December 16th, 2008
Seesmic gets a new set of threads
Seesmic’s black, orange and red colors are now part of the company’s history. As is its attempt to make a full Flash-based interface. As of this morning, the company has launched a re-designed HTML interface that is both cleaner and simpler. Mike Arrington sums it up neatly:
Even though I’m an investor, one thing that has always bugged me about Seesmic
is the all black background (its depressing), and the excessive use of Flash on the site (there’s nothing except Flash, try loading it on an iPhone). Having a few Flash elements on a site when necessary is fine. But using it just to use it is so…ugh.
Needless to say, this veiled grumbling following last week’s spat between Arrington and Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur ripples on in the video comments they were bouncing off one another. All good entertainment for those who like to watch Silicon Valley entrepreneurs at play.
On a more serious note, while in Paris last week, Johann Romefort, Seesmic’s CTO told me the new interface was designed to overcome limitations they found in Flash. They were finding it increasingly necessary to make compromises that were hampering the service.
December 4th, 2008
LeWeb sold out
Much to my surprise but relief LeWeb 2008 has sold out. That’s what Loic LeMeur told me the other evening. Given the economic downturn, that has to count as an extraordinary result. Perhaps things in Paris are not as bad as they are elsewhere. Several of those attending have been struggling to find hotels in the city. That contrasts sharply with what I found last month when trying to book for the event. At the time, I had a choice of over 100 hotels.
As a technology conference, LeWeb is a strange mix of people from the world of arts, science and business but it is always worthwhile. The quality of attendees and the sessions can’t be beaten outside of the US and it is always a fun event.
Who for instance would want to miss Steve Gillmor taking on Microsft’s Dan’l Lewin, investor Yossi Vardi being put through his paces by Kara Swisher or listen to Chris Anderson, the curator of TED?
The tech industry may be shivering from the cold bite of economic recession but it will be interesting to get a bead from those who are much closer to the action than I.
December 2nd, 2008
Zoho's CloudSQL: a real step forward
Zoho just can’t stop churning out software. Today it is launching the Zoho CloudSQL. Put simply, this is the first step to providing a cloud based integration framework that allows developers to pass data between Zoho applications and their own. This is exciting stuff. For the first time, a commercial software vendor is providing an easy way to interoperate with its applications without imposing an entry or exit visa tax.
From the release:
- It’s the first technology that allows customers to interact with their data on the cloud, from another cloud application or from an on-premises one through real SQL.
- It supports multiple SQL dialects. We support all the major (and even some not so major) ones: ANSI, Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Informix.
- With our JDBC/ODBC drivers, developers can access data in the cloud just as easily as if it were stored in a local database.
I caught up with Raju Vegesna to get a feel of what the company intends: “You can think of CloudSQL as a linking mechanism for things like QuickBooks or any application that wants to talk to and from Zoho data.” That’s exactly where I hoped Zoho would position the service.
Like it or not, cloud based accounting (AaaS anyone?) is a niche area with the world remaining firmly in on-premise land. While I see plenty of examples coming out to address the SMB market, it’s going to take time before finance types will trust corporate transaction data in the Internet cloud. Making it easy to consume services in an integrated manner without the distinction of whether the data is on premise or in the cloud is an incredibly smart move. It means that you don’t have to throw out your existing accounting applications if you don’t want to while opening up the business to other scloud ervices that are gaining traction. The obvious candidate is CRM but it could equally be SCM or talent management.
I also asked Raju what will happen with existing Zoho applications. Right now, they represent a great toolkit but little integration work has been done to turn them into a ready to consume suite of services. “The company has made a start by demoing a simple report demo but yes over time we plan to use CloudSQL as the integration point for all the apps.”
CloudSQL is a development environment and not for the end user. Its potential to open up a whole ecosystem category of its own is enormous. The big complaint of all business users is the general lack of integration capabilities between different applications. Taking this step puts Zoho out in front with something that has broad appeal, including the open source crowd.
