• Open Meets Closed – And 2.0 Comes of Age at WhoRunsGov.com

    September 9, 2009

    Business
     

    OK – I’ll agree that the title to this post is a little too declaratory – something I try to avoid but bear with me for a minute. Today at the Government 2.0 Summit, the Washington Post will announce…

    Read more

  • Making Information Like Avatars… An Open Web for Business Data

    September 9, 2009

    Design
     

    Recently I attended the Wellington installment of the WordCamp series – WordCamps are “conferences that focus on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core…

    Read more

  • The Cloud Computing Continuum – Sometimes Simple Explanations Are Best

    September 8, 2009

    General
     

    I live in something of an enigmatic world. I sit down at my laptop and immerse myself in the world of EC2, S3, AVPC, Azure, PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, API, AJAX and a million and one other acronyms and then I go home and converse with real people doing real things.

    Sometimes it depresses me that in the tech industry we are so focused on the minutiae of what are, essentially quite ephemeral concepts, that we lose site of both the fact that these things are meant to be tools for the real world, and that we need to find a language to explain this stuff in terms that others can understand.

    Case in point – Cloud Computing. Taking a step back from the details one can easily see that there are a bunch of concepts that are quite complex, disjointed and difficult to either explain or understand.

    With that said, I was pleased the other day to read a post from James Valentine from Fronde. Fronde is a company that works in a number of areas – mobile, agile development, cloud implementation etc. Anyway, in a bid to clarify the term “Cloud Computing” to his non-technical or at least non-cloudy clients, James came up with a diagram to explain the cloud continuum as he sees it;

    Cloud-continuum1

    I like what James is trying to do here – it’s way simpler than the complex stack diagrams that we seem to see dragged out from time to time. James states that his rationale for creating the continuum was to;

    avoid us getting hung up on specific definitions or labels for each area. It also reflects the fact that in the world of cloud computing providers can quickly add new features that expand their presence across the continuum.

    Congratulations to James for thinking in a grass roots way, and I’d be keen (as I’m sure would he) to hear any feedback around this – let’s jointly find a way to articulate this crazy cloud thing we do.

    I had a coffee the other day with Smina Vanlerberghe, Director and Principal Consultant of Memia, a cloud vendor doing a bunch of cool stuff: architecture, implementation, collaboration tools and the like. We were having a bit of a brainstorm about furthering “The Cloud” in our neck of the woods. The difficulties around that term are huge – putting aside the adoption issue just the definitional issues are problematic. Some people equate Cloud Computing with, for example cloud storage. To others it’s all about simple development platforms while to others it’s all about SaaS. Another bunch of people (and arguably the majority) consider Cloud Computing to be online collaboration tools and little more.

    Of course the problem here is that they’re all right. Cloud Computing is a broad term covering many different things, trying to reduce it to any one aspect is doomed to failure.

    Next months I’m presenting at the New Zealand Cloud Computing Summit, an event that may well see me drag out my dusty suit from the closet. I’m currently creating my presentation and rapidly realizing that really I’m talking about (at least) three things at once.

    Perhaps the time has come to accept that Cloud Computing has finally “grown up” to the point where it’s constituent parts can stand on their own and no longer need an over arching title. What do you, the readers, think?

    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

    Read more

  • Time for a the BNZ Rant, They Don’t Get It….

    September 7, 2009

    Business, IT, My businesses, New Zealand
    , , ,
     

    My fellow blogger Lance Wiggs tends to be a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to banks in new Zealand, in light of the fact that he’s sitting somewhere in the middle of Africa, I figured I’d take…

    Read more

  • T-Shirt Friday #7 – Mindtouch

    September 5, 2009

    Just for fun
     

    Everyone 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…

    Read more

  • Sarah Lacy Pans a Nation, Self-Importance Anyone?

    September 4, 2009

    General
     

    TechCrunch reporter and ultimate Valley insider Sarah Lacy posted today, bemoaning the fact that her “research trip” to Brazil may not happen as planned due to a delayed entry visa. The post is an uber-emotive piece with a Brazilian flag with the text “Epic-est [sic] fail ever” written on it. It seems Lacy booked her travel and then applied for a visa which, apparently due to some technology changes by the Brazilian government at its embassies and consulates, did not turn up in time.

