Archives for August 2006

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No Kidding – Superpapa of 370 Children Arrested

A man known as ”Superpapa” who says he took advantage of a quirk in German laws to adopt more than 300 children worldwide has been arrested on suspicion of violating laws on child rearing in Paraguay, authorities said Tuesday.

According to the police statement, Hass said he adopted more than 370 children of different ages in countries worldwide, including Russia, Romania, India and Pakistan with the intent of taking them to Germany to collect a government subsidy of €200 (US$260) a month for each under Germany’s child protection laws.

(read full article at AP

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Watch Out for Zoho

I declared the Zoho Suite complete exactly 2 months ago, when they released Zoho Show.  However, there is always complete … and even more complete 🙂  And the Zoho guys are getting cute: they want you to guess what’s next.

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Disk Drive: 1956-2006. R.I.P.

Alright, I’m the first to admit the title is exaggerating, the disk drive still has a long life- but the replacement is here.

In an ironic coincidence on the very day Mike Parekh and Will Price are celebrating the disk drive’s 50th birthday (the first IBM unit weighed over 1 tons and held 5MB), CNet reports Samsung’s launch of its diskless portables.

There are absolutely no moving parts in these beauties. “Samsung claims the new model can boot up 25 to 50 per cent faster than conventional laptops as it has a read speed of 53MB per second and a write speed of 28MB per second.”

Faster, but smaller, the current flash storage size is 32G – perfectly enough for an Office 2.0 workhorse.  Just like the computer  commenters to my “Safer Office” post dreamed of. 

Using web-based applications like the Zoho Suite, Flickr, Zooomr, why would I need more storage?

Of course for the foreseeable future we still need larger and larger disks – but let the guys at Omnidrive, box.net, Mozy..etc deal with them. After all, there are people holding up the “Cloud”

Update (9/25): Check out Engadget on the Samsung Q1-SSD

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AOL Heads Roll: I Wish All My Predictions Came True This Fast

The AOL Clusterfuck (pardon my French, I couldn’t resist quoting Mike) became a significant milestone for my blog.  All I did was browse around on a Sunday afternoon, when everybody else (i.e. sane people) was probably outdoors.  I sensed something big, and as such, my piece, AOL Just Did the Unthinkable – Boycott AOL? was one of the first (the second, to be exact) to report the AOL fiasco.

It got on TechMeme, Reddit and a number of secondary aggregators – that lazy Sunday evening saw 3,5K visitors , and Monday about 11K.  (That free bandwidth upgrade from BlogHarbor came just in time, thanks, John). I got quoted in mainstream publications, even in the #1 newsportal in Hungary, and received a voicemail from a WSJ journalist.  The reader-invasion dropped since then, and settled at double what I had before.  What can I say… it still was a cl*** (OK, I am not gonna repeat it), but hey, thank you, AOL.

As for the prediction, here’s a quote from my original piece:

Update #1 (8/6): I’m going out on a limb here with this prediction: as they realize the magnitude of what they did (or if they don’t, due to the PR nightmare) AOL will apologize, the fingerpointing starts and heads will roll. They will remove the download link. Not before anyone who wanted the data will have obtained it though.”

Let’s see:

  • Apology happened the day after
  • Download link was removed the same day, within hours
  • Heads are rolling now

Now that its’ proven I have the magic power, I need to be careful what I predict next: something to do with my career, financial status, marital status… ?  Oh, well, predicting is a lot of work 🙂

Update (8/21):  Enterprise 2.0 is deleted from Wikipedia, but Clusterfuck has an entry. What the f..  cluster:-)

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Nokia Can’t Keep Up with Demand for $5K+ Vertu Phones

The luxury unit of the world’s top mobile handset maker Nokia, Vertu, has seen strong demand this year and is struggling to increase production to keep up, a senior official said on Thursday.

Vertu targets wealthy customers by producing very costly mobile phones made from platinum, gold and diamonds.

“At the moment we cannot meet demand. Sales are more than doubling this year. We hope that pace will continue also next year,” Chris Harris, Vertu’s marketing director, told Reuters on the sidelines of a news conference.”  (Reuters via WeirdTechNewsHub)

Geez, Jeff, you’ve got the wrong one!  🙂

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Zombie-Attack on San Francisco

 I guess this is it: I am officially old.  Otherwise I’m sure I would understand WTF  this  is all about.