However, before running off thinking this is some sort of Holy Grail, integration calls for much more than a few SQL calls and a Web API. Orchestrating services and events is where larger businesses would like to be. Even so, it gives the SMB a real chance to mix ‘n’ match services the way they want to get things done. In that regard, it removes vendor lock-in and allows for the emergence of genuine vertical market applications on a scale we’ve not seen in the past.
It will be interesting to see how Zoho follows this up and how it supports the ecosystem that congregates around its API.
November 21st, 2008
Enterprise 2.0 solution reduces email abuse
We now live in a day and age where we can expect to get dozens, if not hundreds of emails a day. Most of these you’ll find are replies and forwarded emails - emails which you have already responded to and are following up, or emails which have been passed onto you because you’re more of a relevant person to deal with it.
Taglocity works on Outlook 2003/2007, and works as an Enterprise 2.0 solution, allowing the user to prioritise email, and deal with email in a more productive way. Instead of abandoning and forgetting about email days down the line, this solution allows even the most busy of people to organise, prioritise and deal with email.
Being unique in business practise isn’t always useful. Using bad practises of email management has become a social norm, and are more than happy to hit that “reply all” button, even though those people don’t need to see it. People are thinking too socially and less business like; replying to everyone so “everyone can get the message plus smiley face”, when a single email to the sender of the original message is all that is needed.
This not only clogs up your email, it clogs up your business day. Everyone wishes they had more hours in the day, and at times you’ll find you’ve got more coming in than you have going out. Oh trust me, whilst saving the world in my day job and university student the rest of the time, I know how that feels.
Every time you get an email through, simply create a tag for it and a whole load of options are available for it. You can mark them all as read, set appointments and flags for the message, move them, delete them, and even allow them to “travel with you”, so they can be aggregated on other Outlook screens. These can be shared with others, and search all of your tags with smart folders.
“From ‘push’ only to ‘push’ and ‘pull’ thereby giving people more control over their own attention and enabling on-demand knowledge discovery and sharing to all stakeholders. In addition to being able to quickly find needed information, information should also ‘find’ people based on their criteria and terms.”
It’s a brilliant little tool which uses little-to-no memory, and has saved me hours already, especially with the amount of crap I get in my inbox.
November 12th, 2008
JobBlogs: Facebook for business
I’ve been a little busy over the last few weeks, but it hasn’t all been drinking and partying. I’ve been looking into JobBlogs, which has a highly innovative SaaS appliance, which blends together customer relation management and project management, with social media within business as a main selling point, into one central application. As they so delicately describe it:
“It serves up an intuitive, comprehensive and fast workspace tailored to meet universal team challenges. Contacts, plans, activities, tasks, documents and schedules, are easily organized and tracked throughout the work flow.”
But it’s not just that. It feels, from the very beginning of using this application, like an online operating system; a mesh for the masses, or a screen away from your computer. The user interface is fantastic. It has a very Windows-style feel to it, making sure the user feels safe and comforted knowing the environment even before they use it. You can even customise the wallpaper that you have - a very un-business like quality, but gives it that edge over other competing products.
It’s a fresh way to look at things; integrated blog management to keep on track of projects and let others know how things are stewing. You can create and manage workspaces, tags, business processes - someone even quoted this as being “like Facebook for business”. It also boasts:
“…customer relationship management (CRM), intranet, contact database, content management system and file server requirements.”
It runs within your browser with a SaaS element to it, is incredibly easy to set up and worth the cheap cost to run it all. This could well be a user integral part of any organisation - keeping people connected, up to date, understanding and safe knowing their storage is secure.
It’s worth looking into at very least. This’ll be something I’ll personally be keeping in my bookmarks for a later date.
November 7th, 2008
Would you flip to Microsoft?
The announcement of BizSpark didn’t get a huge amount of attention and I’m not surprised. After 24 years of running Wintel based systems I flipped to Mac and have never missed anything Microsoft offered. OK - I’m an edge case that wants to run as much as I can in the Internet cloud but as someone who has invested in startups the last couple of years I can confidently say that no-one I personally know is building on the Microsoft stack. That’s not to say they don’t exist.
