I have been looking for funding recently for Baypup.com and one question that always seems to pop up is where the name came from. It is a long story but I thought I would post it here.
I moved out to the SF Bay area in the fall of 2007 to look for Venture for my search engine prototype. The software was in really good shape and I had several impressive vertical searches with traffic, even making a bit of money. I was still, however, looking for “one great brand” my Coca Cola, Virgin or Google to take the world by storm.
The day my friend picked me up at the Fruitvale BART station, there was a story on the radio about some kind of “sub prime housing bubble”. I didn’t really pay much attention, but as the weeks progressed, it became clear that there was some big trouble with the economy on the horizon. Concurrently, I got hired then fired by an unscrupulous web designer, had my foot stepped on and broken, and got dumped by my beloved girlfriend on Christmas day.
Broken hearted, broke, and demoralized, I headed back to the Midwest to save the company and my dream with my tail between my legs. I have a habit of calling things pup or puppy, and as I was sitting on the airplane, I said to myself “I’m just a baypup”. It just fell out of me, but it was a great name, and the minute I got home I checked to see if it was available, which it was, and the rest is is history.
Baypup.com cost me ten bucks to register at GoDaddy, but I doubt I would have come up with it if I hadn’t gone through some of the more painful experiences of my life and spent my savings trying to get established in San Francisco. It is my pleasure to bring you Baypup.com, the little search engine from San Francisco.
I’m sitting here on my brand new aluminum Mac iBook, and Firefox is just slow as an old dog. It is such a divine browser but ever so slow, especially with a jillion tool bars like I have.
I have a few opinions about what should be done if you really want to juice up Firefox. I am not planning to start a chip company anytime soon, so maybe someone over there at Intel or AMD or Apple will read this and make my life a little bit better.
BPU: Browser Processing Unit – Why are these chip makers and computer company need is browser acceleration hardware. They are talking about letting the OS leverage graphics chips, what we need is for this extra computing power to help the browser with its task, in a dedicated SD Ram cache for the environment .
I can even envision a browser card that is specifically designed to accelerate a specific browser (Firefox/gecko or Safari/webkit or IE/Microsoft whatever) sitting next to a video card in a pci-x slot. Then I won’t need an 8 core machine to have a snappy browser experience.
We are announcing plans for a containerized data center in The Netherlands. Although we are still building our beta platform, in anticipation of funding that will allow us to build this facility, we are looking for suitable locations in the Randstad.
This facility will allow us to build our infrastructure in the United States before deploying it abroad. We were hoping to build a facility here in Kansas first, but the new Governor’s plan to embrace big cola (ad dirty old coal at that) that we have been forced to reconsider our plans to keep a large data facility in Kansas.
A recent article from the Huffington Post about a guy who sued Google and won. (not that we would ever think about that….)
In this BBC article Google announces several new search features. Indeed, Google seems to claim credit for inventing semantic search results! I suspect that this is a response to the semantic features in Powerset and Cuil, and also used extensivelty, though not widely deployed, by Baypup.
MIT Technology Review recently did a pre-release test on Wolphram Alpha. This looks like it will be an important addition to the search community and fun to use. A growing number of search options nipping at Google’s heels, but they all have a similar problem: How are you going to make money? Search is cool, but it is AdSense and AdWords that buy Luxos 767s and Victorian library in Geneva.
We are all very sad that a young man in New York City has decided to infringe on our trademark.
Despite his own admission to potential confusion, Mr. Brower has refused to rename the site and refuses to communicate with us. We have been left with no choice but to pursue this through the Federal Court system.
For a really original recipe search experience, try our recipe search engine, Five Mushrooms. You can also try the Baypup Recipe Search, although it is far from finished, it is still red and cool.
recipepuppy.com is not one of our websites. We are sorry in advance for those of you who may, as well as those who already have, thought that this was one of our sites.
Furthermore, we take great offense that Mr Brower has decided to use one of our competitors to monetize his site. We want to emphasize that we do not use Google Ads, and none of the sites in our ad network do either.
Mr. Brower does neither speak for or work for us. We have no idea why he feels he has the right to do this. Flatland Industries respects trademark and copyright law. Baypup and the bulldog mascot is our original mark, just like Google, Coca Cola, and Virgin. He has no right to steal our mark.
Some of our servers have been getting memory and os upgrades. Because we dont have much failover built into our system yet, some of the search results have been squirrly. Apologies for any inconvenience. If you like Baypup and want to help us grow, buy some ads or even better, contact jason [at] baypup [dot] com and buy some stock.
From Wired.com
The FBI on Tuesday defended its raids on at least two data centers in Texas, in which agents carted out equipment and disrupted service to hundreds of businesses.
Wow, another reason to have redundant infrastructure. Who owns your data and the equipment it is on?
