Tech Stocks, Some Interesting Trends
So Greece is imploding, the flow on effects to the greater Eurozone (and even farther afield) are unknown. Wall Street is down and it’s fun to look at how tech stocks are doing… . Microsoft, down 2.37% on heavy trading. One million iPads and Apple is still down, even so more than Microsoft. What’s going [...]
Skunk Works Junkies: a Series on the Cloud’s Silver Lining – Part One – Dangling the Carrot
Skunk Works Junkies (SWJs) ears perk up if they hear, “beta invite,” and like anything exclusive, jump to snatch it up. The reality is, start ups can’t get enough beta-testers, or at least keep them consistently engaged once the party starts. In this series, you’ll hear first-hand from a beta-junkie what worked and what didn’t. [...]
It’s All About Support – Granular Is Good
The other day I had one of those nightmare situations that only those who are similarly detail-focused (some would say retentive) as myself can appreciate. Now I’m a stickler for detail – it really offends my sensibilities when things aren’t stacked in order, when things don’t match and, most of all, when the numbers in [...]
Red Hat Takes Another Step Towards Cloud Computing
Redhat, the poster child of open source and maker of most popular Linux distribution in the enterprise market, took another step into the cloudy future. Redhat recently released version 5.5 of their popular Enterprise Linux distribution. They followed it up with an announcement focused mainly on the hybrid nature of the enterprise cloud adoption in [...]
Webinar – 10 Questions to Ask About Cloud Computing
This week I’ve been invited to take part in a webinar with Dan Druker from Intacct, co-presenting a webinar looking at the important questions that prospective end users of cloud computing need to ask their vendors. It’s a webinar that leads on from a whitepaper we published (see disclosure) recently, and which has been having [...]
Marketing Automation Made Easy With Suitecloud Platform
Netsuite’s Suitecloud is in full swing now and our own Ben and Zoli are tracking it closely. Soon the videos of Suitecloud will be available on Netsuite’s Youtube channel. The flexible Suitecloud platform is already making waves and I came across an announcement about how Leadforce1‘s marketing automation platform is integrated with Netsuite’s cloud computing [...]
Twitter Acquires Tweetie, What's Next?
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. [...]
Google and Resellers? – How Happy is the Relationship?
Recently Google announced a new tool that would allow users to migrate email, contacts and calendar data from on-premise and hosted Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. The tool would specifically: Perform a centrally managed bulk migration of users Selectively migrate email, calendar or contacts (or any combination thereof) Migrate in phases for very large migrations [...]
Do You Sell Multi Year Contracts?
One of the key selling point of SaaS is the pay as you go model. In fact, some people even consider this to be part of the very definition of cloud computing. Yesterday, Phil Wainewright wrote a post about SaaS vendors selling multi-year contracts. He quotes a talk given by CEO of Workbooks.com, John Cheney, [...]
Three Models for Applying Customer Feedback to Innovation
Customers have always been core to companies’ existence. An obvious statement for sure. Customers are the source of cash flow, and have historically been thought of in marketing and transactional contexts. But in recent years, we’ve seen the rise of a new way to consider customers. As vital influencers of company activities and strategies. Two [...]
Video: A Comprehensive Video Guide For Google Voice
One of my favorite apps from Google is their Google Voice service. It has completely transformed how I handle phone calls. Today Google has posted a comprehensive list of videos explaining how Google Voice can be tapped to your advantage. We don’t want to post the videos here. We will just post one video and [...]
2.0 Adoption Warfare – can military tactics help?
A few weeks ago, as part of Social Media Week, Alan Patrick and I ran the very well received Social Media in Enterprise event (which we’ll run again!). It provided 8 different perspectives on collaboration in the enterprise using the new tools. Amongst the many issues raised in a night of some great discussion and [...]
Lord of the Flies – The Company
The story is set in a company you’re all familiar with. There are no adults in control just big people that believe they are adults. It started well, a revolutionary product that changed how people went about their work. But not all that starts well ends well. Two dominant boy-men control the company. We’ll call [...]
IBM Targets College Students With Free Cloud Offerings But ….
Image via CrunchBase College students are always attractive targets for software vendors. Whether it is the effective targeting of college students in the desktop era by Microsoft or Google’s attempt to enter the market in this cloud era through their #gonegoogle campaign, there is no denying that software vendors find the route attractive from a [...]
Dropbox – Envisaging a Future Well Beyond Files
I’ve been talking a lot recently to cloud storage, cloud synchronization and cloud backup vendors (all variations on a theme but they all have a different emphasis to what they do). Recently I had a couple of opportunities to talk with Dropbox, first with founder Drew Houston, and later with recently appointed SVP Marketing and [...]
