Origami Labs is a startup that was funded by Y Combinator. Origami came out of the mobile social network known as Everyme. Indiana-based eFamily is the company behind the acquisition. Origami Labs will continue to operate their products as is while eFamily takes over the branding and software. The team at Origami Labs is not joining eFamily . They were actually hired by Nest a few weeks ago. All 6 people that worked at Origami Labs now has engineering and design roles at Nest. Everyme raised around $3.66 million in outside funding.


eFamily Has Acquired Origami Labs

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Not all exits have to see a product disappear. Case in point:  Origami , the family-focused social service that arose from Y Combinator-backed mobile social network  Everyme’s  earlier efforts, has been sold. The acquirer, Indiana-based  eFamily , has taken over the company’s branding and software, and will continue to develop and support the product, which is good news for current users. However, the Bay Area team from Origami Labs is not joining eFamily – instead, they were quietly “acqui-hired” by Nest several weeks ago. The entire six-person Origami Labs team, including founder and CEO Vibhu Norby, is now at Nest, working in various engineering and design roles. Norby says that Origami Labs had other good offers on the table for his company, but none that would have kept the product alive. “eFamily was the best one that we had there,” he says. For background, Origami publicly launched its family-focused sharing service earlier this summer  after a year of development. The product was something of a spin-off of Everyme , a private messaging and photo-sharing app that never really took off, despite having raised $3.66 million in outside funding. But Everyme allowed the startup to gain some early insights it used to build Origami. For example, the company found that around half of Everyme’s users were families, so Origami was built with that group’s needs in mind. The new service offered a web and mobile platform (iOS and Android) that allowed families to post text, photos and videos, create photo albums, and receive email digests. Early on, Origami found a foothold with new parents who represented a majority of the site’s earliest adopters at launch. Said Norby at the time, new parents take and share the most photos, but they also had the biggest desire for privacy. Shortly after launching, Origami also acquired competing service  FamilyLeaf , another YC startup. The two companies worked together to help transition FamilyLeaf users to Origami, but FamilyLeaf’s team moved on. That startup had around 7,500 registered families at the time of its own acquisition. Today, the two services have over 40,000 users combined. Origami also had 40,000 sign-ups from its beta program, but that doesn’t speak to its paying users or actives, which are “significantly less.”
Users were charged $5 per month for their private family websites – a price point that wasn’t well-suited to a venture-backed company storing a lot of documents, Norby now believes. He also sees some similarities between the shutdown of Everpix, another photo-sharing service whose closure was announced just yesterday , and what they were building at Origami. “We’ve been working for two and a half years in this space, and it was rough,” says Norby. “We had a good business. It’s not a VC business…The prospect of raising another round for our company was very difficult,” he adds. Also like Everpix, Origami had hosting costs to deal with, though not as substantial. The company still had money to run the business for a few years, but with the offer from Nest and the dim chances surrounding the next funding round, it make sense to move on. The team was able to return some capital to investors, on top of the acquisition price eFamily paid for the Origami assets, which is undisclosed. (It was an all-cash deal, however. )
Unlike Origami, eFamily is a small, bootstrapped company and not eFamily CEO David Hosei’s only focus. A serial entrepreneur and real estate investor, he’s not one to put all his eggs into one basket, he tells TechCrunch. Now at eFamily, Origami’s software is reviving a legacy product first founded in 2006, then incorporated as eFamily.com LLC in 2010. The company had previously offered similar tools allowing families to connect and share their memories online, in the form of private family websites. Today, the company reports having over 30,000 registered accounts, and over 300,000 “profiles.” Those profiles include both users and other family members, alive and deceased, who have been added to eFamily.com’s family trees on its older product. The company now plans to bring those family trees to its new Origami-infused service, and will be transitioning its current user base, largely freemium, to a paid product. Users will be asked to pay $5 per month (or $50/year) for these private sites, a figure Hosei thinks is reasonable. They can also bring in their current domains for the same price, or buy a new domain through the service for a fee. “[eFamily] was a freemium service before, but we decided that model isn’t going to work long-term for us. This software is really beautiful, and works well on multiple devices,” says Hosei, noting why he thinks the new eFamily is worth paying for. He also adds that the service can sustain itself indefinitely if they can grow it to at least 4,000 paying users. The Origami website has now been transitioned to eFamily.com, and the mobile apps are being updated now. 0

