Author Archive for Ben Kepes

Perspective Please People. They’re Only Dogs

Published by Ben Kepes on January 28, 2010 in Business. 3 Comments

This one will annoy the bleeding hearts out there no end.

So today New Zealand was aghast at the carnage wrought in a small rural town. Earthquake? No, Tsunami? No, Hurricane? No. In fact it was.. drum roll, an animal killing.

It seems some eccentric fellow had 30 or so unregistered dogs on his property, some of which got out and mauled a neighbor’s dog to death. In a fit of revenge, said neighbor grabbed his gun, entered the neighbor’s property and proceeded to kill all the dogs.

Now clearly the doggie killer is a little loose – sure the police should investigate the state of his mind and whether in fact he had a firearms license. But for the entire country to get caught up in a mass hysteria is just madness. The headlines screamed:

‘Haunting scene of death and destruction’ – SPCA describes dog massacre

I’ve visited concentration camps, I’ve seen images from Haiti post earthquake, from the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge and from other massacres. Only two weeks after well over 100,000 human beings lost their lives in the Haiti quake, we jump up and down aghast at the misery of 30 or so dogs.

I know clinical psychologists tell us that cruelty to animals is a stepping stone to pathological behavior against other people, I know guns are dangerous things and in a country blessed with limited incidents involving firearms we should be extra vigilant about these things – but what gets me is that the entire nation is only focused on these dogs, despite what is happening every day of the week all around the world.

The SPCA proclaimed that:

The scene which confronted our two inspectors will leave a lasting impression on them… When I arrived at the property, I was confronted with a scene not unlike a massacre… I’ve never seen anything as horrible as this in my life, and I cannot begin to imagine the terror these animals were faced with

Do these people watch the news? Read newspapers? Did they ever study history in school? If the killing of 30 dogs is the most horrible thing you’ve ever seen in your life, then you’re a lucky person indeed.

Balance please people.

box.net – Doing It All In the Box

Published by Ben Kepes on January 22, 2010 in Product reviews and enterprise. 0 Comments

<disclaimer> – I thought twice about the title above, anyone who infers anything from it needs to spend significantly more time away from a computer </disclaimer>

I spent some time yesterday talking to box.net (coverage here) – partly in order to get an update on how they’re fairing, and also to demo some new technology they’re introducing. First a quick update. Box.net are proud that they’ve now reached the dual milestones of 1 billion files served and 1 million files served per day. They’ve grown the organization 75% and are now a 70 person team. Jen Grant, VP of Marketing at box sees 2010 as their “big year” caused, in part, by three factors affecting enterprises:

  • More organic businesses with more external project connections
  • IT changes carving costs out of spend and driving value
  • The changing face of the workforce

With the review underway, Jen was keen to lift the wrapper on their new product announcement. Box.net is integrating the functionality gained when they acquired content management company Increo solutions in October – the new functionality brings content playing and embedding to box.net. So how does this work, and what’s the use case?

With the new functionality, box.net users will be able to view any file natively within the box.net environment – not only documents but images, presentations, audio, video, PDFs etc. This extends so far as to allow for playing of PowerPoint files and, more importantly, gives IT some visibility over the content use – IT can, for example, track which slides of which presentations have been viewed the highest number of times. It’s a value area that Sliderocket is building it’s offering on, the ability to add value to formerly static documents by making them the launch pad for multiple trackable action calls. I quizzed Jen about this side of things and her response was:

We're really excited about how Cloud Content Management can give the IT department more robust analytics regarding how content is being used… giving IT better visibility regarding how business content is shared both within and beyond the organization. Our customers use Box to share files internally, but also as a core way to collaborate around files externally, whether it's partners, vendors, prospects or customers, so information regarding collaboration "beyond the firewall" is key.

It seemed to me a sensible approach for box.net to provide it’s own analytics functionality to the app. When I suggested this to Jen her reply was that:

…adding our own detailed and granular analytics component to Box isn't a current priority, though we'll keep evaluating and see if there's a need for that kind of functionality. But this is where the value of Box's open platform comes in: we can easily leverage and integrate great solutions from other providers, such as a basic Google Analytics integration… we're always interested in bringing best-of-breed solutions to our customers, and analytics is no exception.

