Zendesk Scores New Funding Round and Updated Interface
I’ve been writing about helpdesk provider Zendesk now for going on five years. Their original employee, and now APAC head, Michael Hansen, likes to tell the story about their first blog coverage (a piece I wrote for ReadWriteWeb) corresponding with the beginning of their hockey-stick growth. I don’t know about that, but I do know […]
Hubris and the Data Scientist
ReadWriteWeb‘s Joe Brockmeier captures a recurring issue from last week’s O’Reilly Strata conference, asking “Can Big Data replace domain expertise?” According to Brockmeier, the audience (of data scientists) apparently narrowly agreed that their arsenal of tools and algorithms trumped the knowledge and experience of the meteorologists, financiers, and retailers to whose domains data scientists are increasingly […]
Customer Focus: the Constellation Supernova Awards
Constellation Research, founded by fellow Enterprise Irregular and star analyst Ray Wang has just announced the ambitious Supernova Awards program, focusing on – what a twist! – customer champions of innovation, rather than vendors. Krish and I both feel honored to have been invited as Judges for the Cloud Computing category. Below is the official […]
Shocking ? Yet another way to ruin privacy via Twitter
With ReadWriteWeb Marshall Kirkpatrick on a roll today about Mark Zukerburg and the end of the age of privacy, with follow up from Steven Hodson (fixed) it is time to look not just at Facebook, but at other tools that are out there than can also alter your personal privacy landscape. While I think that […]
A TechCrunch Mention Isn't a Go-To-Market Strategy (Except When It Is)
First a disclaimer – this post isn’t intended in any way to start a flame war with the mega blogs out there. Hell, in the past I’ve written for ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington is a good buddy of mine (he must be, we’re Facebook friends!) Rather it’s a plea for startups to really […]
CancelAds: New Startup Service to Help People Monetize Blogs
Of all the ways that people try to monetize blogs, and the many ways that users have of short circuiting those monetization efforts, a good friend of mine Svetlana Gladikova of Profy fame has introduced me to a new program called CancelAds. This might just be the middle ground between casual users who might click […]
Blackbox Republic – A Marketing Coup but Baseless Perhaps?
I didn’t really want to write this post, but felt an obligation to play devil’s advocate. (Clarification – playing devil’s advocate isn’t necessarily taking the dissenting view merely for dissension’s sake – I’m troubled that no-one else is seeing the other side of this release and I feel obliged to correct that….) Sam Lawrence, ex-marketing honcho at Jive software and […]
SaaS and Religion: the Tenancy Debates. Do Customers Care?
(Warning: this is a long post. Only read it when sitting in a comfortable chair. Or a pool lounge, holding your CrunchPad.) Two recent posts by Enterprise Social Software vendors Jive and Atlassian set up a huge debate amongst my fellow Enterprise Irregulars. Here’s the money-quote from Jive: It’s not so long ago that it […]
The Irony of Google Ads
I often wrote about misplaced “contextual” ads that created undesirable situations, but this is something else. The Google Ad I saw today is ironic on so many levels, I don’t even know where to begin. Dan Lyons a.ka. Fake Steve Jobs wrote about how he quits blogging, as there is no money in it: While […]
Is Enterprise RSS Dead or Not? Gotta Love TechMeme
Gotta love TechMeme – for bringing out great debates. Here’s how two reputable sources came to completely different conclusions regarding the same event, in this case NewsGator’s funding. R.I.P. Enterprise RSS –says ReadWriteWeb: The Market Doesn’t Look Good Newsgator, one of those three companies, announced today that it has closed another round of funding, unbelievably […]
Zoho: Best LittleCo of 2008 that Could … and Will
Most CloudAve readers probably know that Zoho is our exclusive sponsor. When we launched in September, the speculation that this will turn us into nothing but a PR outlet for Zoho was inevitable. I think in these few months we have proven otherwise, by being very conservative with Zoho coverage (if anything, we have a […]
It's About Respect – Keeping Embargoes
I’ll not join in the melee that surrounds Michael Arrington apart from saying that MA has built himself a pretty large cult of personality around TechCrunch. This sort of attention is always enjoyable when it’s going well, but can readily crumble when things turn sour (the Bernard Madoff saga – while in a different vein, […]
