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The Human Touch: TechMeme Getting Nostalgic

TechMeme recently gave up trying to get a 100% working algorithm, instead Gabe  switched to half-manual (edited) mode. I suppose and along with it came emotions, otherwise how could we explain TechMeme getting nostalgic.  There’s an antique classic in the sponsors’ display:

Memeorandum – The Google for blogs on Microsoft’s Startup Zone.  First I got suspicious – is someone recycling TechMeme’s original name for a new venture?  But no, clicking through takes us to a fresh post just off the press, dated January 10th, 2005.  Don Dodage announces:

Memeorandum is a new blog “news clipper service”. It constantly monitors new blog posts and publishes the title and first 50 words or so to the dynamic news page. The page updates every few minutes with new high quality material. There are currently two news pages. One for technology and another for politics.

Obviously a glitch, I don’s suppose you’ll see it long on TechMeme.  Oh, and Happy Birthday, TechMeme ( the 4th, I suppose, more or less).

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Google Layoffs May Affect 30k Workers. Sort of…

Google Layoffs – 10,000 Workers Affected reports WebGuild with a bombastic title.  I can beat that: all Google workers will be affected, at least emotionally. 

As to what the real numbers are, several sources point out that while employee headcount is around 20K, Google has about 10K temporary workers, so whichever way you count, laying off 10K workers would equate to:

  • eliminating all the temp positions
  • letting go 30% of the (extended) workforce, which seems to be the Silicon Valley rule
  • cutting the employee headcount to half (if we ignore temps)

Either way it sounds way too dramatic, a step companies in deep structural trouble would resort to.  I seriously doubt this is really coming, but let me be clear: I have no factual information, am simply speculating, or actually responding to speculation.

But there’s something else worth noticing here: the source.  WebGuild had a bit of a clash with Google this spring, when Google withdrew their support of the WebGuild events it used to host.   Their stated reason was WebGuild’s refusal to change the name of their Web 2.0  Conference & Expo, at O’Reilly’s request. Here are the juicy details in a WebGuild post aptly titled Shame On You Tim O’Reilly.  Without getting into details of the original conflict,  suffice to say that WebGuild has been on somewhat of a vendetta against Google ever since.   They’ve been a little bit too trigger-happy with posts reflecting negatively on Google.

Once again, I do not have factual information, but if this indeed turns out to be false information, I wonder if WebGuild went a step too far this time.  (Remember the Steve Jobs death story?)

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Uncov’s Back… Sort of.

I’ve never particularly liked Uncov, the anti-web 2.0, anti-startup, anti-everything rug.  Not that it was always wrong: it’s criticism was often well-deserved, just a bit too vitriolic for my taste.  But vulgarity is popular, and titles like  I’m Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass certainly grabbed attention.

Of course it’s always easier to criticise than actually build, and for Uncov editor Ted Dziuba the opportunity to put his money where his mouth was came when he finally launched his own startup, Persai – soon renamed Pressflip.   To focus on the startup, Ted and his fellow authors shut down Uncov.

Will Pressflip make it?  Too early to say, but TechCrunch wasn’t too positive about it a few months ago.  (they can always rebrand it again, this time to Pressflop).

A few days ago Uncov came back to life, but with a twist: it opened up to guest bloggers.  And here’s Dziuba’s Ars Poetica, which perfectly sums up why I still dislike Uncov:

If you want to blog at uncov.com, it should be in the style of Uncov. It doesn’t have to be technical or nerdy, and you should feel free to take shots at people, so long as you do it in the Uncov fuck-you-and-everyone-that-looks-like-you fashion.

The latest twist in the story: Ted Dziuba has just quit Pressflip.

I’m leaving for personal reasons: mostly because I’m going to be a father in March and need some stability, but also because I’m tired of the fight.

The announcement is on Ted’s personal blog, not Uncov. It probably does not meet Uncov standards.  For the first time Ted Dziuba sounds perfectly normal. Family man. Human.