Apart from just content viewing though, users will have the ability to build rich content around files – creating comments and tasks and printing the files – in this way box.net are differentiating themselves from the likes of Google docs which is more about file creation rather than content management and workflow.

The second part of the functionality is embedding – organizations can embed files on extranets to give external visibility to chosen files. It’s bringing what YouTube bought for video to all documents. As Jen pointed out:

embedding lets you share the content in the form you intended. For example, you don't have to worry about whether people have the right applications or the right version of any given piece of software - what you want them to see is how it's delivered. Since we remove the barriers to viewing that content, it just makes it accessible to more people, whether it's on a company intranet, a blog or any other web page.

Overall I’m pretty excited by the new functionality – more the ability to view content items on the fly and online than the embedding. What it’ll mean for box.net’s customer numbers this year remains to seem. See the video below for a demo of the new functionality. 

 


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Intuit and Microsoft Sign Deal to Serve SMBs

Published by Ben Kepes on January 21, 2010 in Design. 0 Comments

Huge breaking news this morning is that Microsoft and Intuit (see disclosure here) have agreed to work together on the Intuit Partner Platform to bring a host of products and services to a greatly expanded customer base. This really is massive news for anyone involved in small or medium business – be it as a business themselves or in anyway selling technology products or services to SMBs.

First a slight recap – Intuit developed the Intuit Partner Platform in the words of Alex Chriss, Business Leader of the IPP to:

Bring end to end, best of breed products to small and medium businesses by providing an open ecosystem where customers have choice of products and developers have a choice of what tools and platforms to build on

The Microsoft tie up is beneficial for the two vendors themselves, existing and future IPP and MS developers and the end customers. Let’s look at the gains to each of those groups:

Intuit and Microsoft

Since the withdrawal of Microsoft Money, commentators were trying to determine what Microsoft’s strategy would be with regard to SMBs – we all know that SMBs constitute a huge and lucrative market. This relationship gives both Intuit and Microsoft access to the channel of the other – there’s hundreds of millions of SMB users of MS products who will now be exposed to the IPP, while Intuit’s customers will now have access to products built by Microsoft‘s developer community.

Microsoft gets a ready built channel to increase the uptake of its Azure cloud computing offering and, at the same time, gets themselves a ready built SMB applications marketplace.

The developers

Existing IPP developers get access to a massive new channel of potential customers, the ability to deploy their applications on Microsoft’s infrastructure and the ability to natively use Microsoft development tools.

Microsoft developers get the ability to utilize the tools the currently do, but market their products on a specific SMB marketplace backed by a channel with millions of customers already.

On a technical level, the diagram below sets out how the various integrations will actually work:

ippthingy

The customers

IPP’s stated aim is to give SMBs access to an end to end range of software tools – with this deal customers just got a whole lot more choice. Intuit is committed to integrating Microsoft’s Business Productivity Office Suite (BPOS) onto the IPP by the end of the year – this will mean IPP customers get the ability to use Exchange, SharePoint and (once they’re introduced) the online office products – all leveraging the core IPP offerings of single sign on, common data, single billing etc.

Summary

The playing field just got really interesting – over on The Small Business Web – a large number of small SaaS vendors are trying to build an ecosystem that includes clear and open APIs and a comprehensive offering of business applications – done correctly the relationship between Intuit and Microsoft could very well provide the same value – but potentially more quickly and more easily for the end customers.

APIs are great – wonderfully valuable things that allow applications to work together. But a common data model of the sort that the IPP is built around, is even better, allowing applications to be built from the start around an underlying and consistent model of data.

I spent a few hours today talking to the founder of a SaaS business app that is still very much in stealth mode - we both discussed our concerns about the high aggregate price that businesses would be forced to pay for an integrated set of separate applications with all the duplication that entails - IPP is one way to drive efficiencies that can in turn deliver the holy grail of reasonably priced point-to-point solutions for SMBs - the space just got even more interesting...

