October 31st, 2008

No recession in Joyent's cloud

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 10:45 am

Categories: Office productivity

Tags: Financial, Recession, Data Centers, Financial Accounting, E-mail, Cloud Computing, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Finance

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...

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 7:46 am

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Network, LinkedIn, Larry, Tripit, Networking, Dennis Howlett

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

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 12:59 pm

Categories: Office productivity

Tags: Microsoft PowerPoint, Presentation, SlideRocket, Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Zack Whittaker

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.

October 27th, 2008

The Expense Tracker: as it should be

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 11:13 am

Categories: Office productivity

Tags: Taxes, Financial Accounting, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Financial Planning, Finance, Emerging Technologies, Dennis Howlett

Earlier today I spoke with Eric Tippetts, VP of marketing at VOICE2Insights, a Utah based company that has developed The Expense Tracker. This is a voice activated system that helps you to record expenses as you go. The system also allows you to enter online or via text messages. According to Tippett: “We found that different demographies have different data entry preferences so we give them the choice.”

At times like now when money is tight, The Expense Tracker is a good way to help people keep on top of their finances. When you first sign up, it provides a budget based on surveyed information the company obtained from 25 finance specialists. Users can modify the individual expense line items to suit their own spending patterns.

Rather than simply recording expenses, The Expense Tracker sends users a daily reminder to let them know how much is left in the spending budget. “We found that when the family sits down to go through expenses at month end there’s always a fight. This way, you can’t get away from it.” That’s certainly true though I wonder whether some people might find that reminder annoying.

At year end, users can obtain an Excel formatted spreadsheet that can be handed over to tax preparers. Tippetts says there is an API so that developers of other services can add this into their own offerings. Assuming the API works well then any number of services like FreshBooks or QuickBooks could take advantage of The Expense Tracker.

Users can choose between a 6 month plan at $59.70 or pay-as-you-go at $14.95 plus a one time setup fee of $9.95. For those amounts, The Expense Tracker guarantees to help you find un-necessary spend.

For the future, the company is going to add in debt reduction calculators: “Making people aware that if they put a little more on their credit cards, how fast things get paid off.” Next the company plans to add value by offering opportunities to get essentials at a discounted rate. Finally, they want to trend the nation and states to see how users compare with others in the nation and in their home states. Finally, they are finding demand from other countries and are working on an internationalization program that will include SIP dial-in.

Does this sound like a near perfect solution? The only thing that’s missing is the ability to save or copy expense documents and have them managed by an online drop box. The user still has to keep hold of receipts, something we’re all pretty ill disciplined at doing. However, as a first step towards pro-active budgeting where the service nags me daily then it might just represent the impetus people need to get serious about expense management.

October 23rd, 2008

Noodling on LinkedIn's millions

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 3:35 pm

Categories: Social computing

Tags: LinkedIn, Investment, Finance, Dennis Howlett

The news that LinkedIn has raised another $22.7 million (total inbound investment $100 million) has me thinking. TechCrunch says the money was raised just before the credit crunch and banking collapse of last month but even so, this is an extraordinary achievement. There were signs that things were turning rough around the timing of this investment so I’m not sure why TechCrunch should make a point of this.

The key to understanding this comes in the lineup of investors and what they are saying. Per the release: “Goldman Sachs; The McGraw-Hill Companies; and SAP Ventures, a division of SAP AG; as well as a re-investment by Bessemer Venture Partners.” These are all savvy investors that will have undertaken careful due diligence. Not for these guys the smash and grab that one so often hears about from Silicon Valley VCs.

Doug Higgins of SAP Ventures was quoted as saying: “We made this investment because we believe that when Web 2.0 technologies are thoughtfully applied to the enterprise, they can produce significant efficiencies for small, medium and large companies.” (My emphasis.)

I’ve been a LinkedIn user for some years but have never really used it although plenty of people have come to me looking for recommendations or connections. However, as the economy strains to find rays of sunshine, I expect to see an uptick in activity on this service.

Where LinkedIn scores (and FaceBook fails) is in the professional nature of the relationships you’re likely to create and develop, coupled to the richness of reputation data. This makes far more sense to business people than the indiscriminate friending that occurs on the consumer social networks.

Despite past attempts to write off LinkedIn as an irrelevant walled garden, the fact remains it has been profitable since 2006. Solid business applications usually are and even though the earlier Series D valued it at $1 billion, a figure that now looks like the stuff of fairy tales, raising more money now is a wise move.

