• SuiteCloud 2010 Here I Come

    April 14, 2010

    Business
    , , , , ,
     

    This week sees me stateside for a whirlwind four day trip. I’m here to participate in SuiteCloud, NetSuite’s annual partner conference (disclosure – NetSuite covered my expenses in attending this event). I’m really looking forward to spending some facetime…

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  • Dyyno Ramps Up Their P2P Based Video Streaming Platform

    April 12, 2010

    Analysis
     
    Image representing Dyyno as depicted in CrunchBase

    Image via CrunchBase

    Dyyno, the Palo Alto based company backed by Artiman Ventures and Startup Capital Ventures, offers a SaaS based video distribution platform that allows anyone from individuals to SMBs to enterprises share video and other media at a very low cost. The ease with which it can be done takes the IT out of the picture completely. They are the industry’s first 1080p HD video platform that taps into P2P architecture. They use a hybrid technology based on P2P and the cloud to deliver this high reliability video streaming platform. Dyyno online video platform supports three modes of streaming: LIVE for live events, WebTV for scheduled and creating your own online video channel, and VOD for on demand viewing and video asset management.

    Today, they announced the release of a new version of their broadcaster with additional features and EZ Broadcaster, a complete broadcasting toolkit in a box. Some of the features in the new version includes

    • Lots of presets making video broadcasting a child’s play
    • Advanced monitoring of the broadcasts
    • Broadcast failover
    • Dynamic recording
    • Video asset manager

    and more. The most interesting part about today’s announcement is the availability of EZ Broadcaster. This is a broadcasting kit that will help you stream from any video camera that has a RCA/S-Video output. This $49 kit will be a boon to many of the broadcasters wanting to stream good quality video.

    What I like about their service:

    • The biggest attraction for me was their use of P2P technology along with the Amazon cloud to deliver this platform. The reliability and scalability offered by this hybrid mix is too attractive
    • This fully featured platform supports the entire video lifecycle from capture to encoding to streaming to asset management to audience engagement to monetization to analytics
    • The fact that they make it easy to use any video camera instead of just the webcams in the laptop makes their platform very attractive

    What else I want from their service:

    • Definitely a Mac client and, possibly, a Linux client. Looks like they will soon be releasing a Mac version of their desktop software
    • I would love to integrate their platform with my Google Apps account so that it takes the access control of my organization
    • Not sure if they support HTML5 video. if not, it is definitely a need for me

    Overall, it is a pretty interesting offering. I was not convinced about how they can compete in a crowded marketplace including everyone from Youtube to Ustream to Brightcove. When I queried Vamshi Sriperumbudur, Head Of Marketing, about the tough landscape, he sounded confident. He told me that the reliability offered by their unique platform added with their price point for such high quality video will make them very attractive. They are definitely an interesting company to keep tabs and I am looking forward to see how they evolve.

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  • Speed, Search and Aptimize

    April 12, 2010

    Design
     

    I’ve written before about Aptimize, a company whose sole wish (beyond, I assume, making some money) is to see the web get faster. Well it seems Google just did them a big favor.

    A little while ago on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google announced that speed is now becoming one of the metrics they utilize in their search ranking algorithms. In justifying their move Google says:

    Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.

    Which is great for companies like Aptimize who help companies speed up their website – with this announcement I can imagine an entire new generation of services springing up – like the SEO services of today perhaps tomorrow will see a plethora of website speed improvement services on offer.

    Google themselves came in for some criticism in the comments to the post – many people complained that Friend Connect and Analytics slow websites significantly – either way this move will see people concentrate more on their site speed along with its usability.

    And, in the process, Aptimize might just make their secondary aim, the one about the money 😉

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  • Apple’s Getting All Orwellian On Us…

    April 12, 2010

    Analysis
     

    The blogosphere is aghast with the latest salvo fired in the Apple vs the world war – this time it came in the form of an update to its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement that specifically bans the use of third-party compilers for creating apps that will run on the iPhone OS. Basically it looks like Adobe’s plans to create a workaround for Flash on the iPhone and iPad may have been stymied.

    The news got me all sentimental remembering a ground breaking moment from my teen years. Who remembers this from 1984?

    Hmmmm – anyone else feeling a little uneasy that Apple have, in an Orwellian twist, seemingly returned us to the days of Big Brother? It seems that the public also feel this latest step is one too far if a Facebook fan club and a bunch of replies to various post is any indication – feel the passion evident here!