Y Combinator-Backed Origami Labs Acquired By eFamily, But Service Lives On

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Not all exits have to see a product disappear. Case in point:  Origami , the family-focused social service that arose from Y Combinator-backed mobile social network  Everyme’s  earlier efforts, has been sold. The acquirer, Indiana-based  eFamily , has taken over the company’s branding and software, and will continue to develop and support the product, which is good news for current users. However, the Bay Area team from Origami Labs is not joining eFamily – instead, they were quietly “acqui-hired” by Nest several weeks ago. The entire six-person Origami Labs team, including founder and CEO Vibhu Norby, is now at Nest, working in various engineering and design roles. Norby says that Origami Labs had other good offers on the table for his company, but none that would have kept the product alive. “eFamily was the best one that we had there,” he says. For background, Origami publicly launched its family-focused sharing service earlier this summer  after a year of development. The product was something of a spin-off of Everyme , a private messaging and photo-sharing app that never really took off, despite having raised $3.66 million in outside funding. But Everyme allowed the startup to gain some early insights it used to build Origami. For example, the company found that around half of Everyme’s users were families, so Origami was built with that group’s needs in mind. The new service offered a web and mobile platform (iOS and Android) that allowed families to post text, photos and videos, create photo albums, and receive email digests. Early on, Origami found a foothold with new parents who represented a majority of the site’s earliest adopters at launch. Said Norby at the time, new parents take and share the most photos, but they also had the biggest desire for privacy. Shortly after launching, Origami also acquired competing service  FamilyLeaf , another YC startup. The two companies worked together to help transition FamilyLeaf users to Origami, but FamilyLeaf’s team moved on. That startup had around 7,500 registered families at the time of its own acquisition. Today, the two services have over 40,000 users combined. Origami also had 40,000 sign-ups from its beta program, but that doesn’t speak to its paying users or actives, which are “significantly less.”
Users were charged $5 per month for their private family websites – a price point that wasn’t well-suited to a venture-backed company storing a lot of documents, Norby now believes. He also sees some similarities between the shutdown of Everpix, another photo-sharing service whose closure was announced just yesterday , and what they were building at Origami. “We’ve been working for two and a half years in this space, and it was rough,” says Norby. “We had a good business. It’s not a VC business…The prospect of raising another round for our company was very difficult,” he adds. Also like Everpix, Origami had hosting costs to deal with, though not as substantial. The company still had money to run the business for a few years, but with the offer from Nest and the dim chances surrounding the next funding round, it make sense to move on. The team was able to return some capital to investors, on top of the acquisition price eFamily paid for the Origami assets, which is undisclosed. (It was an all-cash deal, however. )
Unlike Origami, eFamily is a small, bootstrapped company and not eFamily CEO David Hosei’s only focus. A serial entrepreneur and real estate investor, he’s not one to put all his eggs into one basket, he tells TechCrunch. Now at eFamily, Origami’s software is reviving a legacy product first founded in 2006, then incorporated as eFamily.com LLC in 2010. The company had previously offered similar tools allowing families to connect and share their memories online, in the form of private family websites. Today, the company reports having over 30,000 registered accounts, and over 300,000 “profiles.” Those profiles include both users and other family members, alive and deceased, who have been added to eFamily.com’s family trees on its older product. The company now plans to bring those family trees to its new Origami-infused service, and will be transitioning its current user base, largely freemium, to a paid product. Users will be asked to pay $5 per month (or $50/year) for these private sites, a figure Hosei thinks is reasonable. They can also bring in their current domains for the same price, or buy a new domain through the service for a fee. “[eFamily] was a freemium service before, but we decided that model isn’t going to work long-term for us. This software is really beautiful, and works well on multiple devices,” says Hosei, noting why he thinks the new eFamily is worth paying for. He also adds that the service can sustain itself indefinitely if they can grow it to at least 4,000 paying users. The Origami website has now been transitioned to eFamily.com, and the mobile apps are being updated now. 0


