Thanks to everyone that came to Lunch 2.0 last week at Plaxo! Over 300 of you showed up to eat, drink, converse, and check your pulse. A bunch of people grabbed plaxo pulse t-shirts, and we even saw people wearing them at BarCampBlock this weekend. Best of all, everyone was enthusiastic about opening up the social web and putting users back in control of who they know.

There are already some great write-ups posted by Jeremiah Owyang, John McCrea, and others, and of course there are lots of photos to browse. A big thanks to everyone at Plaxo who worked so hard to make this event great, and thanks to everyone in the Lunch 2.0 community for joining us and eating our lunch! :)

We awoke this morning to find a great story on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle about Lunch 2.0! The article mentions Plaxo's involvement in Lunch 2.0's nascency, including the saga of hiring Mark Jen (who turned out to be as good at designing products as he was at getting free lunch).

The most recent Lunch 2.0 was hosted by our long-time friends—and new neighbors—at LinkedIn; it's hard to think of a more fitting place to do some web 2.0 networking! Come to think of it, it's been a while since Plaxo hosted one of these events. We just might have to do something about that...say sometime in July... ;)

The founders of fleck.com--and organizers of The Next Web conference--were visiting Silicon Valley from Amsterdam, Nederlands. They camped out at Plaxo for an afternoon and a fun time was had by all.

Pictured: Arjen Schat (fleck), Joseph Smarr (plaxo), Patrick de Laive (fleck), me/Rikk Carey (plaxo), and Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (fleck).

The white suits are the fleck.com trademark. Fleck.com enables people to annotate any web page and share it with others. So, when they unveiled their first product, they attended a TechCrunch party hosted by Michael Arrington, and wore the white suits so that everyone at the party could annotate them!

People ask us all the time, 'Do you have frog legs?'

And we always answered, 'No, we just walk that way.'
Well, no more. Not since Gil entered our lives. Gil's the company pet. Wendy got her from from the Grow-a-Frog company. The frog growing kit had been sitting in my garage for about 10 years and it was an easy last-minute idea for our secret santa gift exchange here at Plaxo. I was a little embarrassed, thinking people might not like it, or that maybe the company had gone out of business. But Wendy sent in the paperwork and got herself a mail order frog.

Naming her was a group project. The suggestions? Red. Ole Blue Eyes. Spermatazoa--Zoe for short. And Pierre--you know, because she's French. Wendy suggested Gil and it just fit.

Gil has brought much joy to the Quality Assurance department at Plaxo. We've watched as she's transformed from a small pollywog to a kidney-bean-sized amphibian. Over the days we've watched her grow legs (first back, then front) and lose her tail. Gil's a happy frog. (Why? She eats whatever bugs her.) Gil's always telling us frog jokes like that. Here's our favorite:

A man was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, 'If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess.' He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket.

The frog spoke up again and said, 'If you kiss me and turn me back in to a beautiful princess, I will tell everyone how smart and brave you are and how you are my hero.' The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to his pocket.

The frog spoke up again and said, 'If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will be your loving companion for an entire week.' The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to his pocket.

The frog then cried out, 'If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for a year and do ANYTHING you want.' Again the man took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.

Finally, the frog asked, 'What's the matter? I told you I'm a beautiful princess and that I'll stay with you for a year and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?'

The man said, 'Look, I'm a programmer. I don't have time for a girlfriend. But a talking frog? Now, that's cool!'

I guess you had to be there.

-- Michael Rowley
Creative Director, Plaxo

A group of us from Plaxo found out last night when our own Glenn "Fiddich" Dixon from HipCal competed in the Guitar Hero tournament hosted by Meebo. His challenge was formiddable: if he lost in the first round, he would suffer embarassment; if he won the entire tournament, he would be embarassed for a different reason. His goal was thus a solid middle-of-the-pack performance, and that is exactly what he delivered.

The tournament drew quite a crowd.

Glenn (left) plays his heart out.

