Rummy’s resignation is definitely good news, but there are still others who don’t belong in DC .. but we have to wait a bit longer for this one to disappear 
Rumsfeld’s Resignation is a Good Start
Posted on November 8, 2006 ·
Art of the Start / Launch Silicon Valley with Guy Kawasaki – Last Minute Discount
Posted on November 7, 2006 ·
This is a reprint of a previous post, because with 250 registrations I can now offer the few remaining tickets at a huge discount ($49 vs $199) at this special link.
Mark November 8th, Wednesday on
your calendar for a full-day entrepreneurial
super-event (actually two) at the Microsoft Conference
Center in Mountain View.
At 8am SVASE
will present The Art of the
Start, a conference all about helping
entrepreneurs succeed, offering time-tested, battle-hardened business
strategies and the opportunity to meet experienced entrepreneurs and
investors.
The drought of the past few years is over
and venture capital is flowing again. But starting a high tech business
is no less challenging and demanding than it’s ever been, even in an
environment of venture capital overhang.
Pure
talent and winning ideas are never enough. Whether you’re an
entrepreneur in a garage, dorm room, lab or inside a big company, there
are fundamental business 
insights and skills you need
to succeed.
Start-up authority and
popular business author Guy
Kawasaki and experts from Garage, along with Silicon Valley
leaders and mavericks, venture capitalists, and successful start-up
CEOs explore the art of starting up.
The conference
includes breakfast and lunch, including a Fireside Chat with
Guy Kawasaki and
Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.
Check out the agenda
here, then rush to register.
Rush, as Early Bird registration ends tomorrow, November 3rd. (Yes, I
know, posting this late, sorry…)
The conference ends
at 3:30, and an hour later a related event, Launch: Silicon
Valley starts at the same venue.
Launch: Silicon Valley is an
opportunity for the next generation of emerging technology companies
will to tell their stories to the world – literally, as the event will
be videotaped and broadcast later. Over 150 startup
submissions from all over the country, several European countries and
as far as New Zealand have been reviewed by an Advisory Board of
investors and executives. The 30 most interesting companies have been
invited to participate in the “Launch: Silicon Valley”
showcase, and 15 of these companies have
also been invited to deliver product
presentation to an audience of Silicon
Valley’s leading movers and shakers.
Product presentations will take place in three
categories, 5 companies each:
- Information Technology, Communications & related
technologies
- Life Science, Material Science,
CleanTech
- Consumer &
Other
Please check out the complete
agenda, and again, rush to register,
as Early Bird pricing ends tomorrow, November 3rd for this
event, too. The Registration site allows you to book both
events together, or any of them selectively.
Now,
for the surprise: Silicon Valley Auto
Group will be displaying Aston Martin, Bentley, and
Lamborghini cars at both events, and I’m hearing they’ll schedule
test-drives. I’m sure half the participants – the cream of
the Valley VC community – can actually afford these cars… as for the
other half, the Entrepreneurs, how is this for an incentive?
Tags: SVASE,
Kawasaki, Art of the Start, entrepreneurship, startups, silicon
valley, social networking, business events, lamborghini, aston
martin, bentley, venture capital, vc, vc
funding, startup
24SevenOffice is More than Just Office – Watch Demo
Posted on November 7, 2006 ·
24SevenOffice is an innovative software company offering SaaS for the SMB / SME market that should really be called 24SevenBusiness
Their system is modular but integrated with a breath of functionality I simply haven’t seen elsewhere: Accounting, CRM (Contacts, Lead Mgt, SFA), ERP (Supply Chain, Orders, Products, Inventory), Communication, Group Scheduling, HR, Project Management, Publishing, Intranet. Essentially a NetSuite+Communication and Collaboration.
They are innovators in many ways … had an AJAX system long before it was called AJAX and recently they created a “World’s First” by teaming up with a bank that becomes the SaaS provider offering its customers single sign-on Web solutions for banking and all other business software needs.