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Department of Conservation and Scams, A Micro-Rant

Published by Ben Kepes on January 20, 2010 in Business and the Environment and New Zealand. 4 Comments

Traditionally I use my summer road trip to find new tourism travesties to rant about – this year of course is no different. Recently we visited Tane Mahuta, the largest known Kauri tree remaining alive in the world. Tane Mahuta is situated in Waipoua forest, an incredible example of old growth native forest that is a source of pride for New Zealand.

We decided to take a short walk to see some other massive Kauri examples so pulled up to the Department of Conservation car park only to be greeted by a semi-toothless local bearing the sign below;

Yes it seems this entrepreneurial chap, with the support of our very own Conservation Department, had decided to set up a protection racket charging unwary tourists $2 to “protect” their vehicles while they partook of a short walk in the forest.

Now I’ve spent a fair amount of time in DOC sites from the Northernmost to the (almost) Southernmost, this is the first time I’ve seen such a racket, more at home in India or Egypt than New Zealand where we pride ourselves of being open and honest – “baksheesh” (for this is surely what this guy was charging) is an unknown concept here.

So I could only come up with two possible conclusions:

  1. Some underpaid minor official in the Department of Conservation is supplementing his meager income by allowing this chap to run his scam. A scenario I find unlikely or,
  2. This guy has somehow managed to evade the usually rigorous check of the Department and has made up these signs in an impressive, but illicit piece of fraud.

So… which is it? Over to you DOC

It’s Multi-Currency Month

Published by Ben Kepes on January 19, 2010 in Design. 0 Comments

I posted awhile ago when Xero rolled out multi-currency so it’s only fair to do a wrap up of the latest multi-currency entries. Both FreshBooks and FreeAgentCentral announced this month the availability of their multi currency functionality.

The FreeAgent offering is really slick, including on the fly calculation of daily unrealized and realized gains and losses on these invoices between the date of the invoice and the date customer payment is received. Like Xero, FreeAgent have opted to use the forex codes from XE.com – as the biggest exchange rate publisher – this makes sense.

 

FreshBooks has done a nice job of multicurrency also, their rates are populated from the Bank of Canada but their approach isn’t dynamic, rather it averages exchange rate data over a period of time. They don’t have an intro video but have written a FAQ page for more details. Interestingly, with FreshBooks if you have invoiced someone in a currency that is different from your default currency, then you can only enable online payments if you are using PayPal.

The FreshBooks approach is to mainly separate reporting by currency. While this makes life easier for them, it does make it harder for a business to get a really clear picture of their position – however at least P&L and tax show aggregate figures.

It seems the FreshBooks announcement came a little out of the blue, if this post is anything to go by.

All in all it’s interesting to see that multi currency is becoming almost a non-negotiable requirement, even for the smaller end of the SMB market – yet another feature that all vendors need to plan for…

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Enterprise 2.0 – Building the New Schoolyard for Bullies?

Published by Ben Kepes on January 19, 2010 in General, Strategy and enterprise. 0 Comments

I have a friend called Jennifer (name and details changed, obviously). At school she was a loner without many friend who, as loners often do, overcome loneliness by bullying smaller kids in the playground. Jennifer managed to gain “friends” by doing this, although they weren't really friends, rather individuals who were scared that they’d become the target unless they joined in with Jennifer’s shenanigans.

Well, luckily for her schoolmates, Jennifer grew up, studies and entered the workforce where she was forced, at least to a certain extent, to forego her bullying behavior in the interests of fairness, due process and the common good.

Until today that is…

You see the advent of social media in its various guises has given Jennifer the opportunity to once again throw her weight around and make life difficult for others. Involved in a part of an organization that makes extensive use of social media type tools, Jennifer has a wide following in her vocational field and uses this following to bully others the way she used to use her heft to do so all those years ago in the schoolyard.

Now my enterprise friends will tell me bullying in the work place has always existed but social media and enterprise 2.0 tools have extended the reach an individual can communicative with – this is an unquestionably great thing when it comes to collaborating on specific projects, but it’s also a dangerous thing when used inappropriately.

I’ve spent long time talking with Enterprise 2.0 practitioners, attending enterprise 2.0 events and hearing about the barriers to adoption. Generally we’re grasping to find either good case study examples of enterprise 2.0 being put to work or fixes for the oft mentioned barriers to adoption – none of however 9at least in public) are prepared to front up and tell the stories of Enterprise 2.0 gone wrong and used for ugly purposes.

