6 new ventures from Facebook veterans

PATH

Path is a closely watched startup from Napster founder Shawn Fanning and former Facebook platform manager Dave Morin. The venture is so stealthy that its founders won't say anything about it yet, even to comment on the basics of what it will do.

But in February, ReadWriteWeb used Google's cache to capture screenshots snagged from the fledgling site. What RWW found is a tool for creating lists and sharing them with friends on the site -- for example, "Best Coffee in San Francisco" or "People I'd Like to Meet."

Path connects users who have created lists with similar names, and highlights items that overlap across those lists. The site is currently in closed beta testing. RWW's screenshots show a number of influential testers, including Electronic Arts' Robert Kissinger, Creative Commons' Joi Ito, and LinkedIn's Jordan Mendelson.

Though the tester list is heavy with tech celebs, the blog Silicon Alley Insider isn't impressed with Path's concept: "It's not clear from what has leaked why this needs to be a standalone network, rather than just another Facebook application or feature."

RWW is more sanguine. "We have high hopes for Path," the blog commented when it posted the Path screenshots. "It's another example of a basic human experience turned exciting by the network effects, location awareness, APIs and other features of the new social web."

CLOUDERA

Just as Red Hat built a business packaging and supporting Linux software, Cloudera is commercializing another key open-source technology: Hadoop.

By 2004, Google was ingesting the entire Internet every week or two -- and struggling to analyze all that data. The site's engineers created a technology called MapReduce to break up giant data sets into distributed chunks, and published several reports on their approach.

Software consultant Doug Cutting used that information to create Hadoop (named for his son's stuffed elephant). An open-source project managed by the Apache Software Foundation, Hadoop is now used for data processing and analysis by many of the Web's biggest sites, including Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter.

Cutting linked up with a dream team of engineers to launch Cloudera, including Jeff Hammerbacher, the former head of head of Facebook's data team. Cloudera packages Hadoop with other programs and offers consulting services for clients looking to harness the software's massive power.

"The opportunity for this is enormous," says Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, a former Oracle executive. "There is so much data out there in the world now, and people don't know how to manage it. But it's rich with detail if you know how to use it."

With an office full of industry veterans rave reviews so far, the company's future looks bright. In May, Thomson Reuters' Venture Capital Journal named Cloudera the No. 1 most promising startup founded in 2009.

JUMO

Chris Hughes was one of four co-founders in at the ground floor of Facebook, along with Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Hughes left Facebook in 2007 to run MyBarackObama.com, and he's keeping in the grassroots spirit with Jumo.

While it isn't open to the public yet, the site suggests it will try to harness the Internet's social networking power to help "speed the pace of global change."

More specifically, CNBC says Jumo is "a nonprofit website that connects visitors with volunteer opportunities and causes that match their interests." Jumo means "together in concert," according to the site's homepage.

Hughes, who declined to comment on his venture, talked up Jumo last month at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe. "[We need to] give users a reason to connect and make it easy to connect -- open opportunities for groups to better collaborate," he said.
 

QUORA

Quora is a question-and-answer site with a lofty goal: "To get all of the world's information that isn't already on the Web onto the Web," according to co-founder Charlie Cheever, the former head of Facebook's Connect and Platform engineering teams.

"It's true that you can Google a lot of stuff, but some topics are based on experiences," Cheever says. "We're trying to draw that information out so Quora becomes the go-to page for a given topic."

Cheever launched Quora with Adam D'Angelo, who was Facebook's chief technology officer. The site is Wikipedia-esque in that content is created, edited and organized by users. But Quora wants to make all that information highly reliable. Users must post their real names and pictures, along with a short biography.

"If Michael Jordan gives an answer to a question about basketball, that means something really different from someone who has never played the game," Quora's website explains.

The blog GigaOM says Quora is working on ways to showcase high-quality contributions, organize topics and arrange users' news feeds based on how long it's been since they logged onto the site.

"That's a different approach from the typical user-generated site -- say, Facebook -- which is designed to foster maximum participation by users, without placing any sort of value judgment on what they do," GigaOM notes.

The site launched in private beta testing in January, with many tech insiders providing answers to posted questions. Quora's doors opened to the public in June, and TechCrunch loves it so far: "There's a magic to Quora that has captured Silicon Valley's imagination. Something about the quality of the people and the content. Real discussions break out on Quora all the time."

ASANA

Asana is one of the hottest new startups in Silicon Valley, boasting hefty investments from a star-studded list of investors that includes Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark Capital. Founded by former Facebook CTO Dustin Moskovitz, Asana is developing collaboration software to help employees work together on projects.

"In managing and contributing to projects in the past (at Facebook, Google, etc.), we felt frustrated by how much time we spent trying to stay on the same page with everyone," the company's founders wrote on their staff blog.

Asana executives declined to talk about their software, which is now in private beta testing. Though the company is keeping mum, Asana's Facebook page and blog sketch the venture's outlines. Its projects include a programming language called Lunascript that aims to make it faster and easier to build rich Web applications.

Asana will be free and available over the Web. Some of the planned features sound Facebook-esque: news feeds, comment walls and content sharing. Asana also includes enterprise-grade project management tools such as version control, LDAP integration and Gantt charting.

Asana is hiring for several positions in the Bay Area, but it's not for dabblers. The company warns applicants they "should be ready to make Asana a primary focus of your life. We will be working together, eating together, and playing together." But the job comes with a bunch of quirky perks: two organic meals per day, in-house yoga and $10,000 to spend on the computer setup of your dreams.

PLAYHOPPER

PlayHopper is a new social gaming company from industry veteran Net Jacobsson, the former director of Facebook's international business development. Jacobsson is currently an advisor to game companies including CrowdStar and Aurora Feint, but now he's using that expertise to launch his own startup in the burgeoning field.

"There are a lot of social games out there, but they're like NBC or CBS in that they try to cater to everyone," Jacobsson says. "PlayHopper is going to be like ESPN and the Food Network in that it targets very specific audiences."

PlayHopper's first game will launch in September, so Jacobsson is loath to provide many details on what's to come -- though he will say that one of the games under development focuses on travel, "a universal concept" that will make players want to connect with each other.

Jacobsson is the only U.S.-based PlayHopper employee. He's working with developers in Ukraine, Uruguay and China to develop the games. Though venture capitalists have expressed interest, Jacobsson says he prefers to fund the company himself for now.

"Social gaming is a huge field that's telling us a lot about real-world social mechanics," Jacobsson says. "Gaming will have a huge effect on the consumer Web as a whole -- and very soon."