The system is really comprehensive so it may not be that easy to figure out all features, therefore they released a cool flash demo that walks through the major business processes. (hat tip: Espen Antonsen)
What I really like about 24SevenOffice is that they are proof to my favorite theme, i.e. that small businesses can now have “enterprise” system functionality. My only complaint is that so far they onu cover several European countries; I wish they were faster entering the US market. 
But I’m hearing that may not be too far now …
Update (11/12): check out Dennis Howlett’s post on Interprise Suite, another integrated system for the SMB market.
Yahoo Getting Stale
Posted on November 6, 2006 ·
I’m lazy. This must be an only reason my browser’s homepage is still my.yahoo.com, set 10 or so years ago, instead of Netvibes or some other hot site. I rarely read stuff here, relying on social filtering – i.e. if something is of interest to me, it will likely show up in my feed reader, through a trusted individual’s blog.
Today I semi-automatically clicked on a news item and had that deja vu feeling… no wonder:
“Full coverage” (whatever the source) updated 4 days ago, Reuters updated 4 days ago. Not displayed, but AP Europe updated 3 days ago, San Jose Merc 3 days ago, Contra Costa times 3 days ago ..etc.
Is My Yahoo dead?
Update (116): Read about Start Pages / Widgets on the Read/Write Web.
Web 2.x Conferences at Your Price
Posted on November 4, 2006 ·
The Big Week is coming… and you get to pick how much you’re willing to pay for being “there”. If you got invited and coughed up $3,500, you can be at the Web 2.0 Conference which is actually no longer a conference but a Summit. If you didn’t make it there, don’t worry, thanks to Chris Pirillo, here’s the summary:
Of course if you want to get ahead of the crowd, you can upgrade… all the way to Web 2.2
The 2.2 upgrade is considerably less expensive, registration is only $32.95. Of course it’s all so relative, the original Web 2.1 which I had a chance to sponsor was a mere $2.80 – yes, that’s not a mistake, $2.80. Now, if we do a little trendspotting, we can figure out what one of the talk topics will be about: at Web 2.3 and Beyond, What’s Really Next? they will have to decide whether to increase next year’s price to $329.50. 
(OK, just kidding, $32.95 is still affordable)
Happy (Un)Conferencing next week. Oh, and if you’re not attending any of these events, meet Guy Kawasaki, dozens of VC’s and 30 or so startups here. (The Lamborghini is not included in registration)
Mega-Event: Art of the Start / Launch Silicon Valley with Guy Kawasaki by Garage / SVASE (and the Lamborghini is a Surprise…)
Posted on November 2, 2006 ·
(Updated)
Mark November 8th, Wednesday on your calendar for a full-day entrepreneurial super-event (actually two) at the Microsoft Conference Center in Mountain View.
At 8am SVASE will present The Art of the Start, a conference all about helping entrepreneurs succeed, offering time-tested, battle-hardened business strategies and the opportunity to meet experienced entrepreneurs and investors.
The drought of the past few years is over and venture capital is flowing again. But starting a high tech business is no less challenging and demanding than it’s ever been, even in an environment of venture capital overhang.
Pure talent and winning ideas are never enough. Whether you’re an entrepreneur in a garage, dorm room, lab or inside a big company, there are fundamental business insights and skills you need to succeed.
Start-up authority and popular business author Guy Kawasaki and experts from Garage, along with Silicon Valley leaders and mavericks, venture capitalists, and successful start-up CEOs explore the art of starting up.
The conference includes breakfast and lunch, including a Fireside Chat with Guy Kawasaki and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. Check out the agenda here, then rush to register. Rush, as Early Bird registration ends tomorrow, November 3rd. (Yes, I know, posting this late, sorry…)
The conference ends at 3:30, and an hour later a related event, Launch: Silicon Valley starts at the same venue.
Launch: Silicon Valley is an opportunity for the next generation of emerging technology companies will to tell their stories to the world – literally, as the event will be videotaped and broadcast later. Over 150 startup submissions from all over the country, several European countries and as far as New Zealand have been reviewed by an Advisory Board of investors and executives. The 30 most interesting companies have been invited to participate in the “Launch: Silicon Valley” showcase, and 15 of these companies have also been invited to deliver product presentation to an audience of Silicon Valley’s leading movers and shakers.
