Wisconsin Startup: Planduck A Social Network Based On Schedules INTERVIEW

A new Wisconsin startup was pitched at last weeks Startup Weekend in Madison Wisconsin as Schedule Link. Now they’ve changed their name to Planduck. The company has been recruiting developers and plan on doing something that doesn’t appear to have been done before. Planduck is launching a social networking platform based on scheduling and events.

To start off PlanDuck will cater to college students, faculty and staff by being a centralized location to plan, and share events. With PlanDuck it won’t be just one singular event like a Facebook event but all of the events that people are having in their lives and that they want to share across the social network.

When we were preparing for this interview I didn’t exactly get the concept, as you’ll see I asked him was it just event sharing, was it like Path. PlanDuck founder Mike Walsh admitted that Path founder (and former Facebooker) Dave Morin is one of the people that he looks up to and hopes that PlanDuck will one day be able to integrate Path APIs.

So let’s talk with Walsh about PlanDuck and launching a startup in Wisconsin.

What is PlanDuck?

PlanDuck will be a social networking platform that helps people find, share, and create all the events in their lives. It will start with the University of Wisconsin – Madison and immediate surrounding community.

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The Forgiving Valley: Path Puts Privacy Issue Behind Them Takes Another Round At A $250 Million Valuation

Yesterday we brought you the story of how some folks are out for blood against New York deals start up Sqoot. They misspoke and came off sexist, not once but twice. While opponents of sqoot are begging anyone that will listen to stop supporting their start up over saying that women would be at their hackathon serving beer, Path the social media network started by Facebook Alum Dave Morin, had a much more severe issue and just got another round of funding.

Although I truly feel that privacy is in the hands of the user and that if you are that worried about your privacy than you should stay off the net, Path did something far worse than Sqoot. They uploaded the complete contents of users address books to their own private servers.

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Wow More iPhone Apps Dipping Into Your Address Book

A little over a week ago everyone was up in arms over the fact that Path was stealing people’s address book information.

Path was taking user’s contact information and uploading names, phone numbers and email addresses to their private servers.  Path’s CEO Dave Morin, was applauded by many for facing the issue head on, apologizing and fixing it. Even after he was linked to posts when he was at Facebook that showed a similar behavior.

Of course as we expected, once this story broke more apps came out of the woodwork for doing the exact same thing. In Silicon Valley don’t dare throw stones unless you’re ready to break everyone’s windows.

Silicon Alley Insider dug up a handful of other apps that are taking a peak at what you may think is your private address book:

 

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Path, your contacts, and disaster response: Dave Morin takes the high road

Path co-founder Dave Morin takes the high road today, after the news that your complete contact list is being uploaded to their servers. This morning a developer named Arun Thampi released an article titled: Path uploads your entire address book to their servers.  Included in the article were a number of screenshots and detailed instructions to replicate his findings.  Though there is no time stamp on the article, the first comment was left by Dave Morin, instead of ignoring or running from the issues he chose to immediately respond.  First with the comment:

Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently[sic] as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

Dave Morin
Co-Founder and CEO of Path

*Italics – Emphasis mine

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