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 [...]
It’s All About the Suite – NetSuite Enters the Box
Today Box.net is at the NetSuite SuiteCloud conference (see disclosure re my attendance at SuiteCloud here) opening the box (bad pun intended) on their integration with NetSuite. It’s an integration that Box have built using NetSuite’s SuiteCloud development platform, and it allows NetSuite customers to access, manage, share, and collaborate on all their content online, [...]
Freemium – A Word of Caution
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 little [...]
Apptio Helps Enterprises Run IT As A Business
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 using various templates, to fine tune how they run their IT. Their SaaS based business intelligence [...]
Speed, Search and Aptimize
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 [...]
VCs Coming Thick and Fast – Box the Latest to Benefit
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 recessionary quiet phase [...]
Dilbert on Web Design – and more
Hm… I think I know which website they may be talking about: No kidding… yes, I know it’s April Fools Day, but this is real – an accounting SaaS provider , no less. I once speculated on a brave new business model: Ugly Service taking commissions from the sunglasses industry… but this is beyond imagination. [...]
Changing the Game, Inside and Outside of the Box (and The Final Frontier)
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 new mobile app. Yes, box.net were demoing their new iPad application [...]
Xactly – and Managing a Company Through Growth
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 pain points they’ve encountered [...]
Nice Marketing Blackbox Republic – But Maybe I Was Right to be Skeptical
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 an issue” – yeah whatever… It’s the sort of [...]
Crowdsourcing for the Stars
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 languages, and hundreds of customers had already [...]
Xero Personal – Is That It?
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 switch on its long awaited personal edition [...]
Without Standards, the World Falls Down
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 business alone [...]
The “Leo the Late Bloomer” of Business Models
My kids love the book “Leo the Late Bloomer”. As the story goes, Leo was a tiger cub who hadn’t quite hit his stride yet. Leo couldn’t do anything right. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t write. He was a sloppy eater… Leo’s father, playing the classic fatherly role, was very concerned. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong with [...]
CloudCamp Sydney – The Same Old Memes
Two weeks ago the Australasian CloudCamp tour hit Sydney for an event at the National Innovation Centre of the Australian Technology Park. A crowd of around 90 people turned up for some lively discussions – as always there were some common themes – the legal and jurisdictional aspects of Cloud Computing and the public/private cloud [...]