Product presentations will take place in three categories, 5 companies each:
- Information Technology, Communications & related technologies
- Life Science, Material Science, CleanTech
- Consumer & Other
Please check out the complete agenda, and again, rush to register, as Early Bird pricing ends tomorrow, November 3rd for this event, too. The Registration site allows you to book both events together, or any of them selectively.
Now, for the surprise: Silicon Valley Auto Group will be displaying Aston Martin, Bentley, and Lamborghini cars at both events, and I’m hearing they’ll schedule test-drives. I’m sure half the participants – the cream of the Valley VC community – can actually afford these cars… as for the other half, the Entrepreneurs, how is this for an incentive?
Update (11/4): I can now give away a few hugely discounted tickets ( $49 vs. $199).
Tags: SVASE, garage.com, Guy Kawasaki, Art of the Start, entrepreneurship, startups, silicon valley, social networking, business events, lamborghini, aston martin, bentley, venture capital, vc, vc funding, startup pitch, launch silicon valley, product showcase, techcrunch
After SaaS Here Comes SbP: (Microsoft) Software By Parachute
Posted on November 2, 2006 ·
Microsoft invented (?) a new software delivery model: Software by Parachute. Apparently they blanketed the town of Willow Springs, IL with aerial droppings of the new Accounting software. If the embedded player does not work, watch the videos here and here. (hat tip: Julius Danilevsky)
Note: I have no way to verify if this is a hoax or real, but I suppose we’ll know within hours.
Losers of the Google / JotSpot Deal
Posted on November 2, 2006 ·
(Updated)
In my longer analysis of the JotSpot sale to Google I listed a group of JotSpot customers who may feel disadvantaged by the deal: those who’d rather pay to have their data at a company whose pure business model is charging for services than enjoy free service by Google whose primary business model requires dissecting/analyzing their data left and right.
I also pointed out that several competitors are offering deals to migrate these customers to their platform free or at a discount. Socialtext and Atlassian were the first to come forward with their offers, but since the previous post I heard about Central Desktop, (update: see correction in this comment by Central Desktop’s CEO), ProjectForum and I’m sure there are others. (Clearly, the wiki market is growing and sadly, I don’t know all the players). Jerry Bowles and Tom Raftery wrote more on the subject.
We all seem to have missed a point here: there is a group of customers for whom migration is not optional but a necessity: participants in the JotSpot Wiki Server beta program. Like I’ve said before, as much as I am a SaaS believer, it is not a religion, apparently the feedback from most customers is that they want their wiki behind the firewall – JotSpot’s response was the Wiki Server edition. These customers now have a rude awakening: JotSpot notified them that they would discontinue the beta program. Current customers have the right to continue using the product for the remainder of the 90-day beta period (what’s the point? ) but there is no support, no migration plan – game over, bad luck. 
Of course JotSpot had the right to do this, these were not paying customers (yet), and a beta is a beta, after all. But a beta program is a mutual effort, and especially early on requires a lot of time and effort from the customers, so it’s clear that these customers may feel let down. While most competitive migration offers are hosted solutions, it’s this specific “betrayed” group that Atlassian goes after: they offer migration help and discounted rates on Confluence, their behind-the-firewall enterprise wiki. So let down or not, these customers may eventually be better off on a more mature, robust enterprise platform.
As a sidenote, this is the second time that JotSpot drops a product benefiting a competitor: when they discontinued JotBox, Socialtext reaped the benefits by moving those customers to their Appliance. Update: Please read the comment exchange below for correction by JotSpot.
Update (11/29): two post on how the deal affected JotSpot partners and customers:
JotSpot Got the Goldmine. Its Partners and Customers Got the Shaft.
The JotSpot Google Merger
Update (11/30) the above post, The JotSpot Google Merger is now deleted, supposedly under pressure by … (?) Read the story on TechCrunch.
