Forrester Confuses “Best” with “Most Accessible”
I’ve got a love/hate relationship with the traditional analyst firms. Their people are incredibly smart and very thorough, but sometimes in their search for massive levels of details, they miss the very point of technology. A good case in point is the recently released Forrester Enterprise Cloud Database Wave report.
Unfortunately, We (Probably) Have No Idea If Your SaaS Idea is Any Good
Here’s the thing in SaaS: I appreciate you asking me. But, honestly, generally speaking — I probably have no idea if your pre-launch SaaS idea is any good. So no need even to show me any deck, any static demo, any mock-ups of your product-to-be. Because I have no idea if it’s truly a great [...]
Why You and Your VCs Can’t Really Be Friends
There’s a pattern I’ve observed in a number of my friends who are SaaS CEOs. Some fear their board and VCs. The VCs say “Jump”, they say “How High?” That’s for a different post. That doesn’t work out well for anyone. {This tends to happen when you have an insecure CEO, and VCs who control [...]
Harvard’s Cyberposium
Harvard hosted an event called a Cyberposium where hundreds of business school students gather to hear from tech company founders and visionaries. I did not attend the event, but read a post at GigaOm by Barb Darrow where she identifies five surprising themes. I want to add my two cents to her five points. Founders [...]
Ping Identity – Managing and Monitoring Through Cloud Outages
For anyone who has been living under a rock for a few weeks, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had an outage a week or so back which was the latest in a relatively long list of outages that has plagued their US-East region. Commentary has generally been voiced in two areas – the naysayers have come [...]
If You Go Small, You’ll Never Have a Legacy
Small can be beautiful in start-ups. Take no venture capital, build an eight-figure business, put the profits all in your backpocket. You can end up having a villa in Italy full of Pagondis, like the Basecamp guys. Boom. But. The
Why Silicon Valley and Hollywood Don’t Get Each Other and Who Will Win the Future
For the past three years I have been pounding the table as loud as I can about the future opportunities in digital video. The concise guide is here. My narrative has stayed pretty simple: People in the US watch 5.3 hours of TV per day People read for less than 30 minutes You will not [...]
Workday Launches Version 18 – Quick Analysis
At the Workday Rising event being held in Las Vegas this week, Workday announced the latest version of its product, on top of which they held an analyst/influcner day that I was following remotely. I’ve got a few thoughts about the analyst day but first a recap of the news.
Newvem Introduces Native iOS App For AWS Cost Visibility
Newvem (disclosure: Ofir who works at Newvem is a fellow CloudAve blogger but this is my independent opinion), San Francisco based company offering visibility into an organization’s AWS deployment, Called Cloud Smart Meters, it helps CIOs and IT managers to gain detailed visibility into their AWS costs, risks and assets using their iPads or iPhones. As [...]
TwinStrata CloudArray Now Supports NAS for Heterogeneous Storage Management
I’ve written previously about TwinStrata – a company whose CloudArray storage gateway is designed to enable organizations to deploy cloud SANs which combine public and private cloud storage providers along with their existing storage infrastructure. It’s a logical play – while pure cloud may be the holy grail and the
What Really Happened at Apple Around the Maps Scandal
One of our readers sent us secretly recorded snippets of the full inside story of the Maps scandal at Apple. While we cannot disclose the identity of this tipster, we can confirm the story is 100% true and validated, at
Why Startup Entrepreneurs Need to Communicate More Like George Bush Than Al Gore
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. It is election season. So it’s tempting to think this is going to be a partisan post – it is not. I use George Bush vs. Al Gore as allegory and I’ve been using it with entrepreneurs for years to sink in a simple point about how to communicate [...]
Nonsense “Cloud” Marketing, Kill The Cloud Already, Please!
PSA: “Warning: Cloud Washing is in FULL EFFECT! Be cautious or you could be bitten by this nasty virus, a rant on marketing nonsense.” Yesterday I was buying a router. The router I ended up getting has a USB port for attaching a drive as a NAS for media. Not for file sharing, but simply for [...]
Why “The Culture of Failure” is Imperative to Startup Communities
I recently wrote about the 12 tips to building successful startup communities. After a recent discussion I had with Steve Blank it made me remember that I had left off one of the most critical factors – a culture of failure. I remember this lesson well. I lived in London from 1997-2005 and for 6 [...]
Self Service And Cloud
Recently a journalist contacted me to talk about a company she was covering. Since I never interacted with the vendor, I told her that I can talk about general trends in the market segment rather than anything specific about the vendor. I then checked the vendor’s website which claims to be a cloud services company. [...]