Photo Credit: Laughing Squid.

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So Much For Exporting Democracy: Afghanistan to Reinstate Religious Police

Last month, Karzai’s Cabinet approved a proposal to re-establish the agency also known as the Department for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue, whose police under the Taliban beat and imprisoned Afghans for violating Shariah law. For many, the revival of religious cops raises painful memories of ruffians zipping around Kabul in Datsun pickups mainly in search of women and girls who refused to wear the head-to-toe burqa, donned high heels, wore nail polish or walked down city streets without a male relative. Men were cited for sporting short beards, drinking alcohol, working during prayer time, playing chess or listening to nonreligious music.”

(full article in SFGate)

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Enterprise Software is (Still) Not Dead

Recently I joined my fellow Irregulars (a work-group of bloggers, analysts, journalists who write about Enterprise Software) in jointly publishing an article on Sandhill: Software’s Sky is Not Falling.
All articles get edited, and that’s even more so with multi-author ones; therefore I thought I would post my original, pre-edit piece below.

 

With almost predictable regularity we’re seeing software obituaries popping up just about every month: the only variation in the theme is what’s being declared dead: sometimes it’s Enterprise Software, sometimes it’s email.  Just like I’ve already stated I did not believe email was dead, I strongly disagree it’s time to mourn Enterprise Software.

Since my fellow Irregulars mostly addressed the Open Source angle in Guy Smith’s post, Is Enterprise Software Doomed? I’ll reflect on the SaaS part of his piece.

SaaS is the bastard child of the traditional proprietary software vendor and the Open Source marketing paradigm.”

SaaS is NOT an offspring of Open Source, although they often get lumped together, especially in buzzword-heavy startup pitches; however, they are quite different animals.

With a great deal of simplification the single most important difference is in the deployment model, SaaS by definition being on-demand, while most Open Source products are on-premise, traditionally installed systems.

Guy sees the natural evolution of Open Source Enterprise Software vendors “retrofitting” their products to SaaS offerings, but in reality most SaaS offerings are commercial, and most Open Source is on-premise, these two being on decidedly different paths.

The common trait, as Guy correctly points out is the change in the sales & marketing process: PR, buzz, online sales cycle process management, free trials, inbound sales, customer-initiated pull process vs. sales push. Yet Guy sees this as a necessity forced by economics: “the reduction in unit revenue will force all Open Source (including Dual Source) vendors to change their marketing and sales cycle “ when in reality these are actively pursued changes that both Open Source and SaaS companies embrace. Without denying the importance of the underlying technology, the most important change SaaS facilitates is this very business model change, which opens up entirely new, unpenetrated business segments for Enterprise Software: small and medium businesses (not just the M but the S in SMB). In fact customer size is another differentiation factor, at least for now, SaaS penetrating the SMB segment, while Open Source is ideal for mid-size companies, that actually have the in-house IT-expertise to play around with OS.

So is it as simple as:

  • small business = SaaS
  • midsize = Open Source
  • large company = traditional software?

Not really, that would be oversimplification. But while it’s easy to declare that for small businesses without their own IT resources there is no better option than SaaS, there is no clear “winner” for large corporations. There shouldn’t be. This is not religion; it should be business decisions that these organizations have to make individually. Analysts fighting the SaaS vs. On-premise war often forget that software exist to resolve business problems. As Charles so eloquently points out, it’s the complexity of these business processes, the need for customization, the number of user seats..etc that matters, and as we move up on this scale, increasingly “traditional” Enterprise Software is the answer. I happen to believe that eventually SaaS will grow up to meet those requirements, but am not going to guess how many years it will take. In the meantime the SaaS-fans (admittedly I am one) can claim that SaaS is the future – but that does not mean Enterprise Software is dead.

