CloudAve

I’ve long been a fan of the Enterprise Irregulars - and if you aren’t, you should be. The “EI’s” (as they’re often called) are a loosely joined group of practitioners, consultants, and analysts that collectively blog about enterprise software (and building the “smart” enterprise). Their group includes such well-known folks as Michael Krigsman, Susan Scrupski, Jevon MacDonald, James Governor, Phil Wainewright, Jeff Nolan, Maggie Fox, Ray Wang, Dion Hinchcliffe, Niel Robertson and many others.

A little over a month ago, the idea arose that the EI’s might bring some content to Defrag. And, after some discussion (internally for them, and between their side and me), we’ve decided we both love the idea.

And so, it is with great fanfare that I’m pleased to announce that the Enterprise Irregular’s first ever “content track” will be taking place at this year’s Defrag. Steve Mann (the driving organizer behind this) and I

In my presentations I oftentimes reference a quote from Gartner which says the following:

“By 2010 more than half of companies that have established an online community will fail to manage it as an agent of change, ultimately eroding customer value.  Rushing into social computing initiatives without clearly defined benefits for both the company and the customer will be the biggest cause of failure.”

Notice that value must be defined for BOTH the customer AND the COMPANY, something I feel that many organizations miss when developing their social web strategy.  Social media isn’t going to go away and while I’m all for testing and playing around with social channels such as twitter, I think the real benefit comes from being able to solve business challenges while making customers happy.  I thought it would make sense to look at a few simple examples of what defining customer and company value can

The Web.  Open, democratic, leveling, freeing information from closed networks.  The wisdom of the crowds. Or so it seems.

I originally came from the entreprise software world (for 10 years) and before that I was in mobile & telecoms (8 years) so the last three years of immersing myself in consumer Internet, digital media & advertisings has been very eye opening.  I arrived on this scene wet behind the ears assuming that the web was, as it seemed to me as a user, powered by the masses for the masses.  Ah, the joys of youthful naivete.

I first learned the ropes around SEO (search engine optimization) and how for years this has been a cat-and-mouse game where people game the system (Google) through link exchanges, offshore SEO “agencies,” widgets, algorithmically optimized content and the like that degrades the quality of search results.  I then learned about the large world of Internet arbitrage,

Amazon today announced that they are dropping the on demand and reserved prices of High Memory Double Extra Large and High Memory Quadruple Extra Large instances from yesterday. 

I was watching the Apple launch event the other day and I must say I was a bit disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong the device is small and slick and the 99$ puts it in the right price range to compete with other streamers in the market. 
The problem is, that besides connecting to iTunes, the Apple TV its not much different than the rest of the bunch.
Apple isn’t taking advantage of its platform strengths the same way its doing with its other devices…

Why isn’t the Apple TV Social?

Apple just launched its own social network – Ping. Why isn’t Ping data featured on the Apple TV?
I’d like see what my friends watched, get recommendations and share stuff I Like.

Where are the Apps?!

The iPhone, iPod and iPad are thriving on a vibrant Apps market. Why can’t the Apple TV do the same?
I was

We're putting our money where our (digital) mouth is:  having talked so much about crowdsourcing, we took 99designs for a test drive, hoping to see a new CloudAve logo emerge.

I was not too impressed with the initial submissions, but just as I suspected, 99design works pretty much like eBay does: the better contestants ignore fresh contests, coming out of the woodwork in the last minute day or so.

The newer ones are a definite improvement over the earlier cheezy-cloudy ones.



Somehow I am still missing that Wow feeling... but let's crowdsource this part too - it's your turn now, please click here to vote.

Call me crazy (as many of you have), but I don’t see the separation of “listening tools” and “CRM systems” lasting too much longer.  We have actually seen a few acquisitions over the past few months such as Jive acquiring Filtrbox, Lithium acquiring Scout Labs, Meltwater acquiring Buzzgain, Attensity acquiring Biz 360, and several others.  We haven’t really seen CRM companies acquire listening tools (have we?).  We have seen many vendors build integrations with one another but with the recent focus and announcement at the CRM Evolution conference that analytics is the largest missed opportunity, it seems as though integrations aren’t really going to be enough and that CRM systems need to actually acquire and fully integrate listening and monitoring into their offering.

Some of you might remember the Social CRM process diagram that I put together (with some great feedback from Mitch Lieberman). 

