly Chromium-based. In which case it'll be joining the club alongside Brave, Vivaldi, Silk, and many other browsers aiming to "reinvent what it means to browse the web". There's nothing wrong with that (though I'm personally a little weary of the song and dance), but it isn't a shot across the bow of web-monopolists like some here might be hoping.
- akdor1154 6y ago
  An old Techcrunch article says they are using WebKit and focusing on a Mac app.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    Hum, interesting. So still not a whole new browser engine, but could conceivably help balance things out a little bit one day.
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    So like a GNOME Web for mac but backed with VC money?
    - Yaggo 6y ago
      I don't think there's any mention of the new browser being open source? Not sure why you used GNOME Web as an example. Safari is based on webkit and actually webkit is originating from Safari (forked from khtml ages ago).
      - emayljames 6y ago
        I assume is used as an example as it is OSS, and lays bare the ridiculous nature of pouring money into something that could conceivably be gotten for free.
    - akdor1154 6y ago
      and duct-taped to Anki.
rmellow 6y ago
So this is StumbleUpon, with extra steps. I liked StumbleUpon, and I think there's a place for it. Perhaps not as its own browser.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
woeirua 6y ago
This reminds me of this idea that someone had a while back to record every moment of your life with a GoPro-like camera, and then use AI to catalog the salient parts for later reference. The problem was, predictably, that the signal-to-noise ratio was far too low. There was just far too much video to review to find the really interesting things, and so they gave up on it after a year or so working on it. This is also the primary reason why I've given up on all these note taking apps. Once you get too much data in them, they just become totally unmanageable. There's a real problem here to be solved, but I just don't see how you make tangible progress on this one without having something much closer to strong AI.
- karlding 6y ago
  Google also tried doing this via Google Clips [0], which is now discontinued. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/16/20917386/google-clips-dead-discontinued-rip-camera-ai https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/16/20917386/google-clips-de...
  - darkerside 6y ago
    Which is more likely part of a pattern with Google than a pattern around note taking software
- nexthash 6y ago
  I've noticed this as well - a significant problem with knowledge bases is that as knowledge builds up it becomes exponentially more difficult to organize. The article did hint at a solution, however: they are hiring machine learning experts to develop a system that reads into websites you are browsing and doing the organizational grunt work for you. Personally, I believe this is a good solution: throw knowledge in, let AI organize it, and provide a search function to quickly retrieve it again.
  - woeirua 6y ago
    The question then is will the search be as good or better than Google? If it's not (and it's exceptionally unlikely that it will be better), then it'll be faster to find the original source on the web via Google.
vincent_s 6y ago
In case you're looking for the actual app: https://beamapp.co/ https://beamapp.co/
- afterwalk 6y ago
  That has got to be the most frustrating landing page design... waiting 5-10 seconds for the slogan and the call to action to appear...
  - baah 6y ago
    >"It also tracks how long someone spends on a website as a measure of how useful the information is likely to be" they're already gaming their own algorithm
  - dmix 6y ago
    I couldn't find it in Google either. Found two other tech companies using Beam in their product name (not to mention Erlang) which is only a minor issue. And the site doesn't mention browser anywhere on the homepage (SEO?). Even the footer and "Join the beta" CTA only loads after the generic slogan. Hopefully this isn't an indication of their design and web dev sensibilities. Which are critical for browser development. This is some basic work you do before doing PR rounds. Edit: found a blog post with their 'vision', with content that would work better as homepage https://getonbeam.medium.com/beam-bright-paper-1ca4ae41ae0b https://getonbeam.medium.com/beam-bright-paper-1ca4ae41ae0b
  - skulk 6y ago
    It's almost like they were trying to reverse-optimize conversion, like maximizing click-away rate. I really want to see how someone well-versed in UX would justify such design, because I see it in many places and am absolutely baffled that anyone could think it's a good idea. It also requires (what I see as) a nontrivial amount of JS/CSS wand waving, which compounds my confusion.
    - ordinaryradical 6y ago
      Might be wise for a beta sign up, depending on the objective? If you only want the true believers/patient, this is actually a useful pattern for you. Maybe the issue is that we assume betas are a way of establishing a customer base instead of establishing a product?
tomaszs 6y ago
The idea is superb. It is actually a big niche. We all have pieces of our memories as photos. But our digital life is not documented. If I want to use my browser history, a lot of pages from some years ago dissapeared. Bookmark handling by all major browsers is lame. I'd love to use a browser that helps me gather knowledge and create my own Internet Archive. I just hope he won't sell the company when it kicks off
- goleary 6y ago
  There are numerous solutions to this problem. Both historius & pinboard provide full text search on any link that you save. https://historio.us/ https://historio.us/ https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/ Their note taking leaves something to be desired, so perhaps Beam could provide some value add in this area.
  - tomaszs 6y ago
    They don't seem to do it automatically and on mobile devices. So there is also a way to improve
sneakernets 6y ago
Why, oh god why? Imagine if all these soon-to-fail initiatives helped to develop Firefox, an actual alternative to Chrome and Blink-based browsers!
nexthash 6y ago
I love this concept, its like a power user's knowledge base specifically tailored to consuming large amounts of web content. There are definitely power users and busy people who could benefit from this. However, I think the most difficult thing this project will encounter is making money, because it is too niche to attract a large enough user base to force Google to pay for default status (not willing to switch browsers). I hope that once they roll out their core knowledge base system they pivot to making a cross-platform group of browser extensions/mobile browsers to expand the reach of their service.
StreamBright 6y ago
I though it is Brave. At least to me they did reinvent the browser, no ads and the amount of garbage blocked is amazing. The performance is also pretty good.
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  Turning shields off is a real eye opener when viewing news articles. My phone basically locks up.
- tyler_sf 6y ago
  Same story with me with one thing added: never thought I would be doing the whole digital currency thing (BAT in this case) and now I'm doing small contributions to independent sites/content creators.
Krasnol 6y ago
Sounds like an article advertising an addon not a browser.
tppiotrowski 6y ago
“What do I have for all these hours I spent on the internet?” he said. “Nothing. I’ve got three bookmarks and a few notes here and everything else is basically lost.” Myself and developers I've worked with suffer from this. Information is easily searchable so we never bother to memorize the function signature for things like substring(). Is it the (start index, end index) or the (start index, length)? This repeated googling of the same question (sometimes on a daily basis) is draining. I have a belief that this phenomenon is one reason HN bashes on tech interviews. Developers find that they actually have very little retained knowledge when placed in front of a whiteboard. They are dependent on Google and SO. I don't think taking notes in this NEW browser will alleviate this problem. Instead of Google you now depend on notes. Personally I recommend Mastery Learning[1]. It involves more effort but produces much more confident developers. When confronted with a new technology suggestion, don't forget to ask "What problem does this solve?" Maybe there is a low-tech solution that's better suited. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I can't say I find this to be a problem for development, but I still bash on tech interviews. Mainly because the knowledge base required to solve an interview is vastly different from the knowledge base you use in your everyday job. As a teenager I was memorizing PHP function parameters for fun and I rarely had to jump to the docs. Even now that I have a family and my brain doesn't want to work, I rarely reach for GO or SO to do something. I mainly rely on static typing and jump to definition in the IDE. Every once in a while I forget something stupid (eg. I forgot how to floor in JS once and I was stuck with either doing >>0 or google how to Math.floor) but I can't say I would want to store this kind of information anywhere: It's too sporadic and it's incomplete; just keep the documentation of the tools you're using nearby if you need it. That said, I see the benefits for KB and I use them all the time. I agree with you, doing it in the browser won't change things much.
- cjohnson318 6y ago
  Usually, by the time I Google the same thing three or four times, I don't have to Google it a fifth. I use a knowledge base based on Johnny Decimal's system [0], but it's still usually faster to Google something than look it up unless I know exactly where it is. [0](https://johnnydecimal.com/ https://johnnydecimal.com/)
mpalmer 6y ago
