By Zachary A. Goldfarb
Monday, April 28, 2008

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.

Upender, the chief executive of Intridea, said the speed of development today forces the company to rapidly launch and improve products.

"When we thought of these projects, we were probably one of the earlier ones to think about the ideas. By the time we're about to launch them, there are already two guys in the marketplace," Upender said.

"The market is moving very quickly, and that's one of the reasons we have to put something out there quickly, invest more, and that's why we can't afford to say SocialSpring is our platform, that's our product, and that's all we're going to focus on."

Intridea took an innovative approach to recruiting, reading the blogs of developers to find out what they are doing -- and then hiring them.

"We find the smartest guys," Upender said. "They already proved themselves by launching some ideas, they're already blogging about some technology that interests them . . . and within a day they're being productive. They're checking in code."

Upender, 40, calls himself the senior of the group. Most employees are in their mid-20s. Everybody gets a MacBook Pro and a 30-inch cinema display.

Upender and his partner Naffis got their start locally in the Web 1.0 world, working for a Bethesda company building video-on-demand software for cable providers.

After the dot-com bust, they went their separate ways, only to reunite, at least virtually, in the Web 2.0 world.