If I were to launch a software startup, it would be SaaS. Dave Duffield and his PeopleSoft team have the luxury of starting from scratch launching Workday, a pure SaaS company – since they were forced to walk from PeopleSoft and it’s customer base. But SAP and Oracle, (btw, Guy, since when do we determine market leadership by the amount spent on acquisitions?) together “own” the large corporate space; how could they expect their customers to throw away their investment in traditional software?
On-demand “purists” (the religious types) criticize SAP for their half-hearted hybrid approach to SaaS –  but why would they do anything else?    After all, SaaS is still only 10% of all enterprise software sold. Even if we believe “the future is SaaS” (which is of course unproven, but I happen to believe in it), there is a lot of mileage left in the “old” Enterprise model, and market leaders like SAP have certainly no reason to turn their backs to their huge and profitable customer base.

 

Here are the other “Irregulars” un-edited contributions:

 

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Office 2.0 – Under the Radar Event at SAP Labs

IBDNetwork’s Under the Radar event at SAP Labs was a lively evening with full house, good discussion and four exciting companies.  Prior to the presentations moderator Mike Arrington (TechCrunch) and the panel discussed pro’s and con’s of Office 2.0. 

Part of the discussion was whether “Office 2.0” is just an attempt to replicate existing functions on the Web.

Peter Rip’s take was that  such replication is pointless: the web-based apps cannot come close to the incumbent (MS Office) in functionality and they stand no chance to unseat it in the corporate world.  The real promise of Office 2.0 in Peter’s view is creating processes-mashups, supporting business in entirely new ways.

Ismael Ghalimi’s response was that partial “replication” is OK, in reality the MS Office products are way too complex, 90% of users probably only use 10% of the functionality.  The added value is the ease of collaboration, and also easier integration, as it would be demonstrated by Zoho in a few minutes. I tend to agree with Ismael, as I stated before.

 

The Panel: Peter Rip, Sam Schillace, Etay Gafni, and Ismael Ghalimi

The Panel

(photo credit: Dan Farber, ZDNet)

 

After the initial discussion the four invited companies each had 5 minutes for a presentation/demo, followed by another 5 minutes of Q/A.  Although the theme of the evening was Office 2.0,  2 out of 4 presenters were not strictly speaking “office” companies – the Web 2.0 moniker would better fit them:  Wetpaint and Collectivex.  They also have something in common: a strong focus on groups, communities – but they take rather different approaches with CollectiveX being rather structured, whereas Wetpaint is an open book that the users get to write.

 

Wetpaint was presented by Ben Elowitz, Founder and CEO.  Technically Wetpaint is a wiki, but the best part is that one really does not have to know wikis, just happily type away and create attractive pages without the usual learning curve. More than that: these pages can be shared, other users can contribute, entire communities can grow and thrive. 

It’s an ad-supported free web-based service that combines the best of wikis, blogs, and forum software.

  • It’s like a wiki: you can create any number of pages, arrange them in a hierarchy, navigate through them top-down in a tree fashion, or via direct links between pages. Anyone can edit any page a’la wiki (optionally pages can be locked, too). There is version control, audit track of changes and previous releases can be restored at a single click.
  • It’s like a discussion forum: you can have threaded/nested comments attached to each page
  • It’s like a blog: editable area in the middle, sidebars on both sides with tags and other info.  Personally I’d like to see more blog-like features, like pinging blog indices (Technorati and others), trackback support, etc.  Ben confirmed some of these are on the way – when it happens, I believe Wetpaint will take off big time – after all, discoveribility is critical in building online communities.

All panelists were impressed with the simplicity and elegance of the UI, but someone (don’t remember if panel or audience) commented this is just one of many similar products available.  
I beg to differ.  Yes, in a room of 60-80 techies we can all use (?)  any other wiki easily.  Not so in “real life”. I’ve set up wikis for companies, ad-hoc workgroups and events for the general public – there’s a whole world of difference. In a company you have a common purpose, set objectives, can provide training – not so in the consumer/ community space.  Take a look at the Wetpaint site we set up for the Techdirt Greenhouse (un)conference, or Road Trips USA (pic link above) on the fun side. 
I challenge anyone to find another “wiki” with comparable features yet is so easy that anyone who can type and click (i.e. use a simple editor) will be able to contribute without any learning.

Update (8/18): Robert Scoble hits the nail on the head:  it’s all about the Blink Test.  Wetpaint passes it. Other wikis don’t.