And in this we run a real risk – by burying our heads in the sane and not “outing” the dark side of social media, we play into the hands of those who view the blogosphere, Twitter and social media generally as a complete waste of space. If we don’t tell the stories, and develop ways of avoiding the pitfalls these tools enable, they’ll use the same tales to discount E20 outright.

So here’s a plaintive call to those using social media generally and Enterprise 2.0 tools more specifically: Don’t hide the use-cases that feel uncomfortable, rather use them as case studies, develop solutions and show that like a community of old, so too can a virtual community stand up and police its own.

Everyone would be a little happier if we did that…

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T-Shirt Friday #26 – ThoughtFarmer

Published by Ben Kepes on January 16, 2010 in Design. 0 Comments

DSCF5404Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

 If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last year in San Francisco, the chaps from ThoughtFarmer we’re very vocal in their promotion of their new, hot-of-the-press t-shirts.

Always one to take up an offer, and impressed by a presentation given by Bevin Hernandez of Penn State University who sang the praises of the ThoughtFarmer offering, I flicked the guys a message and offered to trial a t-shirt.

Hot

  • Brown is good, way more interesting than black and more practical than white
  • The print is understated and not garish
  • The t-shirt is made by American Apparel – using ethical manufacturing in a first world location (well Los Angeles but almost first world)
  • Natural fabrics are best – this is 100% cotton

Not

  • I was promised that the tee was “slimming” – my wife reports no huge different between my appearance in this shirt and any other shirt

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CloudCamp Haiti – Everyone Doing Their Bit

Published by Ben Kepes on January 15, 2010 in Design. 0 Comments

I’m proud that the Cloud community has got behind the Haiti relief effort. Having some friends who have lost close family members to the earthquake brings home to me the impact of a disaster on the scale of this one – especially in such a poor country as Haiti. CloudCamp is running a virtual event and, in an unprecedented occurrence for the normally free-to-attend events, attendees will be charged a USD25 fee with proceeds going to Haiti disaster relief.

CloudCamp Haiti is a virtual unconference held as a public webinar. CloudCamp-in-the-Cloud builds upon the popular CloudCamp format by providing a free and open place for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing. For this event, we are raising funds to donate to the aid effort in Haiti.

Please help us spread the word, twitter, facebook, IM, tell your neighbours and friends. Attendees can register here.

The event is being held Jan 20th 11:00am - 2:00pm Eastern Standard Time (EST) and if you’re interesting in getting involved as a presenter contact John Willis (john.willis AT zabovo.com). Interested in sponsoring? Contact Dave Nielsen (dave AT platformd.com).

The agenda for the event is below:

  • 11:00am - 11:30am - Sign in and registration (Main Room)
  • 11:30am - 11:45am - Introductions & Overview (Main Room)
  • 11:45am - 12:30pm - Lightning Talks (Main Room)

Lightning Talks - TBD

  • 12:30pm - 1:00pm Unpanel Choosen by attendee’s of CloudCamp Haiti (Main Room)
  • 1:00pm - 2:00pm Break Out Sessions - Round 1

1. Unconference Room #1: main gotomeeting room (TBD)

2. Unconference Room #2: 2nd gotomeeting room (TBD)

  • 2:00pm - 2:30pm CloudCamp Haiti Wrap up (Back in “Main Room”)

Putting on my regional CloudCamp organiser hat for a minute, if you’re unable to attend the virtual event, be sure to check out the schedule of CloudCamps – there’ll be one coming to your town soon!

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CloudConnect Launchpad – Here we come!

Published by Ben Kepes on January 14, 2010 in Design. 0 Comments

Update - my mistake. This from Launch Pad organizer (and she of the awesome teeth) Paige Finkelman:


 it's called Launch Pad (two words), and we’re looking for ‘cloudy’ apps or services launched / announced between 1/1 and 12/31 in 2010. So this could be a look-under-the-kimono future tipoff, a new version, partnership, integration point or (even better) a startup first look.