Pathetic Small Business (?) Consultant
Posted on October 31, 2006 ·
This is not a particularly nice title, I know, but enough is enough. I generally like Small Business Trends , sometimes even quote their material, but I can’t help but wonder what Jack Yoest is doing there.
The first weird post I picked on was 10 Reminders for Effective Management, which technically was advice to small business owners, but it reminded me of the 80’s corporate mid-manager’s survival guides, as in “how to BS your way through your career, looking busy while doing nothing“. No kidding.
In his next piece he recommended that small businesses be run like a military unit. That shocked me again; I for one tend to believe (small) businesses are better off with a team of partners and collaborators than a military organization.
Today he writes about Small Business Business Structure. A few selec quotes:
“Companies should be designed on the ol’ fashioned hierarchical organizational chart so that praise can easily flow up. And the heart-burn can flow down”
“The best structure is a pyramid with the small business owner at the tippy top with a few direct reports. The employee wanting to bother and waste the time of the boss will have to crawl over layers of managers before getting to you, the owner.”
“Put each business function in a box. Every action and process in to a discrete description. … Put employees in a box and a label.”
“And finally, close your door.”
I’ve been long wondering if these posts are meant to be satirical, but I’m afraid they are real. He really means it. Read his posts – if for nothing else, the entertainment value. 
JotSpot Google Deal – Who Wins, Why it’s Big:First Thoughts
Posted on October 31, 2006 ·
A few weeks ago the “wikirati” was having dinner with the Enterprise Irregulars in San Francisco, on occasion of the Office 2.0 Conference. Our gracious sponsor was Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes, and JotSpot’s Joe Kraus showed up, too. Missing from the photo is Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield, who was there for the first part, a briefing for Forrester‘s Charlene Li, but left before dinner. (Hm, did Joe eat Ross’s dinner? )
(photo credit: Dan Farber)
I heard a rumor that one of us in the group had likely gotten a few million dollars richer – and it wasn’t me 
… but Joe Kraus, having sold Jot$pot to Google. The source was credible but of course we had already heard about a Yahoo acquisition, then eBay .. so who knows, after all.
I found the timing ironic, just having come back from a Google briefing where they announced Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which left me largely unimpressed. This is what they were missing, I thought.
Today we know it’s a fact: JotSpot is part of Google. After the quick post, here are my first thoughts around who wins, and what it may mean from a user prospective.
Who Wins:
- Joe, Graham and team for obviou$ rea$ons.
- Google, for now they have all the pieces for a small business collaboration suite, if they are smart enough to get rid of the junk and integrate the good pieces together – something they have not done before. I’ll talk about this more a few paragraphs below.
- Some paying JotSpot customers: Jot has had a funny pricing model, where you can start free, but if you exceed a page limit (10?) you have to upgrade. Most users probably don’t realize that because in Jot everything is a page (i.e. add an event to the Calendar, it’s a new page), 10 pages are essentially nothing, if you wanted to do anything but testing, you’d have to upgrade – until now, that is. From now on paying customers will enjoy their current level of service for free.
- Competitors: JotSpot’s market direction has never been entirely clear; they focused on consumers and small businesses, but were present on the enterprise market, too. I think it’s fair to assume that they are out of the enterprise market at least for a while, leaving only Atlassian and Socialtext as the two serious players.
Who Loses:
- Some JotSpot customers who’d rather pay but have their data at a company whose business model is charging for services than enjoy free service by Google whose primary business model is to know everything about you. Clearly there will be some migration from JotSpot to other wiki platforms. Update: the competition isn’t sleeping, see migration offers by Socialtext and Atlassian.
- Me, for having half-written a post about the merits of pure wikis, Office suites and hybrids, which I can scrap now.
Who Needs to Move:
- Some of the Office 2.0 Suites, including my friends at Zoho. This may be a surprising conclusion, but bear with me for a while, it will all be clear.
So far the balance is good, we have more winners than losers
– now let’s look at what Google should do with JotSpot.