 

Collectivex Founder and CEO Clarence Wooten described his service as LinkedIn meets Yahoo Groups.   Mike Arrington’s definition (not as moderator, but earlier on TechCrunch): “CollectiveX is what LinkedIn should have been.”   It’s social networking based on groups, rather than individuals, facilitating communication, providing file sharing, messaging, calendaring and exchange of leads/contacts.  Revenue model: free base, subscription for a few premium features.

 

I admit I suffer from Social Network burnout.  I do find some of them useful, especially LinkedIn, and I can think of a few groups I am a member of where we could use CollectiveX – I am simply tired of creating zillion version of my profile.   I’d like a “Profile Central” where all these new services could pick up my data from. Am I dreaming?  Wasn’t AlwaysOn/GoingOn supposed to somehow resolve the profile portability problem?

Of course this is just my ranting, although the audience questions pointed in the same direction, albeit indirectly: nice functionality, but isn’t incumbent LinkedIn too entrenched for new social networks to challenge its position? 

 

Echosign Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin’s task was perhaps more difficult, perhaps easier: unlike the other three, his service could not be identified with a few words, he had to explain a new process flow. On the other hand he is addressing an ugly enough problem that he captured everyone’s attention: No matter how well computerized we are, when it comes to signing contracts, we’re back to the world of paper, faxes, lost documents.  Echosign is a web-based service that takes care of the entire process flow( see slide below) : getting documents signed (electronically or hand-signature by fax), filed and distributed as pdf, routed, approved, managed, archived. 

While technically this is SaaS, I guess Software Enabled Service is a better description than Software as a Service:-)  EchoSign addresses a painful enough problem with a simple and elegant solution that it won the Panel’s Award. Congratulations to Jason and team!

 

 Zoho Founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu did not bring us just one product but an entire productivity Suite. How do you demo 4 products in 5 minutes?  (Not that he only has four, at my last count the company has 10 Zoho-branded products).  The solution: you don’t.  Instead of focusing on individual products, you demonstrate the power and ease of integration between them.

Sridhar pulled up a sample spreadsheet of sales figures and a chart; he changed some numbers in Zoho Sheet and of course the chart changed, too.  Next with a few clicks he dropped data in a window and voila! – a Zoho Creator application just got created. We then saw the data entry form show up on a slide – part of Zoho Show.  The same form, or other data views can also be embedded in Zoho Writer documents, or even in an email.  As Sridhar kept on switching screens, one could almost get lost, but he got his point through: whichever application he changed the data in, it would show up real-time in the other application.  I don’t have his presentation, but can present a similar scenario I used on my blog earlier.  First I collected votes in a blog post using a Zoho Polls entry form –here are the results.  Useful chart, not as impressive as the spreadsheet’s charting capability though, so I dropped the results in Zoho Sheet, which generated the pie chart below:

Do you like the new Technorati?  Poll results in % - http://www.zohosheet.com

 The chart has it’s own URL, it’s easy to embed in a blog (this post), document or presentation,  and so does the entire spreadsheet itself.

Clearly the format of the Zoho presentation was a compromise, focusing on integration, but I think it paid off, the audience clearly got the picture that instead of randomly selected applications Zoho has a complete office/productivity Suite to offer.  The tradeoff of course was not seeing detailed functionality – which is probably why panelist Peter Rip commented that the creation of these documents did not appear to be a collaborative process.   As I have played with the Zoho Suite before, I know it is indeed very collaborative and the Zoho folks might want to call Peter and offer him a more detailed demo.   The audience was very interested, in fact after the official event Zoho set up a demo station outside where they continued answering questions for a good half an hour or so.  Some of those inquiries were about the ability to buy and implement the Suite behind a corporate firewall – something that Zoho is not ready for at this stage, but the interest level certainly bodes well for a future corporate business model.  The immediate reward to Zoho came in the form of votes: Zoho won the Audience’s Choice for Best Product Award.

Congratulations to Sridhar and his team!

Last, but not least, thanks to IBDNetwork for organizing another successful event.  

This was just the beginning: Office 2.0 enthusiast, or just about anybody interested, come join as at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, October 12-13.

 

 

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And the Best Title Award Goes to: Good Morning Silicon Valley

for this masterpiece (of a title):

Hewlett Packard announces HP EarningsSmart 3310 CashWriter