As always in investment, quality counts. In business applications, the same applies. Don’t be surprised to see LinkedIn turning out as more profitable in the downturn (in contrast to consumer spend based networks) and using its recent round of funding for enterprise style acquisitions.

Update: Here’s another reason why LinkedIn will do better than Facebook. What idiot is going to do this on LinkedIn?

October 23rd, 2008

PBWiki: growing in a recession

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 1:23 pm

Categories: Office productivity, Social computing

Tags: Collaboration, Recession, Environment, PBWiki, Chris Yeh, Wiki, Marketing Research, Online Communications, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

Earlier today I had a conversation with Chris Yeh, VP enterprise marketing at PBWiki. He brings an honesty and refreshing spirit to the business of building a startup.

PBWiki is a company that everyone kinda knows but doesn’t always see. They’re not big on the blah-blah circuit because as Chris points out, you tend to see the same faces and these events have a navel gazing quality to them. I was interested to hear how the company is doing, where its focus is coming from and how it sees the future. Bear in mind the wiki market is crowded yet at the same time wiki represents one of the few areas where you can argue that enterprise adoption has taken a reasonable hold.

Asked about PBWiki’s approach to market, Chris had this to say: “You have to say that you’re going to solve this specific problem for this specific audience. We have a very specific focus for people who are trying to do collaboration across boundaries. Solutions that you bring in house have a very difficult time dealing with people from multiple enterprises.”

Chris cited the example of SAP where they together with CapGemini in the UK are using PBWiki to reach out to customers raqhter than using in house existing solutions. He also said there are instances of PBWiki running inside Google: “How long that will continue is another matter,” he quipped. Yet another use case is in the mortgage industry where customers who have been rejected try hopping from one provider to another in the expectation that the providers won’t share information. All in, Chris claims that PBWiki now has 5-6,000 paying customers from a total of 400,000 who have signed up, paying on average around $1,000 a year.

Chris’s focus the last year has been about moving the company from what was once perceived as a consumer play to more of a business specific value proposition. “In the last year we’ve grown from a handful of people to just under 30. Most of those are in support and sales plus some marketing. We didn’t have any of those functions. We did that because it was obvious there just isn’t that much money in ad support revenues.” Looking at the company website, it is clear they’re doing something right because the company is still hiring. Even so, Chris is not sitting on his laurels: “These things take a long time to come hit you and even though we’re continuing to do better and better, you just don’t know when or if the recession will bite so I’m cautious.”

Asked why PBWiki is adopting a more traditional approach to market Chris noted that once you get to around the $500 to $1,000 mark, people tend to want to talk with someone about the product: “The amount of business we get from California is minuscule. Our primary markets in the US are the east coast, Texas, the mid-west and Europe.”

This was particularly interesting to me as I have recently questioned the Gen Y adoption argument. Chris said that while it is true Gen Y’ers don’t want to talk with people and that they will buy online, we’re a long way off seeing that as a mainstream form of activity. “I’m sure over time we’ll move to a model where there are less direct sales people per dollar income but that’s a long way out,” he suggested.

The more interesting part of our conversation though came from a discussion around business models and attitudes to software creation. “Free is not a business model, it’s a marketing device. The Bay Area echo chamber believes it can build its own. Trying to convince our engineering team to use outside products is like pulling teeth. There’s a strong belief that every product should be free, anything can be done with open source and whatever we do we’re smarter than anyone else. I want profit motive because the company that has to support demanding customers is going to put the best product out there. That requires money.”

Looking to the future, Chris said the company is focusing on those businesses that have teams of 5-100 people that have to operate in cross boundary environments: “We put the emphasis on hosted collaboration rather than just wiki because we have to think about how does this interact with the primary collaboration environment which is email. How can we make the two work together more effectively.”

I admire Chris’s ‘what’s on the street’ practical approach and refreshingly honest assessment of what it takes to build a sustainable startup. Too often I hear startups wanting to change the world when you just know that however smart the idea, they’re not where their target market is thinking.

October 20th, 2008

Hands up who's tired of Twitter?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:29 am

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Twitter, Operational Accounting, Finance, Dennis Howlett

While I didn’t have time to reflect on the top management changes at Twitter last week, I’m not surprised. Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams have swapped seats for one reason: Jack’s a code jock and Ev’s the biz guy. Andy Beal almost nails it:

Sure, it sounds amicable–which is the norm in these situations–but you can’t help but think that investors were perhaps disappointed with Jack’s leadership of Twitter. After all, three years in and Twitter still hasn’t found a revenue model that matches its Silicon Valley hype.