"[The browser] tracks how long someone spends on a website as a measure of how useful the information is likely to be, and then can match that to an existing card to store relevant information." This is probably a simplification of how it works, but taking this description at its word, Beam will just start assigning outsize relevance to sticky high-engagement sites like Youtube and Twitter. Hope it's more impressive than that!
- simonh 6y ago
  If it can associate the information to particular videos, Youtube channels and keywords in the video title, that could be useful.
1MachineElf 6y ago
Sounds like the kind of thing I'd want, but I don't want to have a very high degree of control over how that info is shared beyond my own personal computers.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
chaostheory 6y ago
Someone is trying to something new with idea tribes, which is great. The last big push was from reddit with sub-reddits. It'd be interesting if idea tribes were merged with a wikipedia.
munificent 6y ago
> And yet instead of feeling accomplished, several years ago Leca realised he felt an internal void. > Has anything he’s built really improved people’s lives? > To hear Leca describe it, the development of Beam is as much an effort to improve the web browsing experience as it is a spiritual quest for meaning. > “The only reason I’m doing this is to be working for the greater good,” Leca said. “Is this something I can explain to my kid and be proud of the fact that it’s not just a stupid business to make money?” This reads like a parody of SV hubris. It's a startup to slap note-taking onto a browser shell. It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better in real ways. But... this is a VC-funded startup for a browser shell. > “What do I have for all these hours I spent on the internet?” he said. “Nothing. I’ve got three bookmarks and a few notes here and everything else is basically lost.” It's crazy to me that the author thought that and their solution was "I should make it easier to take notes" and not "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media." The knowledge base should be primarily in your head. If your mind doesn't feel like a knowledge base to you, it's because we're all so busy jamming new data into it that we never slow down and take the time to reflect and process what we've already consumed.
- azinman2 6y ago
  > "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media." How do you know that is the target audience? To me it's people who are research focused, which doesn't necessarily mean they're fucking around at all. Academics, scientists, etc, often spend a ton of time reading papers and researching things + taking notes. You're making a big assumption here.
  - type0 6y ago
    Yes and that already exists - https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/ and works as a simple add-on. I don't see what new benefit the dedicated browser could bring.
    - azinman2 6y ago
goldforever 6y ago
Another useless company and waste of money.
rbtprograms 6y ago
the tech industry and its insistence upon framing everything around "improving lives" is extremely grating. this guy feels unfulfilled and like he hasn't improved anyones life so he tries to make a browser? i really wish people like this would just come out and say "yea i am successful and i am going to keep pushing because i think i can do better." is that really so bad?
- munificent 6y ago
  There's a failure mode I see pretty often here: 1. My culture tells me that success and fulfillment comes from doing X. 2. Get really good at X. 3. Still feel unhappy and unfulfilled. 4. Do not reflect on why that didn't leave me fulfilled. Do not critique my culture. 5. "Maybe if I get really good at X. I'll just X better than anyone has ever X'd before. That'll do it." I have certainly fallen into this trap many times. I am problably currently occupying it on multiple axes. But I've at least learned to escape it in at least a couple of ways.
  - danielscrubs 6y ago
    I’m way more cynical than that. Him framing the narrative that yeah what I did before was nothing compared to what I will do next is going to get investors and that is what separates him from the other millions of developers out there; his sales skills.
    - rbtprograms 6y ago
      I considered this as well, although from my view I think it just shows how uncreative a lot of people in tech are. this type of messaging clearly works, or we wouldn't see it constantly.
    - munificent 6y ago
      I get you. Personally, I made a deliberate choice this year to try to give more benefit of the doubt and charitable interpretations to narratives I see online. I think one of the key problems facing our culture is mistrust, and the only way I know to remedy that at the individual level is to just... trust more. I accept that sometimes I'll get burned. I'd rather have that happen than to contribute to a society where everyone is untrustworthy because they know they are not being trusted anyway. I don't want people to feel that they may as well do the crime if they're gonna do the time (be mistrusted) anyway.
cryptica 6y ago
I wonder why these so-called 'serial entrepreneurs' don't get tired of playing this phony game of crony capitalism... Why don't they try real capitalism. The one where you take a real risk and produce real value. Bootstrapped, no corporate insiders to provide you a crony-exit, no shell game, no revenue laundering, no tech journalists... And why is the guy who built a career out of making products which, by his own admission, are detrimental society, be the one to build products to supposedly help society. He should stick to his own crony capitalist bubble and let the real value producers do the socially useful work. If a crony capitalist wants to switch sides and do good work, they'd better start on the right foot by bootstrapping it with their own money. It's too easy to make amends using other people's money. These entrepreneurs' win-win mindset is the root of the problem. It's not enough that they get a ton of money playing some phony shell game, they also want to have the moral high ground pretending to be the good guys.
asadlionpk 6y ago
How is this not just an extension on Chrome by a single developer?
- gnicholas 6y ago
  Fair point, though as someone who manages two Chrome extensions, I can speak to the danger of building a company on that foundation. For example, they offered payments through the Chrome Webstore for years. Late last year, they announced they were pulling the plug on payments, effective February 1. They gave scant instructions on how to migrate your users, and they declined to provide you with the email addresses of said users, so that you might be able to contact them. They didn't make explicit what would happen if you failed to migrate people in time (would they lose access to your extension, have free access forever, have it uninstalled from their browser?). They also declined to notify the users that Google payments were going away and that they should expect paid extensions to have a new payment system and upcoming migration. They also have new extension review rules all the time, and they occasionally nuke your extension for no good reason. [1] It's nice to be able to reach people on Chrome, but it comes at a substantial cost. 1: https://beelinereader.medium.com/google-yanked-my-chrome-extension-this-sunday-d9c481e285cb https://beelinereader.medium.com/google-yanked-my-chrome-ext...
  - Glench 6y ago
    Yeah, Google's handling of extension payments was terrible and sad. On the flip side, I made a replacement https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com that should do a lot better job — I made it for my own extensions and it works cross-browser too :)
- kirubakaran 6y ago
  It is https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/ :-) Browser extension, solo developer (me), solving the same problem
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    Nice! How does your feature set compare to Beam? Looking at pricing, it seems like your primary gating feature is search history, is that right? What does the storage space relate to? Is that just the text from the bookmarks? Or do you store entire pages? Fun fact: I actually know the guy featured in your first customer testimonial. I met Alan years ago at a hackathon, where he helped me build one of the earliest versions of what has become my startup. Great guy!
azinman2 6y ago
> “I felt the bulk of tech I was working on was detrimental to society,” he said. “I wasn’t very happy about having 150 guys waiting in the staircase of the company to get a $15 an hour job. I felt myself going the wrong way. So I quit.” (La Poste later acquired Stuart in 2017.) I actually find this quote quite disgusting. You're not happy with having so many people who need a job come trying to get one from you? Do you want to go back to just the land of rich people with rich people problems?
- rank0 6y ago
  The guy is obviously too smart and philanthropic to be hiring plebs that would work for $15/hr.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    I'm shocked he would be comfortable with having a statement so elitist and classist for all to read.
- umamidev 6y ago
  What’s going on with your thought process? Is everything in your life going well?
bitL 6y ago
Building tools for creators usually doesn't pay off :( If you think many people would be taking notes when inspiration strikes them... well.
Simon_says 6y ago
Sounds like an idea for a Firefox addon.
alwahi 6y ago
which is pretty retarded, considering Beaker has done that for free... (haven't read the article, I just want to flame wannabes)
neilparikh 6y ago
OT: Why doesn't the article have a link to the Beam website? That seems like something that would be relevant to someone reading this article. I've noticed this trend a decent amount, where news articles don't link to the very product/study/whatever they're actually talking about. Very frustrating.
lambda_dn 6y ago