    Anyway… back to the new terms and conditions. I was chatting about this with a friend who is involved with a company that makes a web application that utilizes Flash heavily. My comment to him was that it seems the writing is on the wall, what with the market share, and more importantly share of the hearts and minds, that Apple has, it seems that the war for Flash has been lost.

    His perspective was a little different, taking the line that Adobe seems to be in all this by saying that it’s a big web out there and no one company will succeed if it attempts to lock down users to one particular way of doing things. He also went on to suggest that Apple developers where experiencing something of a Stockholm Syndrome – and developing an empathy for their oppressor that is beyond all reality. personally I see it a little different – given the ridiculously large number of iPads that Apple sold in the first weekend post release, Apple developers realize that life under a dictator might not be pleasant, but if that dictator brings along with him potential revenue, sometimes what is “right” needs to be left to the side.

    As this person stated:

    The hassle Apple is introducing for everyone is everyone will need to write one app for iPhone app and one app for most other mobile devices.  Clearly, we, like thousands of other ISVs, would prefer to write once, run on any mobile device.  There are dozens of mobile app platform companies that have built a business on that value and produced tens of thousands of apps that will all now be in breach.  This is a big bummer for all of them and a sour move by Apple. This isn’t a attack on Flash it’s an attack on openness, innovation and freedom  – it’s the exact opposite of Google‘s open approach. 

    The question here isn’t one of whether Apple are being “evil”. Clearly in an effort to both maintain consistency (good) and capture the position of default appstore for mobile devices (not so good if you like “open”) they’re making moves that have only their best interests at heart. But what will be fascinating to watch play out are two different things:

    How deep does Stockholm Syndrome run?

    Fanboy or not, no one can seriously contend that the iPhone user experience is anything other than supreme. Using Apple devices is poetry (in a kind of a “You will only use three words per sentence each having no less than two syllables” controlled way) the question is will those who are hooked on the poetry be able to break out of the user experience spell and look at the bigger picture – if they do they’ll potentially realize that Apple is taking us to a place that isn’t good for anyone other than Apple and in that there is a risk. Put simply – will people in this case rebel against the control that Apple is asserting.

    Interestingly enough, looking at blog comments around the place, the majority of annoyed developers are complaining about not being able to use non-Adobe languages for the iPhone (Ruby on rails, soap, Unity, etc). While there are a number of upset Flash developers, the vast majority are just other coders that like their language and don’t want to write in C….  Just think what it means for small mobile application startups – someone with just one killer app that they wrote in their preferred language – the chances of securing funding at this point has just dropped steeply – who in their right mind would fund someone with Apple’s legal language that allows them to remove all their apps from the appstore whenever they choose. 

    Is the touch web really bigger than Apple?

    It’s important to remember that there were touch devices before the iPhone and seemingly every man and his dog has, or will have, a multitouch slate device in production in the coming months. In his formal response to the Apply move, Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch said that:

    multiscreen is growing beyond Apple’s devices. This year we will see a wide range of excellent smartphones, tablets, smartbooks, televisions and more coming to market and we are continuing to work with partners across this whole range to enable your content and applications to be viewed, interacted with and purchased

    If what Lynch says is right, Apple could well be making a strategic error here and designing themselves into a corner. In a world (for example) where both Apple customers are the only ones who can’t utilize particular webservices AND Apple only has a small share of the touch market – Apple would have to scramble fast to meet the market’s expectations.

    At the end of the day companies need to respond to market conditions today – it’s all very well being strategic but if a long term strategy risks short term viability there’s little use. Apple is the defacto industry standard for multi touch and, as such, any company tying it’s success to a multi touch world has no option but to play by Apple’ rules, no matter how bitter a bill they may be to swallow.

    Update: Robert  Scoble and I must be thinking alike – we’re just a decade apart

     

     

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  • Twitter Acquires Tweetie, What's Next?

    April 10, 2010

    Strategy
     
    First one of Twitter’s investors, Fred Wilson, said this
    Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. It is the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s. Some of the most popular third party services on Twitter are like that. Mobile clients come to mind. Photo sharing services come to mind. URL shorteners come to mind. Search comes to mind. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.
    Immediately, Nicholas Carlson of Silicon Alley Insider wrote a post wondering if Mr. Wilson dropped a bombshell and predicted about the following possibilities
    Bit.ly (as a URL shortener), TwitPic (as a photo uploader) and Tweetie (as an iPhone app) are now considered ‘core’ to the platform. They will either be bought or competed with.
    • Given that Twitter announced their own URL shortener and will need one for any [cost-per-click advertising] business model, we should assume Twitter will have its own URL shortener concept.
    • TwitPic could be bought or built. Probably easier to build, since there’s no magic there.
    • Tweetie is a big favorite of the Twitter crew, they love Loren Brichter’s stripped down design and cool sensibility, and it can probably be bought at an affordable price. Ie., Bit.ly downgraded; TwitPic built, Tweetie bought.
    Now Twitter has announced that they have acquired Tweetie (my favorite app before Echofon replaced it due to lack of development on the Mac client side)
    We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement with Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) to acquire Tweetie, a leading iPhone Twitter client. Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks. Loren will become a key member of our mobile team that is already having huge impact with device makers and service providers around the world. Loren’s work won the 2009 Apple Design Award and we will eventually launch Twitter for iPad with his help.
    So my question is
    What’s next?
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  • Making Linux Relevant In Desktop With SaaS