    Bear in mind that this is the same Lacy who was nearly heckled off-stage for an arguably sycophantic “interview” of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg a couple of years ago – an interview that left watchers with the impression that she’d spent the previous few years as number one confidante and adviser to Zuckerberg.

    Lacy had the good grace to not shoot the messenger in this case (she didn’t refrain however from shouting at them);

    I paid an expediting service hundreds of dollars to ensure I’d be getting this visa, and clearly they’ve been getting an earful from me over the last week. If not for a phone call from the owner this morning finally agreeing to waive the fees I paid them, this post would largely be skewering them.

    Oh Sarah, how gracious of you…

    It seems Lacy is growing accustomed to being a superstar wherever she travels (and invariably it seems she travels to locations that aim to become the new Silicon Valley) and having red carpet treatment to facilitate her journeys. Lacy has caused something of a storm if the comments to her post are anything to go by – she’s been labeled self-centered, vapid, and stupid.

    It’s also a poor piece of journalism. The new Brazilian policy has apparently been implemented as a response to the US’s huge tightening of immigration for non US citizens entering the country. It seems when it comes to international relations, Ms Lacy is a proponent of the US imperialist attitude that seems to advocate a double standard for all the “dirty foreigners” (who, one assumes, Lacy thinks are either terrorists or peasants). As an obviously irate commenter wrote;

    This shows the arrogance of some American citizens, thinking that they can walk into any country without a hitch. You don’t see the problem with your system because you are a citizen but for the rest of us who legally enter the country it is always a pain in the butt. I am in the US trying to help your society by bringing my knowledge and experience as a contribution. Despite that, it is not always easy to make it through customs. Yes, your rules are as bureaucratic as the third world; try walking a mile on an US immigrant shoes before you judge.

    Lacy closes of the post in yet another show of egoism, saying;

    The country should be embarrassed, and its businesses should be furious. I’m going to aim to try this whole Brazil thing again in December or January. It’s not the entrepreneurs’ or our readers’ fault this happened, and I still believe there are great stories in Brazil that I want to report. But when you’re harder to get into than China, it doesn’t bode well for foreign investment, Brazil.

    Sarah, Sarah, Sarah – you may now the biggest names is Silicon Valley but you’re just another hack on the world scale, no more deserving of special treatment than any of the rest of us. If you really want to write a piece about the reality for web start-ups, then walk in the shoes of those same start-ups, not in those of your superstar friends… believe me, your writing would be better for some humility.

    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

    Read more

  • Clio – Web-based Legal Practice Management

    September 4, 2009

    Product reviews
     

    A few weeks ago, after reviewing LegalSoftOnline (see here), I took a very brief look at Clio. Afterwards I had a discussion with Jack Newton, President of Clio who was eager to show me under the hood of Clio…

    Read more

  • Free Sometimes Comes at a Huge Cost

    September 2, 2009

    Strategy, General
     

    The other day I was having lunch with a bunch of technology entrepreneurs and the subject came up of the falling service levels we all experience. The conversation was particularly around the telecommunications field but could have easily been any aspect of commerce.

    The chap sitting next to me had a particular perception;

    When I ring up a telco help desk, I want to get the right advice quickly – it’s as simple as that. I don’t want to talk to someone in Manila or Bangalore, I don’t want to have to wade through multiple levels of AVR, I want to talk with a real person who understands my requirements

    Now this isn’t, at first glance, an unreasonable requirement. But let’s look a little closer. At the same time as wanting a high level of service, my friend also bemoaned the fact that traditional telcos charge such high amounts for connection and call charges – he pointed out the existence of cut price VoIP services that would seem to offer the same thing as the traditional telcos (phone line, calling, data etc) but at a lower cost.

    Anyone see a disconnect here?

    We then got talking about office productivity applications. My friend proudly announced that he uses Google apps free account – he rightly realized that with a free service, there is no guarantee of exceptional uptimes or, for that matter, data security and availability. While he thought it reasonable that he should suffer the odd short outage to his service, when confronted by the reality that his choice of free applications may impact upon the very security of his data – he was incredulous.