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Am I Really So Sexy? C’mon…

Well, thank you all for finding me so sexy (blush, blush) that even my face pic is considered x-rated.  From somebody else I might even consider it a compliment, but it comes from  Gravatar, an “Automattic Joint”:

Which is why my gravatar does not show on WordPress blogs.  I’ve never thought one day I’d be caught by porn-filters. smile_sad

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Steve Jobs Panic – the Anatomy of Fake News on Twitter

I often praised Twitter for being first reporting breaking news – typical examples were several recent earthquakes in Japan, China, New Zealand…etc.

This morning’s news brought panic, as hundreds of Tweets reported:

Steve Jobs was rushed to ER after severe heart attack.

AAPL took a nosedive, then recovered.

Fortunately the news turned out to be bogus. Citizen journalism failed today.

Read the full chronology over @ CloudAve.

(Oh, and while at it, you may want to grab the CloudAve feed. Thank you.)

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Twitter Romance?

you know you are all grown up when you are purchasing your first very own toilet scrubber.

about 7 hours ago from web

Favorite reply to resawu

Semiformal3_bigger

resawu

Teresa Wu

And the response:

@resawu I’ve since purchased two toliet scrubbers along my path to adulthood. I think I’m pretty much ready for children now

about 7 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to resawu

Favorite reply to danielha

Photo_20_bigger

danielha

Daniel Ha

Well, it wouldn’t be the first one 🙂

Update:  Toilet’s indeed play an important role in a startup’s life.

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CloudAve: the First Week

Ah, the end of the fist week!  The new baby, CloudAve is 7 days old!  (..and I’m alive…smile_wink)

We launched with a discussion on Harry Debes’s famous prediction, i.e. the imminent collapse of the SaaS market in two years.  I doubt he realized just how much he re-energized the entire SaaS business, analyst obeservers – he certainly sparked a healthy discussion, even including Software Icon Dave Duffield, who refuted Debes’s argument.  He should know, having been on both sides of the fence. (The podcast is available on CloudAve).

On my personal blog I don’t have to be as politically correct as on CloudAve, so here’s my summary: they tried SaaS, could not crack it, so concluded the market as a whole did not matter – a strategic mistake.. or… well, as they say, a picture says a thousand words.  Ironically, the collapse of the US financial markets may just put things in a new prospective … more on this soon.

Ben compares the advent of Cloud Computing to corporate cars being replaced with allowances, while I present frustrating personal experience that could have gone smoothly using On-Demand tools.

We often talk about Cloud Computing and Software as a Service interchangeably, but are they really the same?  Krish answers in a mini-series discussing the differences, i.e. segmenting out Infrastructure/Hardware as a Service (HaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).   In the second part of his mini-series Krish goes on a myth-busting mission, clearing up several common misunderstandings.  His piece on Governor Palin’s email hijack episode could very well be considered myth-busting, too.

Dan Morrill addresses why Anti-Virus in the Cloud can offer more efficient protection and is also major relief to owners of slower computers, whose resources can be completely bogged down by the frequent Av updates and scans.

Ben, so far the most prolific author reviews Oprius, an online productivity tool for sales professionals, then proves that the second “S” in SaaS is the most important, presenting two service / help desk oriented services: Zendesk and HelpStream.  He discusses NetSuite’s launch in Australia, then starts a discussion on Channels, largely triggered by another NetSuite related move – this may very well become an ongoing thread.

Talk about threads, next week we are launching a new daily feature, CloudNews – the title says it all.smile_wink

If you’ve been reading CloudAve, thank you, if not, why not head over and try … or perhaps just grab our feed.

See you on Cloud Avenue next week.

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3-year Old Millionaires

No, not talking about babies here, but two Tech icons who both reached the Million milestone around their third birthday.

