Startup Famo.us Gets A Quick Demo On-Stage At WWDC

Apple usually shares the spotlight at its WWDC keynote with a few of its developers and partners. Today, the big winner was probably Andreessen Horowitz-backed AI startup Anki, but what also caught our attention was a brief demo of Famo.us, the startup that launched at our Disrupt conference last fall.

The demo itself was pretty short. It came during the announcement of OS X Mavericks, specifically the section on improvements to Safari. One of the big emphases was Safari’s performance compared to other browsers, and at one point, Apple’s Craig Federighi said he wanted to try out a website that’s heavy on power consumption. So he opened up the Famo.us homepage, which is a demo table of elements designed to show off Famo.us’ Javascript framework. Federighi showed the audience that when using Famo.us, the power meter for CPU usage is about halfway up, then he hid the window behind iTunes and the meter dropped.

That’s not the most flattering way to bring up Famo.us’ platform, which is supposed to be used to build HTML5 apps with dramatically improved rendering. But hey, it shows that Apple is aware of Famo.us, the startup got demonstrated, if only briefly, to an enormous audience.

I asked Famo.us co-founder and CEO Steve Newcomb if he could share any details about why his technology got mentioned on-stage today, and he said he can’t say much, except, “We have a positive relationship with Apple and that I guess it’s now obvious that we are on their radar at the highest level.”

WWDC 13 Coverage