In his opening performance he won convincingly over his opponent on the song "Cherry Pie". Of the 16 competitors, he clearly showed a talent level that put him near the top. His second round song choice was "Can't You Hear Me Knocking?" and his opponent was one of the favorites to win the tournament. It was a seesaw matchup and ultimately Glenn suffered a narrow and nobel defeat. The contestants that made it to the final round were indeed masters of their game, and we were humbled by their performance.

All in all it was a fun night, and it was particularly nice to see so many Plaxites come and show their support for our guy!

Signs of the times: Stock markets hitting all-time highs. Pre-profit Silicon Valley startups selling for more than a billion dollars. And entrepreneurs being treated like rock stars!

Literally.

Yep. The latest issue of Rolling Stone just hit the stands, and our very own Todd Masonis is featured prominently in an article entitled "The Baby Billionaires of Silicon Valley." You'll have to run down to your local newstand to see the full article, but here's a link to a preview on the magazine's website.

During our recent Haxo day I decided to help one of our less productive employees contribute more to the company. For the past few months we’ve had a Nabaztag keeping us company by our desks. He’s a little plastic rabbit who connects to wifi and can be configured from the web. It can check your email, tell you the weather, let you know how the stock market is doing, and even practice Tai Chi. We thought it’d be really cool to have him read out Plaxo statistics every day, especially since we knew the 15 million member milestone was approaching quickly. Luckily for us, this guy has an open API you can use to send him text to read and directions to position his ears.

After only a week of practice he announced that we’d reached 15 million members. Swoot! In celebration, and since we enjoy the sound of his voice so much, we thought it’d be fun to let you send him messages too. We welcome compliments as well as criticisms.

So go ahead, send us a message!

Update: Thanks to everyone that sent us a message so far! By now, everyone in the office knows all-too-well the Nabaztag's "I'm about to announce a message" melody! :) Keep 'em coming. Here's a selection of the messages we've received so far:

• Hooray for over-priced wifi-enabled geek toys.


• Get back to work and stop messing around. You've got 15 mill subscribers to support.


• Do you really hear this in your actual office?


• Mark Foley was framed!


• I wonder how long before you turn this off .....


• thanks for the great product (ical/vcal support please)


• So what's the ratio of plaxo spam emails sent out to number of users?


• You should write a Plaxo calendar module for Google home pages.


• Hey guys, You rock, Congratulations


• Who's in the office so late? ;) Thank Mark Jen for this!


• Congrats Plaxo, it is nice to see you grow.


• Please tell your users how the Hip Cal integration is going!

But our favorite message so far came from the Nabaztag creators themselves (I wonder how they found out):

Hello, it's Marvel in Paris from Violet, we wanted to congratulate you on your achievements. What is Plaxo exactly about ? Did you look out the window of your office today ? By the way what is the name of your Nabaztag ? Take good care of each of you. Aurevoir !

In response, Plaxo is a "smart address book" (learn more), yes we did look out the window today, and our Nabaztag's name is jsmarr. Thanks for asking, and thanks for making such a cool and lovable gadget!!

A bunch of us at Plaxo are spending the day (and night!) at Yahoo as part of their first open Hack Day. It's a brilliant idea and so far they're doing a great job of running it--from the logistics (plenty of parking, food/drinks, excellent wifi coverage, lots of help on hand) to the content (the talks have all been fun and interesting, and all their stars are out and about, including Jeremy Zawodny, Cal Henderson, Doug Crockford, Andy Baio, and more). They're also setting up an impressive outdoor stage for their "surprise really awesome band" tonight (no one would tell me who it is, sorry). And the event has already served as a good deadline for Yahoo to release a bunch of new developer features, like Flickr JSON output (yay, at last!) and bbauth for Yahoo! IDs (very interesting potential here).

We can't wait for the festivities and hackery to begin this evening, and we plan to stay the whole night (you can track the fun by watching the hackday06 tag on flickr). So if you see any people with Plaxo t-shirts, that's us, come say hi! And if any fellow hackers are looking to integrate their users' address book data in their projects, don't forget to check out Plaxo's widget and APIs.

--Joseph Smarr

I didn't think it was possible to see the entire San Diego Zoo in less than 3 hours. I didn't think I would enjoy seeing elephants, hippos, and dik-diks going by in a blur. I didn't think we would ever make it out of Los Angeles. But over the last 18 hours, all of those things happened.