    April 10, 2010

    Analysis
     
    Picture Credit: Ubuntu.comLinux has been trying hard to crack the desktop market for long. Being an open source evangelist, I do admit that it didn’t gain much traction in the desktop era dominated by Microsoft. There are many reasons for this including
    • Unpolished UI
    • Lack of support for some of the consumer devices like webcam, printer, etc.
    • More importantly, lack of availability of a good office suite comparable to Microsoft Office. Well, Open Office did a decent job of filling the gap but not many were ok with it
    Fast forward a few years and we are in cloud computing era now. Users are getting used to applications delivered as a service and many are realizing that the bloated Microsoft Office suite is too feature rich for their everyday use. Many are contended with the SaaS Office Suite like Google Docs, Zoho Office Suite (disclaimer: Zoho is the sole sponsor of this blog and this post is written independently using some information made available by a Canonical developer), Thinkfree, etc.. More importantly, SaaS era is making operating system irrelevant. We are seeing a shift in the users’ thinking on operating systems too. The proliferation of netbooks brought Linux to the desks laps of many users and this trend is only going to continue further and further.
    Yesterday Jamie Bennett, an Ubuntu developer from Canonical Inc., made a blog post that explained how users can integrate Zoho Office Suite into their Ubuntu desktop. They have a package available on their repository which will integrate Zoho Office suite into Ubuntu desktop. On the SaaS Office Suite front, I like both Google Docs and Zoho Suite (disclaimer: Zoho is the sponsor of this blog but this is based on my experience as an user) and Mr. Bennett has given reasons about why they chose Zoho over Google docs.
    First off, why Zoho and not, for instance, Google Docs. Both services offer great functionality and are very competitive but the ultimate decision came down to which suited our use case the most. What we wanted was for a user to double click on a document which would then seamlessly open ready for editing. From there the user would edit, read, and maybe even save it back to the local device. No fuss, no logging in, no other requirements, just open and get on with it. Similary, when a user launches the application on its own, we wanted the correct type of service to open ready for the user to concentrate on their document. The service that allowed us to do this was Zoho. Zoho allows the user to do all of this without ever registering or logging in. Of course you get online storage with Zoho if you do register, but if you choose not to you can still get a full featured experience.
    This is a pretty interesting move on many fronts. If this gains traction, we can see more and more adoption of Ubuntu on desktops. With OpenOffice.org coming under Oracle, this will give Linux users a chance to move away from Open Office. Having a light footprint helps convince users to move away from Open Office too. As more and more people embrace such SaaS applications from Linux desktops, we may even see businesses embracing both SaaS and Linux desktops instead of Microsoft Windows OS and their Office Suite. With Microsoft planning for a semi-cloud push with their Office Suite, a marriage between SaaS applications and a Linux distribution like Ubuntu is very useful. It will be interesting to see how these trends play out.
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  • T Shirt Friday #38 – MaxiScale

    April 9, 2010

    Just for fun
     

    maxiEveryone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

    If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).

    MaxiScale was one of the finalists in the recent Launchpad event held at the Cloud Connect conference in San Jose. You can check out the video pitch for their big data solution below:

    Trawling the expo on the last day, Krish and I had a chat to them and convinced them that a perfect go to market strategy was to give me a T shirt to review – well something like that anyway. So here ya go…

    Hot

    • I normally prefer white t shirts but this is a nice understated blue color
    • Made in the USA – the home of the free!
    • No scratchy internal label – this has a lovely printed inside badge
    • The logo.. well that’s my personal motto

    Not

    • Hmmm – despite being cool, the logo is quite… large
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  • Financial Force gets Chatter(ing)

    April 9, 2010

    enterprise, Product reviews
     

    Right about now, Jeremy Roche the CEO of SaaS Accounting vendor FinancialForce (more on them here) is on stage at CloudForce in New York telling the world about the integration they’ve made with Salesforce’s chatter functionality. I had an opportunity to speak with Roche a week or so ago under a strict embargo about the integration – it seems FinancialForce were particularly worried that any leak of the announcement might jeopardize their chances to speak at the event. Apparently salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is getting close to Apple CEO Steve Jobs in terms of exerting control over every little thing. But anyway, I digress.