They have (almost) all the right pieces/features fragmented in different products, some of them overlapping though. They should kill off the weak ones and integrate the best – a gargantuan task for Google that so far hasn’t pulled off anything similar. Here’s just some of what I mean:
Google Docs & Spreadsheets:
One of the reasons I found the announcement underwhelming was that there really wasn’t a lot of innovation: two apps (Writely and Google Spreadsheets) put together in a uniform look and a file management system. It’s this very file management system that I found weak: how on earth can I work online and manage a jungle of thousands of documents in a flat, alphabetical list? JotSpot may just be the right solution.
Google Groups:
It’s rare for a mature product to go back to beta, but when Google recently did it, it was for good reason: the Groups which so far has been just a group email mechanism, became a mini community/collaborative platform, offering functionality found in collaborative editors like Writely, Zoho Writers, page cross-linking a’la wikis, file management..etc, combining all this with group email and the ability to share with a predefined group. I seriously considered it a major step forward, likely attracting previously “email-only” users to the native web-interface – and we all know why Google loves that.
JotSpot, the “hybrid” wiki:
This will be the somewhat controversial part. First of all, JotSpot is an attractive, easy-to-use wiki, and I believe that’s the value Google should keep.
Second, they’ve been playing around with the concept of being an application platform, which just never took off. The “applications” available in JotSpot are all in-house developed, despite their expectations the world has not come to develop apps on their platform. (Will this change in Google’s hands?). In JotSpot 2.0 they integrated some of the previously existing applications into user-friendly page types: Calendar, Spreadsheet, Photo ..etc, along with regular (text) wiki pages. This is what I considered Jot’s weak part. Just because a page looks like an application, it does not mean it really is:
- Try to import an Excel spreadsheet into a Jot Spreadsheet page, you’ll get a warning that it does not import formulas. Well, I’m sorry, but what else is there in a spreadsheet but formulas? The previous name, Tracker was fair: it’s a table where you track lists, but not a spreadsheet.
- Look at a Calendar page: it does not have any functionality. You cannot do group schedules, can’t even differentiate between personal and group events. It’s just a table that looks like a Calendar – reminding me the “electronic” calendars of corporate executives in the 90’s: the Word template that your secretary maintained for you and printed daily…
I guess it’s clear that I am unhappy with Jot’s “application” functionality, but I like it as a wiki. In this respect I tend to agree with Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield, who believes in best-of-breed (whether that’s Socialtext is another question…). Best-of-breed of everything, be it a wiki or other productivity tools. I’ve also stated that my ‘dream setup’ for corporate collaboration: is a wiki with an integrated Office 2.0 Suite. Why?
Other than its collaborative features, a wiki is a map of our logical thinking process: the cross-linked pages provide structure and narrative to our documents, one could think of it as a textual / visual extension of a directory system, resolving the problem of the flat listing of online files that represent fragments of our knowledge. Of course I am not implying that a wiki is just a fancy directory system… au contraire, the wiki is the primary work and collaboration platform, from which users occasionally invoke point applications for number crunching, presentation..etc.
Now Google has it all: they should kill the crap, and combine the JotSpot wiki, their own Office apps ( a good opportunity to dump the lousy Docs & Spreadsheets name), Calendar, Gmail, the Group email from Google Groups and have the Rolls -Royce of small business collaboration.
(Update: Dan Farber over at ZDNet is pondering the same: Is JotSpot the new foundation for Google Office?)
By now it’s probably obvious what I meant by Zoho having to make their move soon: they either need to come up with their own wiki, or team up with a wiki company. Best-of-breed is a great concept and enterprise customers can pick and match their tools on their own. For the SMB market it makes sense to be able to offer a hosted,integrated Wiki/Office solution though. So far Zoho is ahead of Google in Office 2.0, if they want to maintain that leadership, they will need a wiki one way or another.
Of course I could be way off in my speculation and Google may just have bought the team.. either way, congratulations to Joe, Graham and the JotSpot team. 
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