TechCrunch, launched 3-year ago as Mike Arrington’s hobby blog had 1 million Feedburner subscribers for the first time last week.  Of course it’s no longer a hobby blog, but a blog network run by a professional CEO, supported by a growing blogger team.  Mike himself has become a Silicon Valley institution, his Atherton home Web 2.0 Central.

Congratulations, Mike!   And Congrat’s to the other 3-year old millioinaire:  Zoho.

When Zoho Writer launched three years ago it was the underdog compared to Writely (which later became Google Docs). But it improved week by week, was soon joined by Zoho Sheet, and one had to be blind not to see the benefits of a complete Suite on the Net.  Today Zoho has a million users, is recognized as a leader along with Google, has made inroads to the Enterprise (400K users at GE?  Not bad…), The Economist calls them the force that will Deflate IT… a lot of achievements in three years.

Once again, congratulations to both… and now the race is on: who will reach the 2 Million mark first? smile_wink

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CloudAve Launched – and Thank You, Harry

(OK, I sinned. Mea Culpa.  I’ve just cross-posted an entire article, which is not the best behavior. But it’s not every day that I launch a new group blog – so consider this my shameless self-plug, and please subscribe to the feed.smile_wink)

We must be a crazy bunch on a suicide mission.  Why else would we launch a new blog focused on Cloud Computing and Business, when it’s just a fad that will collapse in two years?

Harry Debes, CEO of Lawson Software is a respected Enterprise Software industry veteran, but I’m afraid for all his achievements he’ll go down in history as the man who grabbed headlines with a fatally wrong call.  Of course not all wrong calls hurt one’s reputation: IBM’s Thomas Watson is still an industry legend despite the famous quote incorrectly attributed to him:

” I think there is a world market for maybe five computers“

The small difference is that what Thomas Watson could not fathom in 1943 ended up putting IBM on an amazing growth trajectory,  while Harry Debes’s view may just turn out to be fatal for Lawson – or to quote my Enterprise Irregular friend, Vinnie Mirchandani:

“That’s what American and Delta said about SW. And GM and Ford said about Japanese cars. And Sears and Wards said about WalMart.”

Another quote by Vinnie, closer to our industry:

“Dun & Bradstreet, which GEAC acquired for a song, was one of the most spectacular slides in the software market. In less than 5 years it went from dominant position to a distress sale as it missed the client/server wave in early 90s.”

I’ve seen that one close, fortunately for me from SAP’s side – the winner in that round.  We’re witnessing another tidal wave now, the shift to Cloud Computing.  It won’t happen overnight, but those who completely ignore it will vanish.  Some of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars elaborate more:

  • Vinnie Mirchandani points out that SaaS is what more and more customers want, and those who stop listening to customers inevitably hit the wall sooner or later.  Need proof?  How about this 100% SaaS customer, showcased at the recent Office 2.0 conference?
  • Jim Berkowitz  of CRM Mastery fame agrees,  adding that calling people, potential customers “stupid” never leads to any good.
  • Bob Warfield makes the case that even if we ignore what customers want and only consider profitabilty, Debes is wrong, Salesforce.com is almost as profitable as Lawson, but grows much faster, while Conquer, another SaaS success story is actually more profitable than Lawson is.
  • Jason Corsello adds that Lawson actually launched a SaaS offering last year, but experienced lackluster customer response largely to pricing and deployment issues … so now that they couldn’t pull it off, the declare the entire market doomed.
  • Josh Greenbaum concludes: “SaaS isn’t collapsing, it’s only just getting started“.

I can live with that… it’s only starting… so we’re not a suicidal bunch, after all.smile_wink But thank you, Harry Debes, for sparking a great discussion.

