Technology
I spent much of yesterday mourning, remembering and celebrating the passing of a true renaissance man from our lives back into the Universe. On September 1, 2009, Jeffrey Walker – father, husband, son, musician, artist, creator, company builder, martini-drinker, guitar player, blogger, and all around crazy interesting soul – left us all behind for the [...]
I agree with Thorsten von Eicken’s comments over here on the RightScale blog that Amazon’s new Virtual Private Clouds are a BIG DEAL. (Jeff Barr’s announcement blog post is here.) Now any enterprise can create a secure tunnel into virtually unlimited instances sitting over at Amazon. No more need to design, buy, rack, configure, and [...]
Daya Baran has written two excellent posts over at WebGuild on the people, ideas, and capital that are fleeing Silicon Valley as the geographic center becomes less relevant. He quotes Jim Clark (of SGI, Netscape, and Healthon fame) who exited 10 years ago to Florida. Here are the posts: Part 1 Part 2 I have [...]
To quote Denis whats-his-name from Saturday Night Live, “I don’t want to go off on a rant here but….” <rant> The iPhone rocks. The iPhone 3GS rocks even more. AT&F******T (AT&FT) is absolutely awful but people put up with them in order to use the iPhone. Google, while not always perfectly un-evil, does their part [...]
Click and watch. It’s brilliant.
I work on a lot of distributed teams and we use or have used almost everything: Webex (solid but expensive), Adobe Connect (erratic but powerful), Gatherpace (ugly but very cross-platform and very inexpensive), Yugma (I like the team and really tried multiple times but it just never worked properly and the installers always drove me [...]
I’m a huge fan of Tuftian illustrations of complex ideas. Here is a brilliant web technology timeline map from wikipedia.
To all the crazy inventors out there, can you please invent this for me? I spend my days working on a computer, looking at hundreds of windows, using 20-30 different applications, chatting across way too many channels. Frankly, it’s really not healthy for us to sit so long, work on laptops, and stare at little [...]
I disagree deeply with Garett Rogers over at ZDNet who wrote: Google’s Enterprise strategy so far hasn’t produced much traction — and I’m pretty sure this new plugin isn’t a silver bullet either. If businesses find out about it, this new plugin may be enough to get some companies to switch from Exchange to Google [...]
I made a couple of posts the other day (post 1, post 2) about my (our collective) nightmare with respect to calendar and contact and social network management. Boris Mann responded with: Google Wave, under all the magic, is actually based around XMPP. I’ve been predicting the second coming of XMPP as a protocol to [...]
Business owners know that Google apps are pretty amazing. Valeo, is one of the one million businesses that have taken the plunge – they just bought 30,000 seats of Google Apps. But not all of the “personal” google applications (like Groups, News, Reader, Photos, Shopping, Maps, Books) have been ported over into the Google Apps. [...]
Further to my post the other day on the state of the online backup and storage market, I needed to find a shared file-server solution for a small team so I thought I’d take a peek at some of the current top contenders in the market. I decided to check out and register for Egnyte, [...]
Okay, my Plaxo Pulse “simplify my life” quest spun out of control into exactly what I was hoping to avoid – a full-on examination of my various communication networks and channels. Too late. My question is this. For all of us uber connected networking, writing, blogging, conference-going wonks, is your system as horrendous? What great [...]
Okay, so I was finally fed up with my contacts list (or social graph as the cool kids call it) looking like this and being completely unsynced and unmanageable. Once I got through the slightly hard to use website to actually pay Plaxo for a premium account (there is a 15 day trial offer BTW), [...]
According to IDC, online storage is growing at a 33% CAGR to become a $715M market by 2012. One of my favourite quotes from Don Valentine of Sequoia is “Great markets make great companies .” Judging by the sheer volume of companies in the online storage space, it seems that a lot of entrepreneurs think [...]
Have you seen this new 100mpg Hummer H3? Holy crap. It accelerates 0-60 faster than its gas counterpart and gets 4-5x the mileage. Rasertech and FEV, an established auto design and manufacturing company has built a hybrid vehicle platform that can be used in most larger SUV type vehicles up to and including their test [...]
Well, Google Apps continues to make headway into the enterprise. Yesterday it was announced that Valeo has deployed 30,000 seats of Google Apps. That’s an impressive sale. The deal was coordinated by Cap Gemini. I’m guessing that it was done by their recently formed cloud computing team that was assembled back in Fall 2008. There [...]
Apologies but this post was originally created with the Google Reader “Recommended Reading” widget and it is severely screwy. I can’t get it to lock down data in time so it keeps reflowing new articles into it that are unrelated to cloud computing. May I suggest instead that you click here to read all of [...]
Okay, since I’m on the techno lust track today, here is the new Tesla S coupe that has been announced. Hmmm, toss up between this and the Range Rover. Is it just me or is there a significant overlap between “green” and “good design”?
Check out the concept Range Rover that is aiming for 60mpg courtesy of this article over at Fast Company by Ariel Schwartz. Wow. This thing can get 60mpg??? I’ll believe it when I see it. But I have to say that it triggers some deep techno-lust for this geek.
I have been working on a cloud computing ecosystem map with my colleagues over at Dealmaker Media and MR Rangaswami kindly agreed to host our map on Sandhill.com. You can read the entire post here. Thanks to MR and his team (Maryann and Stuart) for their help and for all of the people who have [...]
(This was originally posted at http://www.undertheradar.com and I’m cross-posting it here as well.) Frank Gillett and his team over at Forrester have released “The State Of Emerging Enterprise/SMB Hardware Trends: 2008 To 2009″ reports. You can find them here (Enterprise / SMB). The summary is below with my thoughts added at the bottom: x86 server [...]
Under the Radar Round 2 Calls! As many of you know, I am extremely fortunate to be assisting the Dealmaker Media team as co-chair of the upcoming Under the Radar event on April 24, 2009 in San Francisco. This is round 2 of our call for companies in the cloud computing, virtualization, software as a [...]
Knowing Apple and the crazy speculation about their recent alleged touch-screen purchases, I hope that they are finally building an iTablet. I have had some interesting epiphanies lately. My iPhone is actually a much more useful mini-tablet than it is a phone. Honestly, the phone part is not that great. Maybe it was just AT&T [...]
Have you ever googled something and thought “If only I could just ask the computer this question instead of typing in keywords, sifting through pages and pages of crap and finally find THE ANSWER” buried in one of the web pages?” There has got to be a better way. Every science fiction computer has a [...]
(This was originally posted on http://www.undertheradar.com and is being cross-posted here.) “Are companies getting funded?” The answer still appears to be yes. As long as the market opportunity is solid, the company has an “A” team (or is close to achieving that), and they’re solving real pains for known, addressable customers, the funding still seems [...]
(This post is being cross-posted here but the original post is at http://www.undertheradar.com/blog) This April 24, 2009, I’m fortunate to be working with Dealmaker Media who will be hosting the 13th Under the Radar conference. In one day we will present a full roster of innovative startups, tech thought leaders, and REAL enterprise & big [...]
Jason Lemkin and the team over at EchoSign are facing a bit more competition from version 2 of InstaSign by E-Lock Technologies. Jason was one of the speakers at the recent Dealmaker Media Strategy Series events that I blogged here. It will be interesting to see if there is really room in the market for [...]
Amazon had their earnings call for their Q4 2008. Buried in those numbers are the numbers for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Eric Engleman did some very brief analysis showing that the “Other Revenue” category (which includes AWS and other…others.) did $542M in 2008, up 41.5% from 2007. If we guess that AWS makes up 25% [...]