Everyone will still use chrome. Example, when I do a fresh install of Windows I use Edge to download chrome then never use Edge again despite all the nags.
- emptyparadise 6y ago
  You're using a Chromium skin to download a different Chromium skin. The power of branding!
wildermuthn 6y ago
The article is pretty light on details, but it appears Beam is attempting to solve the bookmark problem. But that brings up a really fascinating question: what are bookmarks for, and is there really a problem? If not, what is the real problem? Before Google, bookmarks were necessary if you ever wanted to find your way back to a website. Now, all you need is some dim memory of a website to find it with Google. Currently, I only use bookmarks like I used to use fast-dial — to quickly navigate to websites without having to Google for them (or for internal work URLs that are not crawlable). The bookmarks bar has become a built-in concise portal for my various go-to sites. So if the original purpose of bookmarks has been achieved, what is the real problem here? I remember the many hours I used to spend organizing my bookmarks into tidy folders, like a personal Wikipedia of topical links. Many of these sites were blogs that were deprecated by the migration to social media and aggregators. My topical folders are now my Twitter feed and subreddits. So the idea of bookmarks as the “organization of specific topical data” is now outsourced to others. And yet still, I have a nagging feeling that there is something missing from our experience of the Internet, and that some aspect of the concept of bookmarks reveals that problem. Beam suggests that it is marking some piece of information as important — not marking a URL, but marking information itself. As information has grown exponentially, I do often find myself feeling like I’m drowning in a sea of important information, because my mind can only remember so much. There’s a nagging feeling that I’m losing important information, and I know that although I can (and do) bookmark URLs, I haven’t used a non-toolbar bookmark in years. I find myself utilizing various hacks when I find a piece of information I think it important and don’t want to lose: I send myself a link via Slack, or sometimes by text message. How often do I actually revisit those links? Maybe once or twice in years So there’s the problem identified in behavior: bookmarking or otherwise saving URLs, but never actually visiting those links. Am I the only one who does this? Probably not. When I add a bookmark, it is always accompanied by a sense of futility, but I do it anyways! When I leave a tab open to reference later, I know I’ll probably just close it later without a glance. But I still do it. The true problem underlying this futile behavior is obvious and agreed upon: information overload. But we can be more precise: information overload that makes all information ephemeral, when some information should be permanent. When I read an article about Beam, what I want is not only the article itself, but a kind of rap-genius of meta-information I’ve previously marked as important running alongside it. I’d see information about other browsers. I’d see quick summaries of the dead social-bookmarking sites and why they failed. I’d see pithy HN comments about why some people seem to get VC money thrown at them. It would be like this HN comments section, but the only person commenting would be myself with full recall of everything I’d ever read, happily chirping away at every paragraph, line, and word. It would be a genius version of myself with a photographic memory. So there it is: the real problem — we are not geniuses with perfect memory. But it would be pretty cool if we were. If there were a GPT-X continually fine-tuned on everything I had ever read (with meta-data about how long I had read and whether I found it important), then I think it would be possible to at least solve part of this problem — that of not having a perfect memory. But ML has a long way to go until it is capable of producing genius, let alone intelligence. This is to say that Beam has taken on a problem much harder than “bookmarks”, and it is going to take more than a few million to solve.
Yhippa 6y ago
Did anybody figure out how they plan on making money out of this?
idlewords 6y ago
I'm totally willing to reinvent the browser for $8M.
JacobSeated 6y ago
Seems like a pretty bad idea imo. And who the heck gives out 9.5M for an attempt at re-inventing the wheel? Guess someone who has too much cash...
freebuju 6y ago
I could see the potential applications in the note keeping & classification of content use in the education sector.
fudged71 6y ago
It sounds a bit like Vortimo
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
> “If we grab a few percentage points of the browser market, then maybe we can be paid by Google. That’s a long shot, but that’s the thing I’m hoping for.” A well capitalized competitor who only aspires to reach a strong enough position to eventually be paid by the dominant player. This clear and irrefutable evidence of a severely unhealthy market and a textbook case of the impact of monopoly power on consumers. Where's the choice if pretty much all the competitors are aiming to attract Google's business and comply with their vision for the internet?
- ChrisRR 6y ago
  This is like university CS courses where they tell you that anyone can be the next Google or Amazon Statistically, you won't. You're quite likely to be a small to medium sized business owner, or a decently paid independent developer, and that's perfectly fine. But there's no need to convince people to aim for the top and nothing else
  - thundergolfer 6y ago
    It doesn’t seem like that. Related your example to their comment, the very presence of Google is causally linked to the tiny chance of being the next Google Chrome, because Google has monopoly power in search and is leveraging that to power in browser competition. ‘Winner takes all’ markets are created, and can be disassembled. The OP comment is pointing out that to survive and thrive in the browser market an entrant has to seek revenue from its dominant competitor. That is not simply a reality of some businesses being big and some businesses being large. That is anti-competitive.
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  It also means that the business model is still an advertising-funded model - just indirectly advertising-funded, via Google. All the pressure to protect the advertising industry and disseminate advertising will still be present.
- loceng 6y ago
  Or it's a sign of regulatory capture and the VC-financial industrial complex.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
“You’re watching a video, you’ve got an idea, and then you’ve got to do the old dance,” he said. “I’ve got an idea and then I need to include it in my notes app. Then you navigate to it, you put it there, and then you come back to your content. You can do this two or three times a day. But if you do this 20 times, it’s completely breaking your mental flow.” Hmm, I don't know if this is worth making a whole new browser. I use bookmarks for this, and if I'm really interested in posterity I use the OneNote browser plugin to add it to my notes. I know this experience could be a bit more integrated but it feels pretty smooth already, not like something that slows me down. One thing I'm much more interested in in a new browser is breaking the Chromium monopoly. I hope he will take Gecko for his engine so it might get some more traction.
- mcjkrw 6y ago
  Perhaps the real problem is navigating between the apps. I use i3 and I have no problem switching between 2 workspaces in a fraction of a second. Most modern desktop environments try to slow it down by adding some fancy animation or some needless UI component.
  - iFreilicht 6y ago
    Meh, in such cases I’d just put the browser and note-app side-by-side, so switching is quick even with traditional DEs. You can even do this on an iPad and some bigger phones. Why the hell is this guy getting 9.5m for solving a problem that has already been solved?
hobo_mark 6y ago
In principle, the Vivaldi browser already comes with a note editor built in (with tags, markdown support, webpage capture, synchronization...) https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/panels/notes/ https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/panels/notes/ (I wish there was a way to synchronize it with Joplin, which is where all my notes already live)
ksec 6y ago
Someone on HN discussed a similar idea not long ago, where a browser would download and record every single webpage you visited and stored on your computer. And it will record how long you spend on those page as an indicator of importance. You can then easily search back all the information you have read somewhere on the Internet without going to Google. You can then Add notes and Tags to those pages like we do with Bookmarks. I think what Beam proposed here is very similar. Or may be he even got the idea from HN :)
- slightwinder 6y ago
  Basically this: https://getmemex.com https://getmemex.com IIRC
numlock86 6y ago
I am not involved in any browser development, so count me as an outsider. Considering what browsers we have available and taking their estimated development costs into account (not to the point we are at now, but at their release), $9.5M seems like a hobby project at best. What am I missing? And is aiming for a sellout to competitors already a business model in a way that you openly advertise it?
- pwdisswordfish6 6y ago
  $9.5M one time is too little, but you could def get by with funding a competitive Firefox-level product on a budget of $25–30M annually if you ran lean enough and (counter-intuitively) paid high programmer salaries. Pay slightly higher than experienced Googlers make and move the business out of the Bay Area.
wired_devil 6y ago
$9.5M, for a web browser, that doesn't even exist.
dgellow 6y ago
The article really feels like an advertising for the company and the fact that they hire