We drove up the beautiful coast of California, marveling at the vineyards...then just looking at the vineyards...then praying to never see a vineyard, grape, or raisin again in our lives. Even though it was a long day, the end was in sight. Midnight brought relief to the HipCal team when we saw our house in Los Altos, despite the fact that our beds would be the bare floors in the unfurnished 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath, quaintly appointed estate seated on 1.2 acres (I'm also going into real estate). We all had a great time on the trip, but we're looking forward to settling in and getting to work at Plaxo (whom we'd like to thank for bankrolling this operation, which included paying Silent Chris' bail after that incident in Nebraska).

Our new digs in Los Altos

-- Pete Curley, Product Manager

We had quite the kickin' party at Plaxo last night; there were a ton of people visiting from various tech companies in the area. Here are some pictures from the event:

Here's Tawheed and Pete doing what they do best ;)

And Jeremiah, who also blogged about the party

Thanks for all who came; hope to see you at the next Lunch 2.0 event! :D

-- Mark Jen, Product Manager

Answer: HipCal (www.hipcal.com).

Plaxo announced today the acquisition of HipCal, LLC, based in Troy, NY. You can read the formal press release at: Plaxo's website. However, I wanted to give you an insider's view of why we joined forces with these young guns from upstate New York.

You'll have to read the entire article to find out what we both have in common with pimps. ;-)

Plaxo has a calendar?

You may not know this, but Plaxo has had an online calendar for some time. Yup, we really do. As a matter of fact, we were using AJAX techniques two years ago before it was called AJAX (RSI thanks to Terry Chay and Joseph Smarr).

But, to be really honest, we did not put the same amount of effort and resources on our calendar as we did on everything else. Our users have been asking us to do for calendars what we did for address books--not just make them available everywhere, but make them easy to coordinate with friends, colleagues, and customers. This has been bothering us for awhile and it's one of those things that we put into the "someday" category. Well, this is that day.

Exploding calendars

So, it all started while we were watching with amusement as startup after startup announced their jump into the "new, Web 2.0 calendar" space -- the list is long. But, one of them caught our eye, HipCal (and apparently the Web 2.0 Awards and SXSW festival's eye too). I should mention that a few of the others look quite impressive as well -- 30 boxes also appears to stand our from the crowd.

Note that a good friend of mine, Mark Fletcher (ONElist, eGroups, Plaxo, Bloglines), says "Whenever you have more than one funded company in the calendar space, you know you are in the bubble." :-)

Anyway, back to the story...

So, the first thing that we noticed was that www.hipcal.com was extremely fast and simple. The design had a natural ease about it that appealed to everyone here and it was extremely snappy. The second thing that we noticed was that the team was very engaged and dedicated to their users, even though they had classes to attend at school (RPI)!

Garret Heaton

So, on a whim, I sent Garret Heaton, [the guy who started it as part of school project], a simple email: "Hey, love your site. Interested in talking about working together?" Garret replied fairly quickly with enthusiasm and we got started.

A few days later, during a conference call with the HipCal guys (all five of them), we quickly got into a discussion about joining Plaxo. And, at some point during the conversation, I said: "Think about it this way. Would you rather be in Troy, New York, in three feet of snow, working out of your parents' garage OR would you rather be sitting in a nice house on the beach in sunny California with all the beer you can drink and parties every night." After about about 15 seconds of silence--in which I was thinking that I made a huge tactical mistake--the other end of the phone burst into laughter and the group screaming "we like the second option better!" :-)

So, we flew the guys out to California, but had some trouble with the car rental since most car agencies require the driver to be 25 or over. Once we cleared that up, we got down to business. By the end of the day, we all realized that this was meant to be (i.e. they are five amazing, talented, and nice guys) and left us with a great feeling.

That was easy, now for the hard part

We signed the deal a few weeks later and have been making plans for a new calendar ever since. The guys will be moving to California in June. [Note: I failed to mention that buying a home on the California coast would cost a small fortune. ;-] The guys will be looking for a house to rent in Mountain View/Palo Alto very soon -- let me know if you have any leads.