    I read an interesting post the other day by the always succinct Phil Wainewright. Now Phil is one of the most well known SaaS bloggers and has used, and does use almost every SaaS service available. Phil has an interesting, and somewhat unusual ethos in that he prefers to pay for the services he uses, feeling that it gives a form of contract and some sort of recourse if things go wrong.

    Phil listed a number of services he’s used, in their paid versions, only to have the provider acquired by a larger business who then makes the products free – Blogger, Feedburner, Omniture’s Hitbox Professional all fall into this category. And as Phil so rightly points out;

    In each case, the withdrawal of paid services has coincided with a lack of investment in new
    features, a deterioration in service quality and worsening customer service. Which is exactly what I had wanted to avoid by signing up for a paid service in the first place. In my view, online services that want to be taken seriously should always offer a paid option for those that want a business-class service with certain guarantees.

    Of course we’re in an unhealthy spiral whereby vendors, in a race for mindshare, target the one easy attribute – price. As consumers we become more and more accustomed to getting something for nothing, and start to expect professional grade levels of reliability, robustness and service, on a free service. Again, as Phil so rightly points out;

    The true villain here, though [is] the mass of users who want to save a few dollars and let someone else worry about how the service is going to remain viable. What they forget is that the service provider will make money by splicing ads into their work processes, selling off their data to the highest bidder and cutting corners on service delivery , either that or simply giving up on the service one day with no warning.

    So please – think a little about the offerings you, as consumers, use. And think about the level of service you expect from those services. Ensure that there is some reality around those two things – while a business can run a free offering with a high level of service for a very short period of time, eventually something has to give. In the best case scenario it may just be the introduction of a paid service, in a worst case scenario it may just be the loss, or illegitimate use, of your data…

    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

    Read more

  • YouCalc for Zendesk, Analytical View of Helpdesk Data

    September 1, 2009

    Product reviews
     

    I’ve written many times in the past about Zendesk (see here) and have also written about YouCalc. These two companies have much in common, YouCalc founder Rasmus Madsen was actually part of an early “friends and family” funding round for Zendesk, they’re both from Denmark (although Zendesk is now based in San Francisco) and they both have a friendly, open attitude that makes people comfortable with their businesses.

    Recently Zendesk and YouCalc jointly announced the YouCalc Dashboard for Zendesk and Personal Performance Widget, integrations that display Zendesk ticket analytics either standalone or embedded into a website. In a nice example of the proof of the pudding being in the eating, Zendesk themselves are using the YouCalc dashboard to track their own rapidly increasing customer base via their global support team.

    The Personal performance widget is aimed at individual Zendesk agents, and runs as a widget inside Zendesk, inside iGoogle and on the iPhone, providing a personal performance overview. It analyzes tickets assigned to a particular agent and gives a graphical depiction of:

    • The number of tickets created and solved in the past 7 days
    • The average resolution time on their tickets
    • The average waiting time on their tickets
    • The number of open tickets grouped by priority
    • Ticket backlog development.

    zd-for-blog2

    The Dashboard for Zendesk is aimed at Zendesk administrators who need analytics across the service & support organization.

     zd-for-blog

    It gives overview and insight into agent performance, ticket type distribution and resource planning issues.

    6a00e0098d59f888330120a576de6b970c-800wi

    I spoke with VP of Sales from Zendesk, Michael Folmer Hansen. Michael was the first employer Zendesk took on, so has had first hand experience of the stresses caused by the rapid growth that Zendesk has enjoyed. I asked him what the YouCalc integration means to him, heading as he does the support team.

    Hansen, not surprisingly given his role, was quick to complement the functionality of his own product saying;

    Zendesk already has strong reporting facilities which have, with the Zendesk Plus+ release last week [see CloudAve coverage here], been significantly improved with near real-time CSV feed of ticket data including resolution time metrics and custom fields. This enables you to use a wide range of tools to do your analysis.