142 points by cpeterso 6y ago

Personally, I see this as an opportunity for Apple to actually invest heavily in Safari. But Apple's walled garden is no different than Chrome or Edge from a risk perspective and poor Mozilla is so captured by the search traffic payment they get that I really don't see any progress here for many years to come.

TheRealPomax 6y ago
Why would this be an opportunity for Apple to spend time and money on something that isn't going to change their marketshare?
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  As we return to "browsers with an editorial opinion" market differentiation is based on that opinion. Apple has been pushing privacy really strongly to move people to the Apple ecosystem. As the "browser that won't let you be tracked or compromise your privacy" they have an opportunity to further "choke" the data/advertising streams of competitors. It is the advantage of having a weapon that you can use that damages your competitor but not you. Chrome started out that way[1] as a way to attack Microsoft (and to some extent Firefox) When you see things like Tim Cook saying he will "end" Facebook, you might reasonably ask, "Wait how could he possibly do that? He doesn't control the web." And you would be right, with the exception of understanding that Facebook makes its money on data extraction[2], and a lot of Facebook users are also Apple device users. So on the Apple device Apple can build a browser that lets their users access Facebook while taking away as much data as possible from Facebook. This damages Facebook revenue, forces them to invest in counter measures, and doesn't change Apple's revenue model hardly at all. As a result, from a business perspective, I think Apple could justify investment here in a browser that puts forward a point of view that makes it harder for Google and Facebook to make money. [1] FWIW I worked at Google when Chrome was launched and understand that there was the 'open standards' narrative but there was also a pretty obvious 'hurts Microsoft/Apple' narrative. So the technical reasons to invest aside, my opinion is that the real reason any large enterprise invests in anything is because they have a reason to believe it will make their business stronger, more difficult to attack, more profitable, or with luck all three. [2] I think the term 'surveillance capital' a bit too inflammatory.
floatingatoll 6y ago
From which risk perspective?
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Well perhaps if we talked about browser perspective? Chrome - we own the world so use our browser with its proprietary extensions and only works completely if you hand over a Google account. Firefox - we try to follow standards and be good to users as long as we don't piss off the people who are paying our salaries too much. Edge - So much faster and better than Chrome all you need to do is let us know all about you and what your doing and use our services that give us more 'stickyness' over your use of our browser. Safari - Oh hey, we need a web browser so uh, here is a web browser. Brave - Crypto currency is the best, oh here's a browser. Chromium/Konquerer/etc/etc - Opensource is the best! Only we don't do what all the other browsers do, and half the time you'll find the web page is rendering weird but you can fix the code and send us a PR and we'll look at it and contemplate it. Sure that is a cynical view, just trying to share what it feels like that to me.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    > Safari - Oh hey, we need a web browser so uh, here is a web browser. It is also the browser that has the best battery life on a Mac. Also I find it to have the fastest UI.
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      Oh I agree it is an excellent browser for many things, and it is nicely "unOpinionated" on many things. It really only trips me up with web sites that are trying to "guess" my web browser and they guess wrong and then Safari ends up doing something stupid because the webdev thought it was firefox or chrome.
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    > Chrome - we own the world so use our browser with its proprietary extensions and only works completely if you hand over a Google account. I've never logged into a Chrome browser with my Google account. What am I missing? I know you do have to log in if you want to purchase certain Chrome extensions, but now that Google killed their payment infrastructure, this seems not to be an issue anymore.

lern_too_spel 6y ago

This sounds like a browser extension.