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Origami , the new family-focused product from Y Combinator-backed mobile social network  Everyme , has now arrived after nearly a year of development. A spin-off of sorts, Origami takes some of the original inspiration behind Everyme – that people are looking for new ways to share outside of larger, more open social networks like Facebook – and tweaks the formula to address the needs of parents and families, specifically. “What we saw pretty early on was that probably 50 percent of the usage on Everyme is families,” explains Origami co-founder Vibhu Norby. “And that’s 50 percent of total Circles [Everyme’s groups], but in terms of actual usage, it was almost 100 percent of people using it with their families,” he says. “We felt like we found the market, but the product itself wasn’t really intended for that.”
Sustained by its $2.15 million A round , the company has been focused on Origami, a new product build from the ground up, since August 2012. Like Everyme, Origami offers both a web and mobile platform that allows families to connect with each other in a private group, and share photos. But the service goes further, too, offering tools for sharing videos, creating albums, and adding text-based entries for posting stories, recipes, or other notes. Launched into private beta this February, 90 percent of the families on Origami today are new parents. “They take the most photos, they share the most photos, and they have the biggest desire for privacy,” says Norby. “We really want to work with the parents’ workload – the idea that they take photos all day long, they take a lot of photos on weekends especially, and they don’t have time to share every single photo in real-time. They want to sit down when the kids are in bed, and think about sharing them then,” he says. With the new service, parents can set up a homepage for their family, and even grab a custom domain which Origami acquires on their behalf. (e.g. “JonesFamily.com,” “JonesFamilyPics.com,” etc. ) The site itself, like Everyme, is beautifully designed and simple to understand. Buttons on the right side of the homepage direct users to share a photo, video or story, and another feature called “Family Request” lets users prompt other family members to share photos, videos, or stories of their own. Another section of the site lets users create photo albums, and allows for import from your computer as well as a number of other photo-sharing sites including Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, and SmugMug. These collections can also be shared via email, or back out to Facebook and Twitter. At launch, Origami also has apps available for iPhone and Android , understanding that not all family members may be using the same mobile platform. Here, users can also post and view the moments and photos albums, plus receive notifications when new content has been added. The service still has some kinks to work out – not bugs, necessarily, but places where the experience could be a little smoother. For example, if you go to upload from social services, there’s no way to retrieve the photos y0u haven’t already put into albums; it also can’t access those photos you’ve been auto-uploading from your phone to Facebook, Google or Dropbox (the latter two of which are not supported), and in some places on mobile, it’s missing multi-upload. But the product is still in development, and many of these features are still in the works. For example, the multi-upload function is just two weeks away. Overall, the site fills a niche that many other mobile-only or mobile-first startups have ignored: that parents may want more of fully-fledged social experience, rather that just an app. Often, new parents (and especially moms) turn to standard blogging platforms these days instead of traditional “baby books” to record those early memories, but Origami offers another option for that kind of sharing with a service that falls somewhere in between a Tumblr for parents and a private social network. Norby says the company’s vision is to re-create the experience of “home,” and that’s something which the real domain names it gives its users’ websites provides. “Facebook is not a home, let’s be honest – it feels like another person’s service,” he says. “[Origami] is private. It’s its own place somewhere on the Internet.”
Origami is not free, but its pricing, like the service itself, is simple. There’s only one tier: after a free 30-day trial, it’s $5 per month (discounted to $50 per year, if billed annually) for unlimited photos, videos, members, and the custom domain. Really my only problem here is that I have to figure out how to import all the content I have spread out across all those other family-focused and private social services –  Path , Notabli , Kidfolio , 23snaps , Tweekaboo , Hubble , Famil.io ,  Familiar , and others. Being an early adopting parent can be tough. 0

From The Makers Of Everyme, Origami Launches Its Private Sharing Service For Families

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With a new iPhone app called Limelight , Oliver Cameron (best-known as the co-founder of private social network Everyme ) aims to answer the question, “What am I going to watch tonight?”
The app’s basic functionality is pretty straightforward. You can create lists of movies that you’ve watched (rating them between 0 and 5 stars) and that you want to watch. You can also browse lists of highly rated or popular movies in the app, as well as lists created by other users. (You can follow those users, too. ) The ultimate goal, Cameron said, is to help users “organize your movie library” (library might not exactly be the right word for it, since it’s not necessarily a list of movies that you own — but I think it conveys the basic idea) and find new titles to watch. A lot of this functionality is already available in other services. Netflix is famous for its algorithmically driven movie recommendations, and another one of my mainstays, IMDb , also has user ratings and a “watchlist” feature. But in those cases, those features are mixed in with a larger service, whereas Limelight has pared things down and is all about ratings and recommendations. Plus, there’s a nice social component — something that Netflix, for one, is still struggling with . Similar to Amazon-acquired social reading service Goodreads , seeing your friends’ history in Limelight can be useful for finding new movies, and can also just be amusing. For example, I was appalled to discover that Verge writer Ellis Hamburger gave a five-star rating to Armageddon. The app was built by 9:42AM , which is basically the team of Cameron and designer Marcelo Marfil. Cameron said the company’s goal is to “build simple products that work beautifully and have a defined need.” He described 9:42 (which is named after the exact time when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone ) as a side project until he starts his next company. But he said this doesn’t mean he isn’t serious about these apps: “Making apps is a huge passion for me, so it’s a good way to keep creative before I start the next thing.”
As for Everyme, the startup doesn’t seem to have gotten much buzz since its big launch last year, and it launched a new service called Origami in the fall. (Everyme co-founder Vibhu Norby recently published a blog post recommending that startups avoid the big launch and instead focus on building a community, which is what he said he’s doing with Origami. ) Cameron told me that he left because he was looking for a new challenge. “I had been working on practically the same product for nearly three years, so it was time for a change up,” he said. 0


Everyme Co-Founder Oliver Cameron Launches Limelight, A Social App For Finding What To Watch Next

Udacity

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Everyme develops an iPhone app aimed at changing how users keep contacts. It starts by uploading contacts to the app and connecting to various social networks to Everyme. The app then takes the contact information and pairs it with whatever it can spider across the social networks.

Everyme

Tencent

Name	Oliver Cameron
Work History	Udacity
Title	Founder, Chief Executive Officer
Status	Former

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