If you read just the few articles I’ve quoted above, you get a fairly good picture of the many benefits the Software as a Service model offers.  Let me add a few of my personal favorites:

  • Extended reach – small businesses can now have business functionality previously only available and affordable for large enterprises.
  • Commoditization of the software market – commoditization hurts most companies, except the few who drive it, but guess what – it’s great for customers.
  • End of Bloatware  – for the first time SaaS vendors can run stats and observe what features are actually used by customers, so they can cut out the fat and enhance the in-demand features.
  • New Business Models, like benchmarking – based on anonym aggregate data provide your customers with performance metrics.  Even newer business models we have not even imagined yet.
  • Dramatically changed Sales and Marketing model: pull vs. push.  Instead of the traditional sales model it’s all about transparency, information, letting informed customers find you.  The Product sells itself and your Customers are your Marketing team.

We’ll be writing about these and more. I’m a “business application guy”, so I mostly talk about SaaS – but our name is Cloud Avenue, not SaaS Avenue, for good reason: fellow blogger Krish will talk about it soon.  By the way, Krish and I got to know each other through our blogs – just like my fellow Editor, Ben Kepes, and just about all other contributors. We also have our CloudLab – for product / service reviews.  Yes, we will report on products, but do not strive to be a mini-TechCrunch: we have no intention to report about everything new.  We’re not a news-blog.  We’d rather sit back, analyze a market, find key players, then produce a series of reviews / comparative analysis.  Quality before quantity or urgency.

We’re believers in Cloud Computing, but  not over-zealous cheerleaders.  Just as I’m finishing this post, another SaaS debate erupted, which prompted Anshu Sharma to note: “there must be a Sky is Falling Support Group“.  The really notable part of the Cloud-Filled Debate @Forbes is Nick Carr’s responses: not because of the Big Switch author’s unquestionable “cloud-bias”, but because of how realistic he is:

Forbes.com: Is cloud computing over-hyped?
Nicholas Carr: At the moment, yes, and that’s typical for technological advances.

What’s your imagined time line of the adoption of cloud computing? Will it take years? Decades?
If you’re talking about big companies, I would say it will be a slow, steady process lasting maybe 15 to 20 years.

On what Gartner Research analysts call “the cycle of hype and gloom,” where do you think cloud computing is currently positioned?
It’s definitely near the peak of its hype. The doom period, when the media and IT managers realize the challenges ahead, is likely coming soon. But regardless of hype or gloom, the technology will only keep progressing.

Overhyped, slow process, doom is coming… has Nick Carr switched sides?  No, he is just being realistic – and that’s what we need to do here  @CloudAve, too. We will talk about integration problems, security issues, privacy concerns, even legal ramifications – many of these I don’t claim to know much about, which is why it’s great to have a diverse team of authors with complementary areas of expertise. And our door is never closed: we welcome guest posts, and who knows, you may feel inclined to join us as as a regular writer…

Finally, we could not afford to bring you CloudAve without sponsorship.  My regular readers know I’ve been an advisor to Zoho for years now – I’ve found them to be a showcase for a lot of my ideals.  Zoho stepped up as exclusive sponsor of CloudAve.  This does not make us a Zoho PR outlet, in fact they can expect less coverage here than they got on my personal blog.  We enjoy complete editorial independence.

What we do not have, and will not have is any form of advertising.  None of those flashy banners, boxes, making the site close to unreadable. Just pure content.  And since we are not dependent on page views, we can afford to offer our content under a Creative Commons licence.  Yes, it’s all yours, take it – just don’t forget attribution.

So here we are – welcome to CloudAve. We hope you will follow us.   And once again, thank you, Harry, for all the attention to Cloud Computing.smile_wink

P.S.  The CloudAve platform  is not exactly in nice order yet. It’s work-in-progress.

So for now, all I can do is apologize for the shabby appearance, like I did at a previous move – that one turned out quite well, didn’t it?

And talk about move – I am not abandoning this blog either, so I hope you continue to follow me both here and on CloudAve.

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When You Turn off your Main Feature, What’s Left?

I wrote enough about Technorati’s problems, it’s not even funny anymore.  Except when it really is.  Like, when you turn off your main feature, what’s left?

Technoratty? smile_sad