smt88 6y ago
It should be one, but you can't raise money as easily by pitching an extension. I also doubt that the state of the art of ML can achieve his vision of taking meaningful notes from websites.
dingaling 6y ago
Yes, if be very surprised if it wasn't built on top of Blink. It reminds me of a Mac program that a work colleague used, Devon Agent, that consumed the web content that he browsed and indexed it along with local content. There also used to be a functionally simpler Recoll plugin for Firefox that indexed web text. I really should look to see if that has migrated into the new plugins model.
tpmx 6y ago
Yeah, but if you brand it like a browser and if you're french, you're pretty likely to get EU funds to burn. From a nordic perspective: - We could have gotten our vaccines quicker outside of the EU. - Insane amounts of our tax money is spent on idotic programs, often favoring France and Germany. Somehow, an EU membership seems a lot lot less appealing now.
- fabrice_d 6y ago
  From having worked at a large French mobile operator, I can tell you that the EU money granted in European projects was/is not solely favoring France and Germany: we had a couple of people working full time to put together proposals for EU funded projects; they had a very high success rate and one of their tricks was to always include partners from small/poor European countries, because EU wanted to help these countries. So for a while, we had a bunch of projects with greek partners, even if they didn't bring much to the table from a project perspective. I hope this genuinely helped them. You reaction is typical of small, rich nordic countries unfortunately.

smt88 6y ago

Article doesn't mention rendering engine, which I was most curious about. The answer appears to be WebKit: https://startuparound.com/read/1603209607.9733047/Beam-is-building-a-web-browser-that-gathers-knowledge-from-your-web-activity-%E2%80%93-TechCrunch https://startuparound.com/read/1603209607.9733047/Beam-is-bu...

tgv 6y ago
But that limits use to macOS, period. > and is working on a Mac app for now Indeed. And $9.5M is a bit too much money for a mac app, IMO.

amelius 6y ago

> “So if I’m into guitar making and a Japanese guy has an 80% overlap of links on guitar making, it’s highly probable that I’m going to enjoy looking at what he’s done and enjoy navigating into his knowledge base. This is still very far away, but it’s basically a cultural search engine.” ...

hinkley 6y ago
That interesting bit was first uttered at least a dozen years ago, and for the most part we've collectively decided that following that thought to its conclusions is exactly how Facebook got into the Current Troubles with farming dissent. What it doesn't take into account is that the reason I only think 90% the same things as someone else is that I've accidentally or consciously avoided going down certain rabbit holes that are likely to break your brain. This concept that 'there are no dangerous thoughts' is directly at odds with, "there are some things you can't unsee". If you believe both things at once, then you're fooling yourself. We protect our lizard brain from stuff that is rationally objectionable all the time so that we don't horrible things in the spur of the moment. A lie is best concealed between two truths, and cults of every kind know that they have to find common ground with you. And on the internet there isn't a door for you to hide behind and "don't make eye contact" doesn't work as well. And then you add social networking algorithms that build the cult for you. You don't even have to decide to build a cult to end up running one.
mft_ 6y ago
This would be a huge moderation task, I suspect. Maybe solvable... but probably very difficult. (Wasn’t there a startup a while ago that let you add notes to any website, and they were visible to all... but it was horribly abused?)
- huntermeyer 6y ago
  Might you be referring to Dissenter? I think it started as a browser extension, now it's a browser: https://dissenter.com/download https://dissenter.com/download
dan-robertson 6y ago

brundolf 6y ago

Seeing as the article is almost 100% focused on UX, the browser is almost certainly Chromium-based. In which case it'll be joining the club alongside Brave, Vivaldi, Silk, and many other browsers aiming to "reinvent what it means to browse the web". There's nothing wrong with that (though I'm personally a little weary of the song and dance), but it isn't a shot across the bow of web-monopolists like some here might be hoping.

akdor1154 6y ago
An old Techcrunch article says they are using WebKit and focusing on a Mac app.
- brundolf 6y ago
  Hum, interesting. So still not a whole new browser engine, but could conceivably help balance things out a little bit one day.
- SahAssar 6y ago
  So like a GNOME Web for mac but backed with VC money?
  - Yaggo 6y ago
    I don't think there's any mention of the new browser being open source? Not sure why you used GNOME Web as an example. Safari is based on webkit and actually webkit is originating from Safari (forked from khtml ages ago).
    - emayljames 6y ago
      I assume is used as an example as it is OSS, and lays bare the ridiculous nature of pouring money into something that could conceivably be gotten for free.
  - akdor1154 6y ago
    and duct-taped to Anki.

rmellow 6y ago

So this is StumbleUpon, with extra steps. I liked StumbleUpon, and I think there's a place for it. Perhaps not as its own browser.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

woeirua 6y ago

This reminds me of this idea that someone had a while back to record every moment of your life with a GoPro-like camera, and then use AI to catalog the salient parts for later reference. The problem was, predictably, that the signal-to-noise ratio was far too low. There was just far too much video to review to find the really interesting things, and so they gave up on it after a year or so working on it. This is also the primary reason why I've given up on all these note taking apps. Once you get too much data in them, they just become totally unmanageable. There's a real problem here to be solved, but I just don't see how you make tangible progress on this one without having something much closer to strong AI.

karlding 6y ago
Google also tried doing this via Google Clips [0], which is now discontinued. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/16/20917386/google-clips-dead-discontinued-rip-camera-ai https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/16/20917386/google-clips-de...
- darkerside 6y ago
  Which is more likely part of a pattern with Google than a pattern around note taking software
nexthash 6y ago
I've noticed this as well - a significant problem with knowledge bases is that as knowledge builds up it becomes exponentially more difficult to organize. The article did hint at a solution, however: they are hiring machine learning experts to develop a system that reads into websites you are browsing and doing the organizational grunt work for you. Personally, I believe this is a good solution: throw knowledge in, let AI organize it, and provide a search function to quickly retrieve it again.
- woeirua 6y ago
  The question then is will the search be as good or better than Google? If it's not (and it's exceptionally unlikely that it will be better), then it'll be faster to find the original source on the web via Google.

