Category Archives: Design

April 14, 2010 Posted in Design 1 Comment

Freemium – A Word of Caution

By Ben Kepes
I’ve been harkening back to the good old days recently – the days when real companies made real products for real customers who paid real cold hard cash for said products. Call me old-fashioned but I still see value in that model. So that brings me to freemium…. I’ve always been more than a
April 14, 2010 Posted in Design Leave a comment

Apptio Helps Enterprises Run IT As A Business

By Krishnan Subramanian
Image via CrunchBase Apptio, with its headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, offers Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions to enterprise customers. It helps enterprises run their IT more efficiently like a business. Their TBM solutions helps enterprises make ROI optimized decisions usi
April 12, 2010 Posted in Design Leave a comment

Speed, Search and Aptimize

By Ben Kepes
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
April 7, 2010 Posted in Design Leave a comment

VCs Coming Thick and Fast – Box the Latest to Benefit

By Ben Kepes
News releasing right now that Box.net (more on them here) has just secured a $15million C round. Led by Scale Venture Partners and with previous box investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and US Venture Partners both taking a share of the action, this round shows that VCs are coming strongly out of a
April 1, 2010 Posted in Design Leave a comment

Changing the Game, Inside and Outside of the Box (and The Final Frontier)

By Ben Kepes
Exciting times at box.net headquarters. Yesterday I had a briefing with Aaron Levie, Co-founder and CEO, Michael Smith, Product Manager, Mobile and Sean Lindo, Marketing Communications Manager. That’s a lot of heavyweights for a simple briefing and especially something so apparently subtle as a ne
April 1, 2010 Posted in Design Leave a comment

Xactly – and Managing a Company Through Growth

By Ben Kepes
Recently, while in San Jose for the loud Connect conference, I took advantage of an offer from Zuora (see disclosure) to visit a number of different vendors – in part to look at how they’re utilized third party subscription services to power their businesses but more specifically to look at the
March 30, 2010 Posted in Design Leave a comment

Nice Marketing Blackbox Republic – But Maybe I Was Right to be Skeptical

By Ben Kepes
Nearly a year ago the blogosphere went wild about Blackbox Republic, a social media site that “focused on reinventing the online relationship market” or whatever that means. It’s a social network for “sex positive” individuals or people who are "open enough about sexuality that it's not
March 29, 2010 Posted in Design 3 Comments

Crowdsourcing for the Stars

By Ben Kepes
I posted late last year about how Zendesk (more on them here) had crowdsourced the translation of their application into different languages. At the time CEO Mikkel Svane commented that; Within just a few weeks of releasing the Zendesk internationalization tool we had support for more than 25 la
March 29, 2010 Posted in Design Leave a comment

Xero Personal – Is That It?

By Ben Kepes
Six months ago Xero (see disclosure statement) announced that they’d be building a personal finance application to go with their business one. I was pleased at the time, in part because I believe the personal/business divide is an artificial one (see post here). This morning Xero flicked the switc
March 25, 2010 Posted in Design 1 Comment

Without Standards, the World Falls Down

By Ben Kepes
This was meant to be a happy post. Unfortunately OggSync gets to bear the brunt of my frustrations over standards and portability. But first some background: I run a pretty busy schedule – to give you an idea of what that means in real terms I have 12 separate calendars – my manufacturing busin

The Author

Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. More on Ben

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