I’m sorry, but I suspect that it will be only a matter of months before we hear of Jack Dorsey leaving his new role as Chairman to “explore other opportunities” or “spend more time with his family.”

Reading between the lines, it seems that Jack’s time at Twitter is already done:

Jack will remain on the board and be closely consulted for all strategic decisions, while I take on day-to-day operations with the support of Biz, Jason, Greg, and the rest of this impressive Twitter team.

VC Fred Wilson who is an early Twitter backer, sounds like he’s getting increasingly fed up of the same old question: When will Twitter announce a business model.

I made a boneheaded move this week as well with this quote to Chris Snyder of Wired which he reported yesterday:

“It’s like the stupidest question in the world: How’s Twitter going to make money?,” said Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, another investor. “It’s like ‘How was Google going to make money?’

The minute I said it, I wanted it back. But it reflects my weariness with getting this question every time anyone asks me about Twitter (as well as the fact that I had flown back from SF the night before and gotten up at 6am to do a board call to London that day). Rule #1, don’t talk to the press when you are tired and irritated.

It is not the stupidest question in the world. It’s a terribly important question. But I don’t think it’s the most important question facing Twitter right now. Twitter has yet to cross the chasm to mainstream usage. It’s not immediately obvious to anyone why they should use Twitter. Search and discovery doesn’t work well on Twitter yet. There are a host of issues about the API and the developer ecosystem. Will recent reliability success continue? Can Twitter’s architecture scale now? All of these questions loom large in my mind.

Hey Fred, we’ve all been there and in this mea culpa he raises many of the right questions. But seriously, at a time like now, all businesses need to focus on revenue. It is suicidal to believe that anyone other than Google wins in an ad-sponsored world. I don’t care how great your service is, Google has got the ad-search market sewn up and there are few if any viable alternative ad-based business models for commercial software producers. At least none of those I’ve seen look that attractive.

The possible alternatives are not so palatable either. We’ve already seen Twitter clones turn up, demonstrating that it ain’t that hard to do. At least not on a small scale. It is much harder to build a business from a service that increasingly looks more like a feature. One way around this is to come out the gate with a commercial offering that has genuine business value with a roadmap to match.

I’ve seen plenty of Tweets where people have said they’d willingly pay for Twitter on a subscription basis but at what price? $5 a month? I forked over for the commercial version of Jaiku but it just didn’t have the ‘juice’ to make it to the mainstream. I didn’t renew. Is Twitter that important that I’d buy into a revenue model based on consumption? Possibly. But they’d still have to offer a freebie and I can imagine most people moderating their usage to ensure they don’t pay. If ads are a pain then swapping to the currently free TweetDeck solves that problem in a stroke. Unless of course Twitter forces ads on customers. That’s a guaranteed death sentence in a market where alternatives abound.

It seems to me that a combination of its own relative popularity, open API and free to use model is likely to prove a significant dampener on any attempt to commercialize. It’ll likely suffer from its own success and the expectations of people for ‘free.’ At least in the consumer world. Even if its first mover advantage plays in its favor, the click through rates are likely too low to make ad-based sponsorship worthwhile beyond a few million dollars.

The way to go is direct to the enterprise where customers will pay for guaranteed service levels, white labeling and integration. Even then I’m not sure how much there is to be had from a market that is 99% oblivious to Twitter. To repeat Fred’s words: “It’s not immediately obvious to anyone why they should use Twitter.” That’s why use cases are so vitally important and where an understanding of business problems is central to unlocking the value of micro-sharing/micro-blogging services.

But even assuming Twitter overcomes all those hurdles can it really reach Henry Blodget’s assertion of a $1 billion valuation?  Believe that if you will but revenue pressure is forcing prices down which can only be counterbalanced by way of an uptick in active users. Put another way, you can take the sell-side analyst out of Wall Street, but you can’t take the Pavlovian urge to sell-side pimping out of the analyst.

In the meantime I wish that Twitter would put us all out of our collective misery and tell us it’s thoughts on business models. Simply parroting the ‘lots of opportunities’ line is wearisome. But then I’ve come to expect little more from a company whose reputation for secretiveness on any topic is growing by the day.

October 16th, 2008

Koders.com: Ruby as programmers choice?

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 2:42 am

Categories: Development tools

Tags: Open Source, Ruby, Scripting Languages, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Zack Whittaker

Open-source is what keeps most of the world ticking over. We’ve got open-source running on super computers, stock exchanges, schools and educational instutitions. The enterprise is where it’s heading to now, if not already, as a cheaper alternative to heavy software licences.