vincent_s 6y ago

In case you're looking for the actual app: https://beamapp.co/ https://beamapp.co/

afterwalk 6y ago
That has got to be the most frustrating landing page design... waiting 5-10 seconds for the slogan and the call to action to appear...
- baah 6y ago
  >"It also tracks how long someone spends on a website as a measure of how useful the information is likely to be" they're already gaming their own algorithm
- dmix 6y ago
  I couldn't find it in Google either. Found two other tech companies using Beam in their product name (not to mention Erlang) which is only a minor issue. And the site doesn't mention browser anywhere on the homepage (SEO?). Even the footer and "Join the beta" CTA only loads after the generic slogan. Hopefully this isn't an indication of their design and web dev sensibilities. Which are critical for browser development. This is some basic work you do before doing PR rounds. Edit: found a blog post with their 'vision', with content that would work better as homepage https://getonbeam.medium.com/beam-bright-paper-1ca4ae41ae0b https://getonbeam.medium.com/beam-bright-paper-1ca4ae41ae0b
- skulk 6y ago
  It's almost like they were trying to reverse-optimize conversion, like maximizing click-away rate. I really want to see how someone well-versed in UX would justify such design, because I see it in many places and am absolutely baffled that anyone could think it's a good idea. It also requires (what I see as) a nontrivial amount of JS/CSS wand waving, which compounds my confusion.
  - ordinaryradical 6y ago
    Might be wise for a beta sign up, depending on the objective? If you only want the true believers/patient, this is actually a useful pattern for you. Maybe the issue is that we assume betas are a way of establishing a customer base instead of establishing a product?

tomaszs 6y ago

The idea is superb. It is actually a big niche. We all have pieces of our memories as photos. But our digital life is not documented. If I want to use my browser history, a lot of pages from some years ago dissapeared. Bookmark handling by all major browsers is lame. I'd love to use a browser that helps me gather knowledge and create my own Internet Archive. I just hope he won't sell the company when it kicks off

goleary 6y ago
There are numerous solutions to this problem. Both historius & pinboard provide full text search on any link that you save. https://historio.us/ https://historio.us/ https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/ Their note taking leaves something to be desired, so perhaps Beam could provide some value add in this area.
- tomaszs 6y ago
  They don't seem to do it automatically and on mobile devices. So there is also a way to improve

sneakernets 6y ago

Why, oh god why? Imagine if all these soon-to-fail initiatives helped to develop Firefox, an actual alternative to Chrome and Blink-based browsers!

nexthash 6y ago

I love this concept, its like a power user's knowledge base specifically tailored to consuming large amounts of web content. There are definitely power users and busy people who could benefit from this. However, I think the most difficult thing this project will encounter is making money, because it is too niche to attract a large enough user base to force Google to pay for default status (not willing to switch browsers). I hope that once they roll out their core knowledge base system they pivot to making a cross-platform group of browser extensions/mobile browsers to expand the reach of their service.

StreamBright 6y ago

I though it is Brave. At least to me they did reinvent the browser, no ads and the amount of garbage blocked is amazing. The performance is also pretty good.

ketamine__ 6y ago
Turning shields off is a real eye opener when viewing news articles. My phone basically locks up.
tyler_sf 6y ago
Same story with me with one thing added: never thought I would be doing the whole digital currency thing (BAT in this case) and now I'm doing small contributions to independent sites/content creators.

Krasnol 6y ago

Sounds like an article advertising an addon not a browser.

tppiotrowski 6y ago

“What do I have for all these hours I spent on the internet?” he said. “Nothing. I’ve got three bookmarks and a few notes here and everything else is basically lost.” Myself and developers I've worked with suffer from this. Information is easily searchable so we never bother to memorize the function signature for things like substring(). Is it the (start index, end index) or the (start index, length)? This repeated googling of the same question (sometimes on a daily basis) is draining. I have a belief that this phenomenon is one reason HN bashes on tech interviews. Developers find that they actually have very little retained knowledge when placed in front of a whiteboard. They are dependent on Google and SO. I don't think taking notes in this NEW browser will alleviate this problem. Instead of Google you now depend on notes. Personally I recommend Mastery Learning[1]. It involves more effort but produces much more confident developers. When confronted with a new technology suggestion, don't forget to ask "What problem does this solve?" Maybe there is a low-tech solution that's better suited. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning

jokethrowaway 6y ago
I can't say I find this to be a problem for development, but I still bash on tech interviews. Mainly because the knowledge base required to solve an interview is vastly different from the knowledge base you use in your everyday job. As a teenager I was memorizing PHP function parameters for fun and I rarely had to jump to the docs. Even now that I have a family and my brain doesn't want to work, I rarely reach for GO or SO to do something. I mainly rely on static typing and jump to definition in the IDE. Every once in a while I forget something stupid (eg. I forgot how to floor in JS once and I was stuck with either doing >>0 or google how to Math.floor) but I can't say I would want to store this kind of information anywhere: It's too sporadic and it's incomplete; just keep the documentation of the tools you're using nearby if you need it. That said, I see the benefits for KB and I use them all the time. I agree with you, doing it in the browser won't change things much.
cjohnson318 6y ago
Usually, by the time I Google the same thing three or four times, I don't have to Google it a fifth. I use a knowledge base based on Johnny Decimal's system [0], but it's still usually faster to Google something than look it up unless I know exactly where it is. [0](https://johnnydecimal.com/ https://johnnydecimal.com/)

mpalmer 6y ago

"[The browser] tracks how long someone spends on a website as a measure of how useful the information is likely to be, and then can match that to an existing card to store relevant information." This is probably a simplification of how it works, but taking this description at its word, Beam will just start assigning outsize relevance to sticky high-engagement sites like Youtube and Twitter. Hope it's more impressive than that!

simonh 6y ago
If it can associate the information to particular videos, Youtube channels and keywords in the video title, that could be useful.

1MachineElf 6y ago

Sounds like the kind of thing I'd want, but I don't want to have a very high degree of control over how that info is shared beyond my own personal computers.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

chaostheory 6y ago

Someone is trying to something new with idea tribes, which is great. The last big push was from reddit with sub-reddits. It'd be interesting if idea tribes were merged with a wikipedia.

munificent 6y ago

> And yet instead of feeling accomplished, several years ago Leca realised he felt an internal void. > Has anything he’s built really improved people’s lives? > To hear Leca describe it, the development of Beam is as much an effort to improve the web browsing experience as it is a spiritual quest for meaning. > “The only reason I’m doing this is to be working for the greater good,” Leca said. “Is this something I can explain to my kid and be proud of the fact that it’s not just a stupid business to make money?” This reads like a parody of SV hubris. It's a startup to slap note-taking onto a browser shell. It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better in real ways. But... this is a VC-funded startup for a browser shell. > “What do I have for all these hours I spent on the internet?” he said. “Nothing. I’ve got three bookmarks and a few notes here and everything else is basically lost.” It's crazy to me that the author thought that and their solution was "I should make it easier to take notes" and not "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media." The knowledge base should be primarily in your head. If your mind doesn't feel like a knowledge base to you, it's because we're all so busy jamming new data into it that we never slow down and take the time to reflect and process what we've already consumed.

azinman2 6y ago
> "I should spend less time fucking around on the Internet mindlessly consuming media." How do you know that is the target audience? To me it's people who are research focused, which doesn't necessarily mean they're fucking around at all. Academics, scientists, etc, often spend a ton of time reading papers and researching things + taking notes. You're making a big assumption here.
- type0 6y ago
  Yes and that already exists - https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/ and works as a simple add-on. I don't see what new benefit the dedicated browser could bring.
  - azinman2 6y ago

goldforever 6y ago

Another useless company and waste of money.

