Web Firm Finds Its Footing Through Big Ideas

Staff writer Zachary A. Goldfarb's "Tech Post," which looks at people and ideas driving the local technology industry, runs Friday on the WashBiz blog.

Intridea, a Washington area Web company with 15 employees, has no office. It hasn't received any venture capital. It's happy to work in the background. And in just a year in existence, it's launched four products.

Intridea may be the model for the modern Internet economy.

It's much different from Web and technology companies of yesteryear -- Apple, Google, even Facebook -- which concentrated on one product, a well-known brand and a single culture early on in their business lives.

Intridea's founders, Barg Upender and Dave Naffis, are local technology professionals who officially launched Intridea a year ago. The name is a play on "interactive ideas."

The first product they launched, MediaPlug, enables Web sites to build a feature that lets users upload videos, images and other multimedia to their sites. In other words, it allows any site to create an internal YouTube or Flickr, bypassing the complicated software and heavy hardware demands needed to host multimedia. MediaPlug has been licensed by VisualCV, a new résumé and recruiting site chaired by WebMethods founder Phillip Merrick. (Intridea built the VisualCV site. The company makes money not just by launching and licensing its own products but also by building sites for outsiders.)

Intridea's second product is Scalr. When an article, blog post or Web page gets linked on Digg, Drudge Report or another popular aggregation site, a rush of traffic can often follow that overwhelms the site's server and gets it shut down. Scalr will automatically detect additional traffic and buy more server space to meet the traffic bump, then scale the server space back down when the traffic subsides.

A more recent product is SocialSpring, which Intridea calls a "white-label" social network. In other words, Intridea will build a social network -- an internal Facebook or MySpace -- for any site. It's already built such a site, for instance, for Geico that converts people's photos into the "caveman" look from Geico's marketing campaign.

The most recent product, launched this week, is called Smarkr. It's a way to find and tag photos on the Web.

Underpinning Intridea's business is cloud computing. Cloud computing combines thousands of computers in data centers, which serve as remote storage and processing power. It's gotten attention for enabling Google applications such as Gmail and Google Docs, which transfer one's e-mail client and office suite to online applications and save files on Google computers.

Intridea's work is based on an even more cutting-edge version of cloud computing introduced recently by Amazon.com. For the most part, cloud computing has been contained to services like Google's -- companies that have their own server farms and offer remote storage and services.

Amazon wants to turn hardware into a service with a product called EC2, which stands for "elastic compute compound." EC2 allows people and companies to rent space, for pennies per gigabyte, on a massive server farm that Amazon has spent $2 billion building. Scalr and MediaPlug, for now, live on EC2.