Stay tuned for the big changes coming from Plaxo's new calendar team.

btw: The original name of HipCal was MyPIMP.com. And, in case you didn't know, "PIM" is a common acronym for Personal Information Manager.

Garret Heaton, Tawheed Kader, Pete Curley, Glenn Dixon, and Chris Rivers

More photos of the HipCal guys

Here's a photo of Pete Curley. We haven't figured out what he does yet, but we know that it has somethng to do with refilling the kegs. Oh, and Pete designed the cute little hippo on the HipCal site.

Here's a photo of Chris ("Silent Chris") Rivers. He's generally ....., um, er, ..... silent. But, once you get a few margaritas into him, watch out because he turns into "Crazy Chris"! He is rumored to have a very large shoe collection.

Here's a photo of Glenn Dixon. When we first met, I thought that he was "Silent Chris" and kept wondering "he talks a lot, I wonder why they call him Silent Chris...?" Glenn just recently got out of prison, but don't let his tatoos and rough exterior fool you... he's a teddy bear on the inside.

Here's a photo of Tawheed ("Wheed") Kader. He's sorta like the George Harrison of the HipCal group. [Not really sure what I meant by that, but it sounded good when I wrote it.] We don't understand what his nickname means yet, but he sure seems excited about moving to California.

UPDATE: Looks like we've got some initial reactions coming in :)

• Om Malik
• Techcrunch
• Red Herring

A few of us plaxors have started a weekly poker night. From the trash talking, to the bluffing that you're bluffing (or are you?), to the gut wrenching all-in moments, it's a very fun diversion. I could tell you about the time Michael's flush got beat by Mark's full house, or when Ryan doubled up with quad jacks on the very first hand, or when my 9-6 beat Mark's 9-7 in an all-in battle for first place. And that's only from the first three weeks.

There has been some debate about how constructive the game of poker really is. I think it actually reinforces some useful skills. You can talk about bluffing, betting, and pot odds all day, but when it comes down to it, poker is a game about decision making. The best poker players are the ones who can gather the most information and make the best decisions based upon it. Can that be applied outside of poker? My bet is yes.

More photos here...

-- Russ Davis, Plaxo Client Engineer

When we started Plaxo we were running on a handful of Linux boxes. In fact, I think we had as many development machines as we did production servers. The initial roll out was 2 database servers, running MySQL, each with a couple IDE drives in them of around 80gigs a piece. That was about 3 and a half years ago.

Once we started growing we moved into Dell servers with their external storage, that was ummm...interesting. Let's just say that Dell should stick to what they are good at, making desktops. So we moved on.

Now we've grown to over 200 servers, which includes over 25 DB pairs (primary/secondary for redundancy), each capable of storing between 600gig to 1TB. We're still running MySQL, on InnoDB, but not much else is the same. We've installed a SAN environment built around storage from Pillar Data Systems, and a whole slew of servers from Penguin Computing , which run very nice Opteron chips from AMD. I won't go into more specifics as to what we have in place, but will say that it takes 6 full data center racks to hold just the storage, and no we aren't being paid by Pillar or Penguin to say this. :-)

Here's a glimpse at a bit of the storage:

Yeah, we know it's not a huge environment, and there are certainly larger environments in most any data center, but we thought it'd be interesting for our customers to understand what it really takes to run this service. Maybe it'll entice a few of you to show your appreciation and become premium users, hint hint.

Some of you have been watching the OPS Blog, which we keep updated with any issues that the service is experiencing. It's not a perfect service, but we try darn hard to provide a fast, reliable and secure experience, and hope you can bear with us when we do have little issues.

Finally, we're hiring in the OPS department if any of you talented Operations Engineer/Unix Admin types are looking for a challenge! See ya next time.

Plaxo is business. But it's not business all the time. We're a tight group. We respect each other. We don't ever take sides. Except maybe in bowling. Bowling together, we settle scores, but we enjoy our time. We're good to each other. Like family.

Trevor bowls with style and grace.

Jie knocking down pins.

