
5 Weeks in Shanghai Behind The Great Firewall. My (Nonprofound) Learnings.
Unless you follow SaaStr on Quora, things may have looked a little quiet here for the last 5 weeks. Well, that’s because hosted WordPress (what Saastr.com is powered by), along with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a good chunk of Google, are all blocked in China by The Great Firewall. Quora for now is unblocked. You […]

Social Media is Really Tough in China. At Least There is Quora.
SaaStr is in Shanghai for the month of July. While I have internet access and an iPad … it’s tough to stay connected with the domestic SaaStr audience. Why? Well, first almost everything is blocked: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress (as an app and URL — individual sites with custom URLs sometimes barely work, sometimes not at […]

Growing Internationally
One of the greatest opportunities any established business faces is growth internationally. Take a company like Apple. Recently, much has been made about how they have saturated the domestic marketplace wi their iPhones and iPads. The thinking is a concern over how earth’s largest company can grow much more. This type of thinking lead to […]

Will Obama’s Cyber Warfare Policy Backfire?
Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council brings up an interesting thought about how diplomacy is shaping how we view cyber warfare. In an article over on usnews.com Mr. Healey brings up some interesting points about how we are approaching cyber warfare using a two-pronged approach. One approach is to […]

A cyberwar barely in the making
We are asking China to stop poking at our networks; maybe we should take a look at what everyone else is doing along the way. An international framework is probably in order at this point. Many news systems are broadcasting that America is asking/telling China to stop hacking American Companies. While in testimony Army Gen. […]

Public Honeynet Data – Who are the top 20 hacking countries?
Public Honeynet Data – Who are the top 20 hacking countries? I could watch this site all day. In case you were wondering really wondering who the top hacker countries are, the German Alliance for Cyber Security has a dashboard display as to what is happening on 97 honeypots around the internet. It makes for […]

Mandiant and APT1 cyber warfare espionage
Hey wait, if we have screen video of hackers doing their work, doesn’t that mean we penetrated the hackers methods, processes, and other information resources? Sometimes I don’t think we are thinking clearly enough, as the fear mongering escalates for cyber warfare, and how we are all going to go through an electronic pearl harbour, […]

2B or Not 2B
I have worked the majority of my career from various executive suites. As a part of senior management I see many corporate leaders. I am unusual in that much of my early career was not climbing the corporate ladder through successive management ranks. I was an engineer who was happy doing engineering until some unusual […]

Apple margin per device – expressed in Chinese
[Image by Sven Teschke] An article in the New York Times published 2 days ago suddenly gained a lot of traction and got discussed, reposted and reblogged today: Apple making money off of the United States, while directly employing “only” twice as many employees in the US than overseas – but indirectly more than ten […]

If I wanted to have the great firewall of America
Image via Wikipedia This is one of the most difficult blog entries to write, one it is hard to tell the truth, and in some ways I think the sponsors and supporters of SOPA are trying to pull a fast one. I am reminded of the scene is the Wizard of OZ where Dorothy is […]

Eucalyptus Targets Asia
Image via CrunchBase Eucalyptus Systems (see previous CloudAve coverage), the academic project turned commercial vendors that helps enterprises build private clouds, is now focussing on the Asian markets. In 2010, Eucalyptus focussed on releasing their new version and strengthening their partnerships with companies like Redhat, rPath and newScale. They are turning their attention in 2011 […]

Virtual Nonsense All the Way Down the Drain. A Twisted (?) View of US vs China
I don’t often recycle older posts in full – but sometimes I get all worked up, want to “blog it out of my system” only to discover I’ve already said it all. That’s how I feel about the explosion of virtual goods. So there it is, vintage July 2009, still valid, except this time I’d […]

Handful Of Monopoly Infrastructure Players – Not So Fast
This is the second post on the topic I have been emphasizing on many different forums. My earlier post, Handful Of Monopoly Infrastructure Players – A Shortsighted Idea, laid out philosophical and economic reasonings against the idea of the emergence of handful of infrastructure providers. This idea is a pet theme for many cloud pundits. […]

Google's Shot at the Waterline with China
Yesterday Google dropped the biggest corporate bombshell in recent memory with the announcement that they are reviewing their operations in China following a very sophisticated cyber attack against Google and some 20 other companies (including Rack Space) that targeted intellectual property and the Chinese dissident community. This has implications that go far beyond the explosion […]

Massive Bittorrent Site Closures in China
The Chinese government has been busily shutting down Bittorrent sharing sites over the last 10 days causing a rush to download across China according to Sina. The rush to download has degraded Bittorrent services with the remaining servers that are still up and running. As the largest BT download website in China with 5 million […]