Here’s my wild speculation – Tumblr will not be a new cash cow for Yahoo within the next five years and David Karp will not enjoy working under his new overlords My original thoughts have changed, after writing this post out and researching the gaps, I’m now bullish on this acquisition and starting to drink the Marissa Kool-aid.

Tumblr is popular as fuck, no doubt about that. They have over 20 billion page views a month and have continued to grow.

Will this growth continue and can it be monetized effectively?

Growth is anyones guess but the numbers are promising.

Eyeballs are eyeballs and despite what some want to believe you can always make money if you have enough eyeballs. Rumor has it that Tumblr made $13 million in 2012 which seems small considering it’s $1.1 billion exit. In the world of the web, revenue isn’t everything and Tumblr is an example of a product-first company that has delayed gratification ($$$) for the sake of the product quality – not because of a lack of opportunity to do so.

What would Tumblr need to do in order to make this acquisition a success? To justify the $1.1 billion price Tumblr will need make a lot of money someday, better sooner than later.

Synergy

Yahoo makes the majority of it’s money in advertising – search, display, video and mobile. Yahoo has experience monetizing eyeballs and relationships with advertisers to quickly and effectively monetize Tumblr. How valuable are the views on Tumblr? This is yet to be seen. The intent of a user, unlike Google and Yahoo searches, are low and the information about a user, like you have on Facebook, is minimal. A pageview on Tumblr can make money but is most likely not as valuable as one on Google or Facebook but similar in value to the pageviews that many other Yahoo properties receive. With the experience that Marissa has making money off of eyeballs and the eyeballs that Tumblr has this may just work. I doubt in any jaw dropping way, but it may be worth the $1.1 billion price tag.

Over the weekend I took a break from my normal schedule of partying to participate in DCWEEK’s Hackathon. This Hackthon was two days, Saturday to Sunday. Teams up to four members competed to create an application the judges deemed “the best” for prizes. There were no restrictions in what type of app you created but there were extra prizes for those who programmed for the Microsoft Surface.

My co-workers from JIBE – Adam Lloyd, James Petty and Boris Kozak formed our Hackathon team and arrived early Saturday. After getting briefed about the different APIs that were available to us we broke to a room to start coming up with ideas. We debated on a couple of ideas before settling on Sous Chef – a voice-activated recipe app that would work on the Microsoft Surface. 36 hours later we had a workable demo and the beginnings of a promising product.

Here is our Demo:

It’s been 90 days since I left Blackboard and started a new job developing software at JIBE.com.  The past three months have been a blast – packed full of coding sessions fueled by 5-hour energy, trips to NYC and a lot of learning.  I’ve picked up a new language (ruby) , framework (rails) and have used many other new technologies including SOLR, REDIS, Nokogiri, Mechanize, MongoDB and nginx.

Going from Blackboard and their 1500+ employees to JIBE, which is currently around 17 full time employees, has been what I was hoping for – awesome.  At JIBE, I can tell my work has made an immediate impact on the company and that feeling has been great.

JIBE.com has been dubbed by the press a “next-generation job board”.  In short, JIBE leverages Facebook and LinkedIn to help job seekers find the best positions in the job market.  When a job seeker searches for a job on JIBE they are shown their connections to the companies hiring along with the job posts.  This allows people to use their personal network more effectively to land their dream job.

Check out the new Quasars-inc.com!  Quasars is an engineering and technology company based in Washington DC.   Artin Petrossian and I collaborated with Nick Riotto of 829 llc to put together a sleek corporate site.  Quasars supports client missions involving systems engineering, information management, program management, custom application development, configuration management, and independent validation and verification for a wide range of federal and private clients.

My latest collaboration with the the people at Cost2Go.com, the Electric Commuting Calculator, was launched last week at the North American International Auto Show and can be found at http://apps.facebook.com/costtodrive/

This simple facebook application takes in your home address, work address, car type and days commuting to calculate the amount of fuel costs incurred.  The EPA-determined electricity-per-mile cost is subtracted from the fuel costs to give a user an idea of the monthly and yearly savings of driving an electric vehicle.

ZenTaraTea is a local tea shop in Bethesda, MD.  Since 2008, I have been visiting ZenTaraTea to purchase loose leaf tea (Oolong is my favorite).  When it was time for them to revamp their website I volunteered to help out.

ZenTaraTea.com provides customers with over 100 different specialty teas from around the world.  Customers can learn about tea through the Tea Knowledge section and the Zen Tara blog.  ZenTaraTea.com allows customers to sign up for Tea of the Month Clubs and Tea Tasting Events.

Nick Riotto of 829 Studios did yet another great job with the design of the site.  Artin Petrossian and I worked closely with Guy from ZenTaraTea to provide a front-end his customers could enjoy and a back-end that he and his staff could use with ease.

This has been a fun and challenging project.  I have learned more about e-commerce and have learned a ton about tea.  We will continue to tweak the site as time goes on.  Feel free to email Guy or I about any feedback you may have.