December 16th, 2008

Seesmic gets a new set of threads

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 10:53 pm

Categories: Video

Tags: Seesmic, Flash, Entrepreneurship, Corporate Communications, Advertising & Promotion, Management, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

 

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

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:36 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Hotel, Financial Accounting, Finance, Dennis Howlett

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

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 5:55 am

Categories: Development tools, Office productivity

Tags: SQL, Cloud, Zoho, Smb/Sme, Databases, Programming Languages, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Software Development

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.