Joseph's left hook.

Swami, Ben, Huy, and Stuart

Drew Colace watches Joseph's back

Jing keeps score

Every year, there has been talk about having a Plaxo Ski Trip, but it had never happened. Well, this year it finally did :)

This past weekend, 14 of us went up to North Lake Tahoe for some skiing and snowboarding. Peter graciously hosted us at his cabin in Tahoe Donner and since we had so many people, we rented a condo nearby for additional sleeping arrangements. Many of us left Thursday night and spent Friday at Northstar.

The rest of the crew drove up and joined us Friday night. People split off between Northstar and Squaw on Saturday, but we reunited for dinner and games afterwards.

All in all, the first annual Plaxo Ski Trip was a success; can't wait 'till next year! :D

--Mark Jen

I've always been fascinated by old photographs. Besides being a transport back in time—Brando is skinny, Steve Jobs is wearing a suit, Bill Gates looks like a nerd, well, a young nerd—I find the oldness of the black and white photos intriguing. Men wore hats, kids' clothes weren't smattered with logos, apricot orchards blanketed the valley, and those black and white prints had a timeless quality that insta-matics couldn't touch.

I've been shooting pictures in and around the office here at Plaxo since I started three months ago. The office has a few partitions, but mostly it's a big open floor with islands of desks and computers. Without the protection of walls, people are easy to shoot. Sort of. The monitors get in the way, but if people have an impromptu meeting on the other side of my desk I'll shoot them. I have a silent trigger and I can swivel the back of the camera so I shoot looking down, like on a Hasselblad. This let me get the odd shot of Rikk making faces.

He thought I was just setting up. He doesn't like that picture, so figured I had to find a way to work it into this blog. I like candids—catching people when they forget they're being photographed and let their 'IS' be taken. The people here at Plaxo are a friendly, animated, likable lot. For a company of 40 plus people, I've heard, we're perceived as a much larger entity—a behemoth, a faceless corporation even. Not even. Take a look for yourself.

My Dad always had a 'You're On' face. He put it on just as anyone squinched one eye and with the other took aim through a viewfinder. Every shot of him? Cocked head, toothy grin, and a look in his eye that seemed to say, 'What's it going to take for you to drive home in this car today?'

Four years ago I got my Cybershot and I took snapshots: on vacation, smile-it's-your-birthday kinds of snaps. I was visiting my Dad and was looking down, seeing him on the glass my new digital camera and my son said something that made 'Grandpa' laugh. And I pulled the trigger. This time it wasn't a snap. It was THE shot of my Dad. 'My eyes are closed and I need a haircut,' he'd say. He didn't like it. Everyone else did. My Mom liked it. She had a print made to set on the altar at his memorial service last year. I love the shot because it IS my Dad. And it's my Dad in THE shot that marked the moment I went from taking snaps to aiming for photographs.

-Michael Rowley, Visual Designer & Resident Photographer

(My Dad: Don Rowley)

At Plaxo, we believe in empowering our employees to do the best work they're capable of. From flexible hours to telecommuting options to no-questions-asked sick days, Plaxo treats its employees with respect. In return, our employees understand and accept the responsibility that's inherent in the trust they're given, and consistently go the extra mile in their work.

Our environment is one in which self-motivated team players thrive. So whether you're an outstanding engineer, UI specialist, or product manager, there's room for you to join in. If you're interested in helping Plaxo help millions of others to stay connected, drop us a line with a cover letter and your resume. We'd love to hear from you at jobs@plaxo.com.

Here at Plaxo, we think it�s crucial that we connect to each other and with the outside world. One of the ways we connect internally is by having lunch brought into the office twice a week. By avoiding the typical lunch time scatter, everyone can sit down, have a meal together and talk about what�s going on in their lives. Once in a while, we even talk shop; we�ve found that oftentimes, switching up the environment and context lends itself to great �out of the box� ideas.

Join us for lunch through these pictures from one of our lunch hours :)

Happy holidays from all of us at Plaxo!

To help our Plaxo members get in the mood, we cooked up a holiday edition of My Plaxo. Enjoy!