The rise of small outfits building big things on constrained budgets is the theme of a Reuters story carried by Yahoo! News. It includes a quote by Tim O’Reilly and talks among others about Odeo. And of particular interest on these parts about their use of Ruby on Rails:

Evan Williams, who helped create Blogger software and later sold it to Google, is working with a small group of developers in San Francisco, to build Odeo, a highly anticipated new application due out in the next few weeks. Odeo relies on a freely available set of simple yet powerful database programing tools known as Ruby on Rails.