In the past I’ve tended to be a bit skeptical of launchpads run at the same time as conferences – they tend to seem a little bit like a meat market where we all attendees get to inspect (and criticize) the goods at will and generally without any more than the most cursory of glimpses at the product. Having said that every now and then a launchpad really does turn up a great company (I first came across YouCalc at the Enterprise 2.0 lanuchpad in Boston last year).

This year, as part of the Cloud Connect conference, TechWeb will be running a launchpad for new applications to the Cloud Connect community. All developers, large and small, are invited to enter their applications or services - you do not need to be an exhibitor at the Connect Connect. Companies can just enter by filling out our application form, and then Tweeting their entry to the Cloud Connect Launch Pad Twitter handle.

I’ve been asked to be on the judging panel for the launchpad so this post is a shoutout to those who fit the criteria (see below) to jump in and enter. To be eligible, applications must be announced after January 1, 2010 with a release date before December 31, 2010.

Entries should target the Connect Connect market. Examples can include (but are not limited to) the following types of applications:

  • Cloud Clients (mobile, thin client, thick client)
  • Security-as-a-Service applications
  • Software-as-a-Service applications
  • Software + Services
  • Cloud Platforms
  • Cloud Infrastructure

Entrants have until January 25 to submit their Twitter pitches and quarter finalists will be chosen by February 3 to create three minute video presentations for public voting. The final four will then present at Cloud Connect in March.

Contest Rules are up in full on the site. So jump in and register then tweet @cloud_connect with your Twitter pitch along with the hash tag #cc_lp.

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GDrive – A Rose By Any Other Name

Published by Ben Kepes on January 13, 2010 in General and Product reviews. 0 Comments

I posted late last year about some movements I saw happening in the short term around Google’s long fabled GDrive offering. Well it seems I was right (actually I knew I was right!), this morning Google announced it was allowing upload of any file times to be made within Google docs. While very sensitive to point out that this is not GDrive, for all intents and purposes it fulfils what we all expected GDrive would provide.

This morning I had a briefing with Syncplicity CEO, Leonard Chung. Syncplicity has been working very closely with Google on this project for a few months now and, after the hype and hoopla dies away, it is interesting to look at what this move actually means for the landscape.

I’ve followed Syncplicity for 18 months or so now – when I first came across them, it was safe to say that they were a provider offering cloud storage, with an interface wrapped around it. Today’s announcement see them shed that model entirely and now become the interface that brings together users storage islands of choice all in one place. It’s a smaller slice of the ecosystem, and that brings some inherent risks to Syncplicity, but they’re also broadening their footprint significantly.

Why did Google chose Syncplicity? Currently there are 5000 customers shared between Syncplicity and Google, and those customers have around one million files synced – it’s a sufficient number to give Google proof-of-concept, and Syncplicity obviously manage to increase their footprint significantly with the partnership.

I questioned Chung about the changing situation this brings to his business, the sands in the sync/backup/storage space are shifting fast and Syncplicity has deftly maneuvered with them. His response:

Our key differentiator is in allowing users to view stuff across different clouds. While our initial approach was turnkey storage/syncing, our customers pushed us in this direction as they needed us to integrate with whichever way they prefer to store data

One interesting thing to note about this deal is that Google is setting initial limits of 1Gb space and 256Mb maximum file size for its storage solution. (Regular users have 1 GB of free storage and can purchase more for $0.25/GB. Enterprise customer pay higher prices, starting at $17/year for 5 GB). Syncplicity users on the other hand can set their own storage size and have no file size limits – an interesting situation then arises when users chose to sync a particular folder onto Google if it contains larger files – in this instance the folder would appear within Syncplicity, and on all the devices that are synced with it, but would not in fact appear within Google.
 
For this reason, and in something of a hidden blessing for Syncplicity, Google customers who chose to use the storage system are more likely to view their files via the Syncplicity interface as it will show all their files, regardless of which have actually been synced to Google. A minor point possibly, but one which will secure a few more eyeballs, and user habits, for Syncplicity. This is after all their core offering – the interface that ties together all the discrete island of storage a user may have.

Another feature of this integration is that Google will follow the business rules Syncplicity uses for versioning control – in this way users get a consistent approach to versioning control across all their files.

It’s exciting times – exciting for Syncplicity, interesting for Google and above all one step closer to cloud nirvana for us, the users.

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