The Only Kind of Product That Can Pull Off Freemium
The Wall Street Journal finally picks up on the freemium trend (it’s only been 2-3 years, right?) The problem is, anyone reading the article is probably under the impression that what succeeds and what doesn’t i…
Amazon Cloud and the Enterprise – Is it a love story? (Free Infographic Included)
As befitting any great online vendor, Amazon cloud product guys listen carefully to their market targets and ensure fast implementation and delivery to satisfy their needs. It is clear that Amazon cloud is eager to conquer the enterprise market, as I already mentioned in my past post, “Amazon AWS is the Cloud (for now anyway)“. [...]
Want to Know How to Better Partner With, Raise Money From or Be Acquired by a Big Media Company?
This is one of the best episodes of This Week in VC for a long time. I had the chance to speak with Andrew Siegel who runs corp dev & strategy for Condé Nast (aka Advance Publications). In case you don’t know, they are one of the biggest media companies in the world. They are [...]
Appcara Delivers Cloud Infra and App Management for AWS Based Clouds
Appcara is an unfortunately named (considering the fact that Cloud Foundry creator, and Clouderati pin up boy Derek Collison’s new gig is called Apcera) company in the business of providing automation for cloud deployments. They use a modeling based approach towards designing and deploying cloud infrastructure. Appcara today announced an
Facebook, Part Deux
Nearly two years ago, I asked the question, “Did Peter Thiel Make The Single Best Investment In History?” Today, now that Thiel has sold most of his remaining stake in Facebook, it’s a good time to re-examine the math surrounding his investment. Two years ago, I wrote: In 2005, Peter Thiel paid $500,000 for a [...]
Twitter is what you make it
Following up on a challenging post by Luis Suarez, let me jot down my thoughts on what Twitter is, has become, and will be. The word “dead” is cunningly avoided after all these years that certain things have come to be claimed dead, dying, or extinguishing – and rightfully so. If anything, any new thing [...]
Video: A Peek Into Intel IT
Intel, the portland based microprocessor vendor, is also a large enterprise IT user. They have large number of employees spread all over the world and they have various divisions including manufacturing. We thought it will be a good idea to talk to them and find out how they are leveraging cloud computing. As a part [...]
Engine Yard’s Evolution: Support For Node.js
Engine Yard (previous CloudAve coverage), one of the earliest PaaS players to enter the market, today announced the availability of Node.js support on their platform. This is the next step in the evolution of a company that started as a pure play Ruby on Rails PaaS player on AWS. The last few announcements clearly indicate that [...]
Keeping Safe In The Cloud
The last few weeks have seen a seeming storm of examples of security breaches of cloud services. As is often the case when people have vested interests in a particular technology, many naysayers have pronounced that these security breaches spell the end of the cloud. Heck, even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak went on record saying: [...]
Research: Spotlight on social media risk management
A new report by Altimeter Group sheds light on the importance of risk management as applied to social media.
The Problem with Many Task Management Solutions like Asana
There are many task management solutions on the market today such as Asana, Producteev, HiTast, and dozes of others. My team happens to use Asana which is why I mentioned them in the title of this post (and is hence the one I am most familiar with). The goal of all of these solutions is [...]
When did Amazon abandon Main Street for ‘the Skyscrapers of Cloud Hosting’ ?
In the competitive world of cloud-based computing infrastructure, Amazon remains top dog. It’s highly visible, its footprint is almost global, it incrementally adds features or cuts prices to keep competitors on their toes, and it generally manages to meet most people’s needs, most of the time. It may not always offer the lowest prices, or [...]
HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Metro App Building on Windows 8 Part 1
I’m a fan of JavaScript and I’m warming to some of the Metro interfaces on Windows 8. I’ve always found the Windows 7 Phone UI, which is the first iteration of the Metro UI, to be a very slick phone interface. So with this blog entry I’m going to lay out setting up a default [...]
Taking on the Issues of the Day with Jonathan Strauss
It’s been nearly a year since I did This Week in VC on a regular basis. I’ve wanted to come back but had a busy year on the road meeting with investors and making a few investments of my own. But I’m back. I agreed with Jason Calacanis that I would re-launch the show if [...]
Alcatel Lucent’s Big API Bet
Last week Alcatel Lucent made an announcement which, at first blush, seems kind of boring. They’ve released a methodology for creating APIs, they’ve made the methodology available through Creative Commons as a front end for a new consulting practice that helps enterprises work through the processes involved in moving to