In the diagram above (which

There was a lot of buzz about new visualization techniques back in 2009. About a year ago, Mashable posted on an Apple patent called Apple ID :

[it] recognizes an object based on visuals (through the iPhone’s camera), a RFID reader or through GPS, and then fetches the data from related databases. I like to imagine all this happening in real-time, with a layer of visual information superimposed on the actual camera image, but in the beginning it’ll probably just take you to a related Wikipedia page. Still, it’s a start.

What's being described is Augmented Reality (AR) - in which information is paired with, merged and displayed with a real time, real world image.  Here's a fun example.  This augmented reality app displays information on where the nearest London Tube station can be found.

And here's an app called Wikitude, an augmented

That’s the title of Paul Kedrosky’s keynote (Monkeys and Typewriters and Data — I added the “oh my!”). And it sits at the convergence of some conversation threads I’ve got going today…

I asked Paul to shoot me a paragraph about his keynote at Defrag. He sent over this:

===

Monkeys and Typewriters and Data

We have instrumented the planet. From webcams, to sensors, to servers, to satellites, we collect more data, on more things — at more times and in more places — than ever before. From Chinese electrical consumption, to Lake Havasu water levels, to Amazon web traffic, to iPhone backorder times, we have it all.

But given enough data, there will always, even if by chance, seem to be something wrong, something right, and something doing nothing at all. How do we tell the difference? Let’s talk about how we keep all these monkeys and typewriters with

When Google released its PaaS offering called Google App Engine, it attracted Web 2.0 developers in big numbers but it didn't gain much traction like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft platform. In fact, in May 2010, Network World had an article quoting a Forrester Survey which put the percentage of developers using Google App Engine at a meager 8.2%.

This post was originally published in a shorter (more sensible) format in the Wall Street Journal online.  If you’re short on time click on the WSJ link and read  the 990 word version there.  Otherwise, grab a cup ‘o coffee …

Clicking on any graph below will take you to that article.

One year ago I predicted that in 2010/11 the economy, far from being on the path of permanent recovery was on a temporary resurgence and there was a strong possibility of a “double dip” recession.  My advice to entrepreneurs was and is “when the hors d’oeuvres tray is being passed take two” (e.g. raise money now to weather any storms).

My original thinking from Oct ’09 was, while I didn’t (and still don’t) have a crystal ball I worried that: consumers were over-stretched with debt (and make up 77% of the economy), unemployment would

If you’ve been reading along with the defrag blog for any period of time, you’ve probably figured out that I like to have a macro-economic view inform how I approach things. For over a year now, I’ve been pounding on the theme of a “productivity boom” as an economic meta-theme — one that was driven by the databases/spreadsheets of the 80’s, email/e-commerce/productivity apps in the 90’s, and SaaS/productivity apps/shift to the cloud in the 00/10’s.

If we look at the current economic situation (from my admittedly, U.S.-centric viewpoint), we find ourselves in a world where a massive amount of liquidity has been pumped into the system (via the actions of the Fed and other central banks). Companies (technology and otherwise) are now sitting on a massive amount of cash in the face of fears around economic recovery, and as I’ve pontificated over the past few weeks, we’re going to

Zetta, the two year old company offering storage as a service targeted towards enterprises, yesterday announced the availability of Zetta Data Protection Solution and they are demoing their offering at the VMworld booth at San Francisco this week. In this era of big data, even enterprises have tons and tons of data which becomes too cumbersome to manage using traditional tools. Zetta is eyeing the enterprise storage market with their cloud storage offering. In this post, I will dig into their solution to understand how it fits into the enterprise storage needs.

Seth Levine of Foundry Group addresses this important topic this morning on his blog with a post, “ Has Convertible Debt Won ?”Seth was basing this on a Tweet by Paul Graham that said”

“Convertible notes have won. Every investment so far in this YC batch (and there have been a lot) has been done on a convertible note.”

I have to say that I didn’t take the question to mean that convertible debt had won for the entire market, but either way it’s clear that convertible debt has become an increasing trend.  I’ve written about the topic of convertible debt at length before specifically about how angels & entrepreneurs should think about pricing .

Convertible debt is an investment that “converts” into equity in the future usually at a discount to your next funding round price and sometimes

If you thought the bidding war between HP and Dell over 3Par is getting ugly, you will be surprised to know how personal it gets among the folks in these organizations . The following picture starring @HPStorageGuy, @3parfarley and @DellServerGeek should convey you the tensions :-).