I recently spoke with ThoughtFarmer. They’re betting that organizations wanting to replace intranets will be more willing to do so if the offering is built on Microsoft technology. I see the wisdom in that (more on ThoughtFarmer next week.) Despite all the column inches that open source, Mac, Ubuntu and the like generate, the fact remains that Microsoft still ‘owns’ the enterprise. That may not matter for departmental solutions owned by users or those deployed over the Internet but it sure as heck matters internally. Especially if that means support.
Mike Arrington declares Microsoft’s BizSpark initiative as ‘brilliant’ and when you look at it, that’s easy to understand:
What startups get: a free, tech-supported alternative to open source software. Microsoft gets to train a new crop of engineers on their software and services, and lock these guys in after three years when fees start to be charged. Brilliant.
The question for startup developers is whether they trust Microsoft not to gouge them when the deal expires or before they’ve hit enough revenue to afford the services.Most of the folk I know give a collective shrug but then I only know a fraction of 1% of those in the developer community. As Jason Harris said on CMS Newsire:
In many cases, running Microsoft software doesn’t even enter the minds of those building solutions in a start-up environment.
It will be interesting to revisit this in say a year and see how Microsoft is doing. In the meantime, if you’re a startup, would you go for BizSpark?
November 4th, 2008
Trade show horrors
The global sales VP of an enterprise software company once told me that 70% of his salesforce are D-graders the company had to constantly winnow. Tip up at a trade conference and you’ll see them in abundance.
A guest column over at Sandhill by Elizabeth Cook points up some of the horrors she saw at the recent Oracle OpenWorld trade floor:
- The Slump: Booth staff slumped over, focused intently on their handheld devices. No acknowledgement of passers-by. Some sat hunched in a chair, others stood back to the aisle. A widespread problem.
- The Texting Talker: One representative came to the edge of the booth to talk with me, then repeatedly checked his messages. “Don’t worry, I’m still talking to you” he said as he started texting a reply. Don’t worry – I’m outta here.
- Cell Phone Snobs: Also a widespread problem. No one stops to talk to someone who is clearly too busy to be bothered.
- Eaters: Even if you are the only representative from your company, you don’t eat in the booth during the peak traffic time. If you have more than one person at the show, take turns and eat away from the booth – during a slow time.
- The Huddle: Groups of company representatives, huddled in conversation, paying no attention to passers-by, often with backs to the aisle.
- The Glazed Gaze: Too bored, disinterested, or hung-over to put on a game face.
- The Clearly Uncomfortable: Some people are just not suited for booth duty. Even if you have a technical product, selling to a technical audience, your programmers may not be the best representatives on the trade-show floor.
Keep in mind, these are behaviors I observed during the peak-traffic times. And I couldn’t make this stuff up.
On the other hand, some companies got it right. Interestingly, the market leaders had buttoned up, professional operations.
So true. As the conference season starts to wind down, I see these kinds of thing all the time. They’re enough to make any CXO weep. How the heck are you supposed to get a sales person’s attention when he’s shoving burritos down his neck or yabbering into a Crackberry? That’s assuming the person isn’t showing obvious signs of recovery from the previous night’s party?
Hungry companies don’t do this kind of thing. They may not have the best sales pros but they sure as heck know how to give attention. That above everything is what prospective customers want. Whatever your stage in the startup game, don’t get into bad habits. They’re costly.
October 31st, 2008
No recession in Joyent's cloud
Rod Boothby at Joyent (disclosure: Rod is also a fellow Irregular) sent me the above graph showing how Joyent is profiting from the downturn in the economy. The reasons are not hard to fathom.
Despite the economic downturn, organizations still need to get things done and still need data center scalability. However they are turning their attention to providers that can quickly provision and which do not require capital expenditure. In email to me, Rod says: “In uncertain economic times, the move from capital expenses into operating expenses not only makes it easier to get new projects off the ground, but it also reduces the risks associated with running a new project. If the new application fails, clients can simply cancel their cloud infrastructure.”
Also see: Cloud computing: Will the financial geeks give it a boost?
October 29th, 2008
LinkedIn's apps: good idea but...
Larry Dignan offers his view on the announcement that LinkedIn has added in a bundle of applications designed to enhance the platform. Larry is mildly dismissive, suggesting that:
I wouldn’t call these applications exactly enterprise class, but could be useful in the corporate environment.