After data was released on Koders.com, the leading open-source search engine from Black Duck Software, shows that Ruby is slowly but surely increasing amongst developers. Tens of thousands of people each day use Koders.com to search for code from a variety of open-source languages, and shows that Ruby is being used more and more than ever before.

Whilst many will be stuck using PHP, Python, Perl and ASP, Ruby has climbed the ranks of code search since 2004, fourth in line after Java, C/C++ and C#. From the press release sent to me the other day:

“Ruby, used in combination with the Rails framework, is rapidly gaining momentum and will reach 4 million developers worldwide by 2013, according to Mark Driver, research vice president at Gartner Inc. “Moreover, Ruby will enjoy a higher concentration among corporate IT developers than typical, dynamic ’scripting’ languages, such as PHP,” Driver continued.”

Black Duck Software bought Koders.com in April 2008, and the searchable code repository has increased by 33% since. The code repository now surpasses that of SourceForge, CPAN and RubyForge, the dedicated open-source project database for the Ruby programming language.

More information and Ruby statistics can be found from the Koders.com Zietgeist.

October 13th, 2008

Egnyte: using and sustaining Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 2:03 pm

Categories: Mobile, Office productivity

Tags: Apple iPhone, On-demand, Server, Enterprise 2.0, Egnyte, Backup Facility, Storage, Backups, Hardware, Zack Whittaker

Egnyte, in a nutshell, is a software as a service, cloud storage application. But it’s a lot more than just that. It feels like your online home of files, storage and where you put your valuables.

Egnyte started out because the small business, which is roughly between 1 and 250 employees is a unique market and sensitive to investments, but generally there seems to be a low IT competence. With the advancements of technology and broadband getting faster, storage seemed less of a commodity. The world is getting more mobile with working from home, tele-working and commuting twice a day. The enterprise and small-medium market is accepting a more on-demand solution, and with this, Egnyte was created.

The service is an on-demand infrastructure with increased mobility, Web 2.0 sharing, virtual collaborative teams and on-demand storage. A unique solution is needed to support complex business needs and expanding business model.

If you read all that and thought, “yawn, you mentioned business related words, I’m switching off”, it bores me too. However take this on board instead. It’s basically Live Mesh but so much better and will probably always be better. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed using Egnyte, which is something I can not always say about every product I’m pushed.

Egnyte is primarily an on-demand file server. In an ordinary on-site enterprise you’ll get sharing issues, backup issues and disaster recovery, security flaws which need patching, remote access violations and all other kinds of crap a workplace doesn’t need.

Egnyte eliminates the need for:

• physical servers
• backups
• added hardware
• maintenance overheads, as after all, a small-medium business doesn’t need these clogging up the workplace, as well as the financial impact.

It works excellently, if not specifically, for branch and distributed geographic offices, includes secure desktop and web access, has built-in disaster recovery, works incredibly well with sharing large files through direct transfer or hotlink sending and has a comprehensive auditing capability.

SaaS, security and file storage –>

October 11th, 2008

Tim Bray on surviving the tough times

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 9:14 pm

Categories: Video

Tags: Personal Technology, Tim, Dennis Howlett

Image via WikipediaTim Bray, director of web technologies at Sun Microsystems gave what I believe to be the most practical advice I’ve heard so far for those in startups looking forward. Speaking at FOWA, Tim’s blunt view is that we are headed for tough times but that should not blind people to the downside. Instead he offered positive steps that people can take right now. Among the nuggets he offered (as editorialized):

• Capex style applications and projects are a no=no at a time when cash is king. They simply won’t be funded.
• Consider innovation for regulatory technologies. My colleagues believe we need less rather than more. Tim shares my belief that we will see a slew of new regulation. Therefore, offering technologies that improve transparency will stand a good chance of adoption.
• Build something for yourself. Tim asserts that some of the best technologies are those that were designed to solve a problem that mattered to the individual. That was the genesis of FreeAgent Central (disclosure: I have a small investment in the company.) Time and again I hear that users love the service because it is built for their needs as freelancers.
• The web is heterogeneous so get over whatever your personal technology religion might be. It doesn’t matter and nobody except you cares.
• Contribute to an open source project. OSS are full of holes but if you start to contribute, through bug reports, code or documentation, your reputation will spread. Tim says this is one of the best ways to become known.

The highlights of Tim’s talk (about 13 mins) are here and I have added comments at each of the relevant points so you can concentrate on the things that are important to you.