Next Iteration Of PaaS: Will Amazon Join That Race?
I have been critical of “me too” approaches to PaaS by current breed of PaaS providers and have been calling for some differentiation which will take innovation to the next level. Some people have been asking me how the next generation of PaaS will look like. I have framed a simple model to explain where [...]
Microsoft, the USA PATRIOT Act, and European cloud computing
Microsoft announced last month that its Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, Office 365, will better comply with European guidelines to ensure that customer data is adequately protected. This move is certainly welcome, but the long-armed spectre of the USA PATRIOT Act continues to hang over Microsoft and other US companies, regardless of customers’ nationality [...]
Cloud Computing Came to a Head in 2011
Happy New Year! I hope you all had a fantastic holiday. This is a review post that I think you will find particularly compelling. Rather than predicting the future I thought I would take a look back at five long years of ‘cloud computing’. As many of you long time readers know, I’ve been ‘in [...]
Boundary Latest to pick up Cloud Monitoring Funding
Whenever technology platforms change, there is a scramble to provide the underlying services upon which the new paradigm sits. The move to the cloud is no different and cloud monitoring is one area where there is a significant amount of activity in terms of startups being founded and funded. Today it’s the turn of Boundary, [...]
AMZN ‘Other’ Revenue in 2011+
I had meant to put more content together around these numbers, but due to time constraints I won’t be able to. Regardless, the picture speaks for itself. Here’s my AMZN ‘Other’ revenue numbers with the blue bar representing my estimates of AWS revenue with the green bar representing the rest of AMZN’s ‘Other’ line. The [...]
Law Firm going after individual sellers on Amazon for Patent Violation
I don’t know enough about this right now to go and make the statement of if this is a valid legal issue, or if this is simply “patent trolling”, but apparently a law firm representing Kelora Systems is now going … Continue reading →
Innovation Culture Eats R&D for Breakfast
Research and development is a mainstay of the innovation strategy for companies. And with good reason. R&D can invent new products and technologies that redefine markets. Think electricity, telephones, airplanes, semiconductors, the Internet. R&D can pave the way for whole new industries. Exciting, for sure! But there’s a problem. Too many companies treat R&D as [...]
A Tale of two customer bases: Amazon and Ebay
My company is four years old this week, and while we do have our own web site where we sell from, we need to be on Amazon and Ebay as well to make sure we get the largest audience possible for our products. Going through the data over the last year, and over the last [...]
Poor Retail
SaaS, or Shopping as a Service is killing retail. If there was one investment or model that I would have considered safe forever – say 20 years ago, it would be retail. If I had, I was sure wrong. The Internet and sales tax laws are conspiring to make retail a thing of the past. [...]
Amazon’s Kindle Fire diverges the Tablet market
In his book The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called divergence the driving force that creates a new species. Last week Amazon enhanced their Kindle range of e-readers, but also applied some divergence to the tablet market by extending in to a new sub-category of mobile tablet devices with the Kindle Fire. I think it’s [...]
AWS meets Kindle Fire
On Sept 28th, Amazon announced the new Kindle Fire tablet. This post digs into the two key cloud integratio ns that Amazon brings with Fire. Amazon Silk, The Cloud Accelerated Browser The browser deploys a split-architecture where all of the browser subsystems are present on the Kindle Fire as well as on the Amazon’s cloud [...]
Beating Apples system Amazon introduces Cloud Reader
Is this one of the first chinks in Apples armor for eBooks? I have tried repeatedly to use the eBook development kit for Apple, and honestly from a user friendly and programmatic viewpoint it is probably the worst chunk of software pushed by Apple. If the eBook fits all specifications and everyone from Amazon to [...]
Understanding Changes in the Software & Venture Capital Industries
In this three-part series I will explore the ways that the Venture Capital industry has changed over the past 5 years that I would argue are a direct result of changes in the software industry, not the other way around. Specifically, Amazon has changed our entire industry in profound ways often not attributed strongly enough [...]
Amazon Quietly Announces AWS CloudFormer
Amazon made a quiet announcement on Wednesday in their forums about a release of a new prototype tool called AWS CloudFormer. This is a deviation from the usual practice where they announce newer features to their cloud offerings, however tiny the feature is, through a midnight blog post. The new tool allows users to create [...]
SAP On Amazon Web Services
Sapphire Now conference is going on in Orlando right now and it is time to hear about another player from the traditional era making their software available on AWS (previous CloudAve coverage). According to Arik Hesseldahl, Amazon today announced that they are working with SAP (previous CloudAve coverage) to run their applications on Amazon cloud. [...]