    Firstly a bit of an update on FinancialForce – they’ve now got customers in over 40 countries and are seeing something of a polarization among their users – with many utilizing the entire accounting functionality, but many larger customers using FinancialForce as a kind of accounting “middleware” – facilitating the integration between large enterprise systems such as SAP, and smaller divisional systems. In fact FinancialForce recently showcased their integration with SAP, allowing sales data from a business unit using FinancialForce to be populated through to the SAP ledgers – see the diagram below:

    coda

    According to their PR blurb, FinancialForce:

    want(s) to help finance reach the whole (or part) of sales which as we know is a pain in the real world when wrangling via email. We are giving them the ability to initiate and be part of conversations that they wouldn’t normally be included in until a problem occurs or questions need answering. We think there’s real value in this and that it creates a different sense of where finance sits in the organization that can drive longer term value. The collaborative finance function – bringing accountants from the back office into the heart of the business. Since everything in business comes back to a financial transaction, the opportunities both internally and externally are compelling

    What Financial Force is releasing is an integration of their core accounting product with Chatter and a continuation of the interaction between the front and back office functions of an organizations. This leverages the ability of Chatter to follow all types of objects, be they people, opportunities, cases, customers etc. FinancialForce is enabling their “Chatterbox” a rules builder for chatter that Roche pointed out a couple of use cases for:

    • A financial manager, concerned about cashflow, might create a rule that shows them progress relating to every opportunity about (for example) $50000 that will be closing in the current quarter
    • A service manager may create a rule that allows them to follow all service cases with no progress activity for a certain number of days

    Check out the video below which gives an example business scenario for chatter:

    “;” alt=””>

    I’ve always been cautious about social tools that promise to revolutionize the enterprise – but I have to say that an integration between chatter and a third party force.com application really shows the promise these social tools can bring – dragging information kicking and screaming out of the app and to where a user needs it.

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  • Enterprises Sneaking Into Public Clouds?

    April 8, 2010

    Analysis
     
    Image representing newScale as depicted in Cru...

    Image via CrunchBase

    There is a widespread opinion among pundits and cloud practitioners that enterprises are running away from public clouds. Part of the reason for this impression is the real security concerns about the cloud and the rest is due to the misinformation campaign unleashed by vendors who have a lot to lose in the cloud era. However, the enterprises are more open minded than what these people want you to believe and they are tapping into the public clouds at varying levels.

    Recently newScale® Inc., the company offering IT service catalog software for enterprises, and Hyperstratus, the silicon valley based cloud computing consultancy firm, conducted an informal survey of 200 IT operations managers, infrastructure executives, developers, and architects from leading Global 2000 organizations and found some surprising results.

    Some of these results include

    • About 47% of the participants told that the developers in their company used external cloud providers in some form or other. Out of this, 32% told that their developers strictly use in test and dev environments and 15% said it is used in test, dev abd, even, production environments
    • When asked about the importance of a hybrid environment of internal data centers and external cloud providers, only 9% told that it is not important. A whopping 91% have answers ranging from important to very important with varying emphasis on internal data centers and external cloud providers.

    Even though this survey is not scientific, it does offer us a glimpse of what enterprise IT folks think about cloud computing. Contrary to conventional thinking, enterprises are not terrorized by the idea of cloud computing. In fact, when I spoke with various cloud vendors like Skytap, they told me that they see considerable traction with the enterprise customers. Many vendors pointed out that the enterprises are very open to adopting public clouds in the test and dev environments and some are even considering deployment on production environments. The above survey goes on to confirm these assertions.

    I would like to learn from Cloud Ave readers about what they think about enterprise public/external cloud adoption. If you are a member of enterprise IT team or a vendor selling to enterprises, please take the following survey to help us get better insight into the enterprise mindset. We appreciate your time in taking this poll.

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  • And Who Said SaaS Wasn’t Customizable? – NetSuite Rewrites the Rules and Embraces Design Thinking in the process

    April 8, 2010

    Product reviews
    , , , , , , ,
     

    I spend a lot of time talking to organizations about moving to SaaS an often I hear their concerns around the apparent lack of flexibility that SaaS apps give them. In the broader context this argument speaks to the…

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