rbtprograms 6y ago

the tech industry and its insistence upon framing everything around "improving lives" is extremely grating. this guy feels unfulfilled and like he hasn't improved anyones life so he tries to make a browser? i really wish people like this would just come out and say "yea i am successful and i am going to keep pushing because i think i can do better." is that really so bad?

munificent 6y ago
There's a failure mode I see pretty often here: 1. My culture tells me that success and fulfillment comes from doing X. 2. Get really good at X. 3. Still feel unhappy and unfulfilled. 4. Do not reflect on why that didn't leave me fulfilled. Do not critique my culture. 5. "Maybe if I get really good at X. I'll just X better than anyone has ever X'd before. That'll do it." I have certainly fallen into this trap many times. I am problably currently occupying it on multiple axes. But I've at least learned to escape it in at least a couple of ways.
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  I’m way more cynical than that. Him framing the narrative that yeah what I did before was nothing compared to what I will do next is going to get investors and that is what separates him from the other millions of developers out there; his sales skills.
  - rbtprograms 6y ago
    I considered this as well, although from my view I think it just shows how uncreative a lot of people in tech are. this type of messaging clearly works, or we wouldn't see it constantly.
  - munificent 6y ago
    I get you. Personally, I made a deliberate choice this year to try to give more benefit of the doubt and charitable interpretations to narratives I see online. I think one of the key problems facing our culture is mistrust, and the only way I know to remedy that at the individual level is to just... trust more. I accept that sometimes I'll get burned. I'd rather have that happen than to contribute to a society where everyone is untrustworthy because they know they are not being trusted anyway. I don't want people to feel that they may as well do the crime if they're gonna do the time (be mistrusted) anyway.

cryptica 6y ago

I wonder why these so-called 'serial entrepreneurs' don't get tired of playing this phony game of crony capitalism... Why don't they try real capitalism. The one where you take a real risk and produce real value. Bootstrapped, no corporate insiders to provide you a crony-exit, no shell game, no revenue laundering, no tech journalists... And why is the guy who built a career out of making products which, by his own admission, are detrimental society, be the one to build products to supposedly help society. He should stick to his own crony capitalist bubble and let the real value producers do the socially useful work. If a crony capitalist wants to switch sides and do good work, they'd better start on the right foot by bootstrapping it with their own money. It's too easy to make amends using other people's money. These entrepreneurs' win-win mindset is the root of the problem. It's not enough that they get a ton of money playing some phony shell game, they also want to have the moral high ground pretending to be the good guys.

asadlionpk 6y ago

How is this not just an extension on Chrome by a single developer?

gnicholas 6y ago
Fair point, though as someone who manages two Chrome extensions, I can speak to the danger of building a company on that foundation. For example, they offered payments through the Chrome Webstore for years. Late last year, they announced they were pulling the plug on payments, effective February 1. They gave scant instructions on how to migrate your users, and they declined to provide you with the email addresses of said users, so that you might be able to contact them. They didn't make explicit what would happen if you failed to migrate people in time (would they lose access to your extension, have free access forever, have it uninstalled from their browser?). They also declined to notify the users that Google payments were going away and that they should expect paid extensions to have a new payment system and upcoming migration. They also have new extension review rules all the time, and they occasionally nuke your extension for no good reason. [1] It's nice to be able to reach people on Chrome, but it comes at a substantial cost. 1: https://beelinereader.medium.com/google-yanked-my-chrome-extension-this-sunday-d9c481e285cb https://beelinereader.medium.com/google-yanked-my-chrome-ext...
- Glench 6y ago
  Yeah, Google's handling of extension payments was terrible and sad. On the flip side, I made a replacement https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com that should do a lot better job — I made it for my own extensions and it works cross-browser too :)
kirubakaran 6y ago
It is https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/ :-) Browser extension, solo developer (me), solving the same problem
- gnicholas 6y ago
  Nice! How does your feature set compare to Beam? Looking at pricing, it seems like your primary gating feature is search history, is that right? What does the storage space relate to? Is that just the text from the bookmarks? Or do you store entire pages? Fun fact: I actually know the guy featured in your first customer testimonial. I met Alan years ago at a hackathon, where he helped me build one of the earliest versions of what has become my startup. Great guy!

azinman2 6y ago

> “I felt the bulk of tech I was working on was detrimental to society,” he said. “I wasn’t very happy about having 150 guys waiting in the staircase of the company to get a $15 an hour job. I felt myself going the wrong way. So I quit.” (La Poste later acquired Stuart in 2017.) I actually find this quote quite disgusting. You're not happy with having so many people who need a job come trying to get one from you? Do you want to go back to just the land of rich people with rich people problems?

rank0 6y ago
The guy is obviously too smart and philanthropic to be hiring plebs that would work for $15/hr.
- azinman2 6y ago
  I'm shocked he would be comfortable with having a statement so elitist and classist for all to read.
umamidev 6y ago
What’s going on with your thought process? Is everything in your life going well?

bitL 6y ago

Building tools for creators usually doesn't pay off :( If you think many people would be taking notes when inspiration strikes them... well.

Simon_says 6y ago

Sounds like an idea for a Firefox addon.

alwahi 6y ago

which is pretty retarded, considering Beaker has done that for free... (haven't read the article, I just want to flame wannabes)

neilparikh 6y ago

OT: Why doesn't the article have a link to the Beam website? That seems like something that would be relevant to someone reading this article. I've noticed this trend a decent amount, where news articles don't link to the very product/study/whatever they're actually talking about. Very frustrating.

lambda_dn 6y ago

Everyone will still use chrome. Example, when I do a fresh install of Windows I use Edge to download chrome then never use Edge again despite all the nags.

emptyparadise 6y ago
You're using a Chromium skin to download a different Chromium skin. The power of branding!

