The Truth About Lock In
Last week I was invited to speak at a Microsoft conference in Redmond about building cloud applications for portability across clouds and infrastructure. In my presentation, I approached the issue of application portability from the enterprise perspective. This means that developers generally are not choosing servers, clouds or other infrastructure components. Developers focus on building [...]
Understanding Amazon Web Services Cloud Watch
Sometimes making an alarm is the best thing you can do for yourself when working with Amazon Web Services. Sometimes things can go wrong with your cloud computing installation, and it would be a great idea to know what is happening with your cloud systems. We simply cannot have the console open 24X7 to monitor [...]
Does it matter if you are popular on LinkedIn?
I am sure that some of us have gotten these really cool e-mails from Linkedin lately helping us put some kind of context around our relative popularity on the internet, or at least on the LinkedIn system. The problem is that being popular on LinkedIn does not matter to me at all. Sure the infographic [...]
Dropbox Listens to the Criticism–Starts to Mature Corporate Product
I’ve been a harsh critic of Dropbox in the past – mostly because I feel they lack maturity – both as a company and as a product – and this lack of maturity is a real risk for enterprise customers using their product. It seems Dropbox has been listening to the criticism that myself and [...]
Social Sales | 10 Social Sales Lead–ership Tips
Sales professionals are some of the earliest adopters and most annoying users of social networking. The problem is that most sales reps treat LinkedIn like a prospecting database for cold calling. To succeed at social sales you must have something to offer beyond your product. You must be someone your prospects want to know.
What a Great VP Sales Actually Does. Where The Magic Is. And When to Hire One.
In SaaS, #1 most common mishire, with a bullet, is the VP/head of sales. In fact, there a VC saying that I used to really hate. It goes something like “You’ve Got to Get Past the Carcass of Your First VP of Sales” or “It’s The Second VP of Sales When You Really Start Selling” [...]
Creating a CloudFront Distribution in Amazon Web Services
Creating a CloudFront distribution is fairly straight forward. You just need to know if you want to do streaming data or download data, and have your items in an S3 bucket already. CloudFront is a very cool way of setting up a cheap Content Distribution Network using Amazon Web services. This video goes through the [...]
Where is SIRI for the Enterprise?
If you have one of the newer versions of the iphone then you are more than likely familiar with Siri; the “personal assistant” on your phone that you can talk to get help with anything from directions to recipes. Unfortunately the concept is at this point, much more valuable than Siri itself. Now while Siri [...]
ComodIT–IT Automation as a Service
I’m always interested to speak with companies trying to build innovative solutions outside of the US. Despite living away from the epicenter of technology myself, all to often I find myself displaying a Valley-centric perspective on companies and the solutions they bring to market. It’s good for all of us
Using Elastic Transcoder in Amazon Web Services
If you ever wanted a painless way of transcoding video to some 120 different devices, then the new Elastic Transcoder service from Amazon Web Services is the service you are looking for. This is probably the easiest service to use of all the Amazon Web Services out there. All you have to do is record [...]
Configuring an Amazon Web Services Security Group
Configuring an Amazon Web Services Security Group Security Groups are just like firewalls, you can set what you want to allow into your system or not on both public and private interfaces. Building out an Amazon Security Group is much like building out a firewall for your systems. You can have as many security groups [...]
Beware of Ballers on a Budget
The other day I was at a Mercedes dealership. Unfortunately my wife was hit head on in December by a woman who lost control of her car. It was time to get a new car and my wife’s requirements were: The safest thing on the road As many air bags as possible I researched the [...]
Dell Boomi Announces New Milestones and Partnerships
Only days after the announcement that Dell was going to return to private ownership, Dell subsidiary Boomi has come out with some news about its integration platform This is really timely given the near universal acknowledgement that software lies at the core of Dell’s future (more on this in a later post) and that it [...]
Post-Traction, You Need to Spend 20% of Your Time Recruiting
Love him or hate him, Nick Saban is the most successful college football coach of the current generation. Winner of 3 out of 4 of the last national championships. And how often is he recruiting? Every. Single. Day. In fact, every single day he and his team go into their Recruiting War Room, and analyze [...]
Announcing a Deal I’ve Wanted to Talk About for a Year
Let me not bury the lede. I’m super excited to announce that GRP Partners led the investment in Ethan Anderson’s new company MyTime (link has LA-based merchants but will give you a good feel for the product). I am taking the lead from GRP and we also invested alongside a number of friends including Dave McClure, [...]
