Qwaq Secures $7 Million in Funding From Alloy Ventures and Storm Ventures
28 November, 2007
Full speed ahead. With the rise of virtual technology and a huge lead in the virtual workspace market, Qwaq pulls even further ahead with a successful first round funding raising $7 Million from Alloy Ventures and Storm Ventures.
Qwaq Forums the company’s first commercial product is built on Croquet and open source virtual world development platform written in Squeak, an open source version of Smalltalk. The work that Qwaq has put into forums is exceptional. The platform takes the concept of a virtual world with all the benefits of immediate communications and immersive visual feed back and integrates it with important business technologies that allow users to truly collaborate in real time. They have taken Croquet and made it work for business.
The news is really terrific, not only for Qwaq and their customers, but for our open source communities as well. Qwaq continues to share code and support both Croquet and Squeak, not to mention hiring some of the best and brightest Smalltalkers, something I’m sure Qwaq will continue to do with this new funding.
Congratulations Qwaq!!
The Weekly Squeak 
7 January, 2008 at 12:34
Congratulations on more smalltalk jobs. But let me make a prediction – Qwaq is using a free technology and all the background work and research that went into it, they’re not paying all the people who worked on it, and they’re going to go ahead and focus on obscenely profiting from the technology. They’ll put a few nickels in the pot as they go along, just to give the apologists something to crow about, and they’ll take huge amounts of funds out of the public trough – after all, who funds “free software” but universities, which are funded by tax breaks and other forms of indirect and direct public funding. I have more respect for mobsters than for marketing people – if you’re going to steal the baby’s candy, don’t insult my intelligence by tucking in the corner of it’s blanket afterwards and calling it childcare. Companies are there to profit. If they really “gave back” they’d be out of business. So congratulations on Qwaq and its investors finding a new way to steal public money, I hope you choke on the poverty you create.
7 January, 2008 at 15:53
JP,
I’m amazed that you were able to make the jump from public funding of software research and open source software to creating poverty. I guess I fail to see how using public funds to create and support open source software that anyone can use is bad. Whether you are creating a company, using the software to teach a new generation of computer scientists or building educational software, practical applications are exactly the benefits we expect from public funding. I see the universities and students benefiting from this work as much as any potential company. Overall the availability of software for practical purposes is a benefit.
When you look closely at Qwaq and who is benefiting from this work you will find that the people that essentially created the software are running and working at the company. It would be very difficult to argue that they deserve less then anyone, including the universities to use this software. You can see that connection through the very close collaboration between Qwaq and these university projects.
As for token sharing of software advancements, I will agree that it is possible that some significant advancements may be slow to arrive in the open source versions, but I would point out that these development are expensive to develop and Qwaq should have the opportunity to recoup some of that expense. Overall even though this may be true the amount of code coming from Qwaq to the open source code is significantly more then you would expect. This makes me believe that the opposite of what you are suggesting is true. It seems to me, and this is just an opinion, that Qwaq believes that they would benefit from more companies developing Croquet, and they are supporting the open source code with an eye on developing a market for them to compete in. Everyone involved will benefit from greater adoption of Croquet. I think they can “give back” and need to do so to create their business. They will support open standards in order to build bridges with other communities, universities and companies. It’s not marketing, it really is just good software and good people sharing and creating a new virtual world.
Ron
16 January, 2008 at 00:24
[…] reported earlier that Qwaq received funding, well today Qwaq announced that it is hiring. They are looking for a Software Quality Engineer and […]
31 July, 2008 at 23:55
[…] Qwaq Gets Funded November 28, 2007 Qwaq got funded with $7 million. Qwaq uses Squeak and Croquet to build a collaboration product. Read about it here on the weekly squeak blog. […]