wildermuthn 6y ago

The article is pretty light on details, but it appears Beam is attempting to solve the bookmark problem. But that brings up a really fascinating question: what are bookmarks for, and is there really a problem? If not, what is the real problem? Before Google, bookmarks were necessary if you ever wanted to find your way back to a website. Now, all you need is some dim memory of a website to find it with Google. Currently, I only use bookmarks like I used to use fast-dial — to quickly navigate to websites without having to Google for them (or for internal work URLs that are not crawlable). The bookmarks bar has become a built-in concise portal for my various go-to sites. So if the original purpose of bookmarks has been achieved, what is the real problem here? I remember the many hours I used to spend organizing my bookmarks into tidy folders, like a personal Wikipedia of topical links. Many of these sites were blogs that were deprecated by the migration to social media and aggregators. My topical folders are now my Twitter feed and subreddits. So the idea of bookmarks as the “organization of specific topical data” is now outsourced to others. And yet still, I have a nagging feeling that there is something missing from our experience of the Internet, and that some aspect of the concept of bookmarks reveals that problem. Beam suggests that it is marking some piece of information as important — not marking a URL, but marking information itself. As information has grown exponentially, I do often find myself feeling like I’m drowning in a sea of important information, because my mind can only remember so much. There’s a nagging feeling that I’m losing important information, and I know that although I can (and do) bookmark URLs, I haven’t used a non-toolbar bookmark in years. I find myself utilizing various hacks when I find a piece of information I think it important and don’t want to lose: I send myself a link via Slack, or sometimes by text message. How often do I actually revisit those links? Maybe once or twice in years So there’s the problem identified in behavior: bookmarking or otherwise saving URLs, but never actually visiting those links. Am I the only one who does this? Probably not. When I add a bookmark, it is always accompanied by a sense of futility, but I do it anyways! When I leave a tab open to reference later, I know I’ll probably just close it later without a glance. But I still do it. The true problem underlying this futile behavior is obvious and agreed upon: information overload. But we can be more precise: information overload that makes all information ephemeral, when some information should be permanent. When I read an article about Beam, what I want is not only the article itself, but a kind of rap-genius of meta-information I’ve previously marked as important running alongside it. I’d see information about other browsers. I’d see quick summaries of the dead social-bookmarking sites and why they failed. I’d see pithy HN comments about why some people seem to get VC money thrown at them. It would be like this HN comments section, but the only person commenting would be myself with full recall of everything I’d ever read, happily chirping away at every paragraph, line, and word. It would be a genius version of myself with a photographic memory. So there it is: the real problem — we are not geniuses with perfect memory. But it would be pretty cool if we were. If there were a GPT-X continually fine-tuned on everything I had ever read (with meta-data about how long I had read and whether I found it important), then I think it would be possible to at least solve part of this problem — that of not having a perfect memory. But ML has a long way to go until it is capable of producing genius, let alone intelligence. This is to say that Beam has taken on a problem much harder than “bookmarks”, and it is going to take more than a few million to solve.

Yhippa 6y ago

Did anybody figure out how they plan on making money out of this?

idlewords 6y ago

I'm totally willing to reinvent the browser for $8M.

JacobSeated 6y ago

Seems like a pretty bad idea imo. And who the heck gives out 9.5M for an attempt at re-inventing the wheel? Guess someone who has too much cash...

freebuju 6y ago

I could see the potential applications in the note keeping & classification of content use in the education sector.

fudged71 6y ago

It sounds a bit like Vortimo

benjaminjosephw 6y ago

> “If we grab a few percentage points of the browser market, then maybe we can be paid by Google. That’s a long shot, but that’s the thing I’m hoping for.” A well capitalized competitor who only aspires to reach a strong enough position to eventually be paid by the dominant player. This clear and irrefutable evidence of a severely unhealthy market and a textbook case of the impact of monopoly power on consumers. Where's the choice if pretty much all the competitors are aiming to attract Google's business and comply with their vision for the internet?

ChrisRR 6y ago
This is like university CS courses where they tell you that anyone can be the next Google or Amazon Statistically, you won't. You're quite likely to be a small to medium sized business owner, or a decently paid independent developer, and that's perfectly fine. But there's no need to convince people to aim for the top and nothing else
- thundergolfer 6y ago
  It doesn’t seem like that. Related your example to their comment, the very presence of Google is causally linked to the tiny chance of being the next Google Chrome, because Google has monopoly power in search and is leveraging that to power in browser competition. ‘Winner takes all’ markets are created, and can be disassembled. The OP comment is pointing out that to survive and thrive in the browser market an entrant has to seek revenue from its dominant competitor. That is not simply a reality of some businesses being big and some businesses being large. That is anti-competitive.
throwaway2245 6y ago
It also means that the business model is still an advertising-funded model - just indirectly advertising-funded, via Google. All the pressure to protect the advertising industry and disseminate advertising will still be present.
loceng 6y ago
Or it's a sign of regulatory capture and the VC-financial industrial complex.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

“You’re watching a video, you’ve got an idea, and then you’ve got to do the old dance,” he said. “I’ve got an idea and then I need to include it in my notes app. Then you navigate to it, you put it there, and then you come back to your content. You can do this two or three times a day. But if you do this 20 times, it’s completely breaking your mental flow.” Hmm, I don't know if this is worth making a whole new browser. I use bookmarks for this, and if I'm really interested in posterity I use the OneNote browser plugin to add it to my notes. I know this experience could be a bit more integrated but it feels pretty smooth already, not like something that slows me down. One thing I'm much more interested in in a new browser is breaking the Chromium monopoly. I hope he will take Gecko for his engine so it might get some more traction.

mcjkrw 6y ago
Perhaps the real problem is navigating between the apps. I use i3 and I have no problem switching between 2 workspaces in a fraction of a second. Most modern desktop environments try to slow it down by adding some fancy animation or some needless UI component.
- iFreilicht 6y ago
  Meh, in such cases I’d just put the browser and note-app side-by-side, so switching is quick even with traditional DEs. You can even do this on an iPad and some bigger phones. Why the hell is this guy getting 9.5m for solving a problem that has already been solved?

hobo_mark 6y ago

In principle, the Vivaldi browser already comes with a note editor built in (with tags, markdown support, webpage capture, synchronization...) https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/panels/notes/ https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/panels/notes/ (I wish there was a way to synchronize it with Joplin, which is where all my notes already live)

ksec 6y ago

Someone on HN discussed a similar idea not long ago, where a browser would download and record every single webpage you visited and stored on your computer. And it will record how long you spend on those page as an indicator of importance. You can then easily search back all the information you have read somewhere on the Internet without going to Google. You can then Add notes and Tags to those pages like we do with Bookmarks. I think what Beam proposed here is very similar. Or may be he even got the idea from HN :)

slightwinder 6y ago
Basically this: https://getmemex.com https://getmemex.com IIRC

numlock86 6y ago

I am not involved in any browser development, so count me as an outsider. Considering what browsers we have available and taking their estimated development costs into account (not to the point we are at now, but at their release), $9.5M seems like a hobby project at best. What am I missing? And is aiming for a sellout to competitors already a business model in a way that you openly advertise it?

pwdisswordfish6 6y ago
$9.5M one time is too little, but you could def get by with funding a competitive Firefox-level product on a budget of $25–30M annually if you ran lean enough and (counter-intuitively) paid high programmer salaries. Pay slightly higher than experienced Googlers make and move the business out of the Bay Area.

wired_devil 6y ago

$9.5M, for a web browser, that doesn't even exist.

dgellow 6y ago

The article really feels like an advertising for the company and the fact that they hire