    Realizing though that advanced analytics is not something the majority of users will want or need, Hansen was very complementary of the YouCalc dashboards ability to give a rich visual display of metrics, all with little or no configuration required;

    I manage the Zendesk Global Support Team with 9 members in 7 Countries. The Team also uses Zendesk to interact with the whole company and with external partners. Our customers are simply interested in quick resolution, which I also am, but I have to provide this with optimal manning across the globe while Zendesk continues its rapid month on month growth with resulting increase in Support tickets.

    With the YouCalc Dashboard I can, using 3 views, see our matrix of KPIs. In the Tickets Overview I see tickets created compared to tickets solved per hour, day, week + evolution over time – this allows me to plan the current and future manning of Zendesk Support, not just numbers, but also time zone location. In the Tickets Analyzer I can see the Resolution time and can drill down by date, type, group, agent e.g. for July 2009 the Resolution time for Level 1. tickets was under 1 hour for 44.03% of the tickets and under 10 hours for 71.13%. Under the Agent Performance view I can drill down to better understand the performance of the team and individual members – last month we had one Agent who solved 438 Tickets with an average resolution time of 51 minutes, while another Agent solved 183 Tickets with an average resolution time of nearly 3 hours. A little analysis shows that the first Agent palmed all the difficult Tickets off to the second Agent.

    It’s this sort of valuable analysis that YouCalc is aiming for – it allows for in-depth analysis of a number of different applications, from Salesforce.com to Highrise, from Google Analytics to Ebay and now includes Zendesk. I was excited when I first saw YouCalc at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston earlier this year – the power of this latest integration shows why.

    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

    Read more

  • How to be a Media Darling…

    September 1, 2009

    Design
     

    At the recent New Zealand WordCamp, one of the sessions looked at building successful media relationships. In a session titled “How to be a Media Darling”, Doug Casement from Renaissance talked about building relationships and pitching for coverage with mainstream media. I covered the event for Idealog magazine but thought it was worth returning to for this audience.

    His advice was good, and was, in my opinion, applicable to organizations wanting to foster relationships with both mainstream and new media – there’s significant crossover and it’s certainly not black and white as to who is traditional and who is new.

    Anyway, Casement contends that the mainstream media still has a place, it can deliver;

    • General publicity and profile
    • Increased awareness in a target audience
    • It helps boost word-of-mouth (what viral marketing USED to be…)
    • If SEO and content are similar, mainstream media can make the difference
    • Multiple information streams – the gestalt effect, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts

    But you need to remember that everybody sells… Even you. You need to answer these questions;

    • Can I trust you?
    • Do you understand my issues?
    • Do you care?
    • Are you committed to working with me?

    Because people do business with people… and prefer to do it with those that they like and trust.

    Given his experience in journalism, Casement had some good lessons for the most successful strategies to engage with journalists. Some press myths he advises that it’s best to ignore;

    • The press is not always adversarial – they’re just often busy
    • That influencing the press takes lunch, trips or tacky giveaways

    But, he said, not all publications (or journalists for that matter) are equal – there are those who, like a common street hooker, will sell themselves for a junket, a gadget or some cash.

    Questions you shouldn’t ask of technology journalists;

    • Do you have a technology section?
    • So you’re a weekly – how often do you publish?
    • Can I have my advert next to the story
    • I’m booking an advert, any chance of an interview?
    • I’m considering advertising – but I need a front page story first..

    Seduction for dummies;

    • Journalists are people too – find out what interests them, invest in the relationship, engage with them – not just when you want something
    • Don’t hide behind “off the record”

    Simple tactics that work when engaging with journalists;

    • Read, and understand, the publication. Understand the “editorial window” of the publication, understand the readership, what’s the angle of the story and the relevance for the particular journalist/publication
    • Don’t call at deadline time!
    • Never demand or harass them
    • Regard it as a sales call – be comfortable talking

    The Zen of press releases;

    • Short and simple
    • Don’t tell fibs or exaggerate
    • Delete superlatives, adjectives and adverbs
    • Customize to fit their editorial window
    • Don’t shotgun – the press love exclusives!
    • Press releases should be teasers

    Above all else… Be Relevant!

    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

    Read more

...320325330335340348349350351352...
...320325330335340348349350351352...