If we’re equating ‘enterprise’ to the 1,000 person up business then yes, Larry has a good point but if we’re talking about the individual, looking to establish a personal business network then I disagree. Huddle for instance is a great application for the kind of crowdsourcing we’re seeing in niche networks. Tripit is useful for connecting with those you may have in your network when on the road. From a regional viewpoint, I would have preferred to see Dopplr. But Wordpress.com inclusion just seems lame. What’s wrong with Wordpress.org?
I’d like to think this will work but I’m not convinced. I installed some of the apps to my profile and found that there is no discovery process that automatically links to my profiles in other applications. OK - so maybe I need a touch of ’security’ to ensure I’m linking to the right ’stuff.’ And yes, there are the to be expected performance glitches that a couple of my colleagues have picked up.
But the real downside for me is that LinkedIn requires me to use it as a portal of sorts. That means another application I need keep open on the desktop and probably in its own window. The advantage is that I can aggregate other apps I might use into one place but in reality I don’t believe I am going to do that.
I’d like to be proven wrong because LinkedIn is starting to mature into the kind of personal work-life tool that professionals will want to use. As Larry says:
The move (LinkedIn blog, statement, Techmeme) makes sense as LinkedIn can stick to its knitting, maintain its focus in what should be a boom time (lots of folks looking to network and find jobs on the cheap) and the social network can differentiate from the games and other time wasting apps found elsewhere.
Whether it catches the eye of the Gen-Y’ers I see flocking around Facebook is another matter. They don’t seem to mind the chaos that Facebook has become. Speaking personally, I got out of there the moment I started getting ‘poked.’
October 28th, 2008
SlideRocket presents from the cloud
Something that I can’t seem to avoid when writing a post on here are the words, “collaboration”, “interoperability” and “productivity”. These are, however, essential parts in the enterprise industry and a step closer to a fully fledged Enterprise 2.0 application.
SlideRocket is a Web 2.0 application which integrates enterprise relating features, to allow you to create, manage, share and present online presentations. You can import presentations from offline to online, and you can just as easily export presentations from online to offline.
The key features to point out is that you can access your presentations from anywhere in the world. No more will you need to email things to yourself, save things in a server share or carry round your flash drive with you. It’s an online presentation service which stores your presentations, and lets you edit and present them afterwards. The website address is all you’ll need when going into a meeting.
The entire interface is, dare I say it, gorgeous. It’s slick, smooth, gentle on the eyes, and all Flash based so everything works as soon as you want it to. If anything, it actually seems to work better than PowerPoint offline. With all of the features that PowerPoint has, it’s a much more economically viable option than buying even a basic version of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite.
You can still share your documents with others, setting permissions on slides and objects within your presentation to make sure others can’t screw with your work. Transitions, tables, shapes, Flash plugins, other plugins, audio, themes, text, pictures and themes are thrown in there, making this a highly functional web application.
After using this software for the last day, revising and catching up on university work, involving a lot of PowerPoint deck creation and modification - I can honestly say this is something I would continue using. However, I’d want all of the features but I don’t want to pay for it.
Regardless of business structure or employee numbers, there are three tariffs which seem to fit most people for pricing. Free, Individual at $10 a month, and Business at $20 per user a month - which all offer more and more, depending on how much you want to pay. There are plenty of demos of the application available on their website, and much more information lying around the place.
On a closing thought, with the recent news that Office 14, the next version of the Microsoft Office system, will come with a set of lightweight web editions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote, maybe this start-up won’t be lasting as long as I hope it will.
Amongst many things, Zack Whittaker is a good-for-nothing, pink-sock wearing,
tea drinking, British student at the University of Kent, Canterbury, on the south-east coast of England. Currently in his second year, he decided to change courses to BA (Hons) Criminology and Social Policy, because he got bored with computer science.
Have a look at his public biography and work disclosures of his current and past industry affiliations.
Fire off an email if you feel like sharing a story, or just feel a bit lonely and want a chitty chat and a virtual hug or Leave a voicemail.
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