Software as a service (SaaS) is all the hype these days as tough economic times demand leaner and meaner software solutions within the enterprise. Gartner research has predicted that revenues from SaaS will reach $8 billion is 2009, a 21.9% increase from revenues in 2008. However, despite the promising implications of SaaS in the enterprise, AllenPort feels that the all web-based approach is not… → Read More
The best news in years for Microsoft just hit the wires. Remember way back when Microsoft was under the threat of a breakup in the anti-trust days? Bill Gates famously pointed out Microsoft had no such thing as a monopoly, because (this was pre-Google) some company could come along at any moment and change the dynamics of the environment. Soon he was proven exactly correct, as Google emerged with… → Read More
Earlier last month web hosting provider SoftLayer announced the availability of cloud services on an hourly basis. The offering includes flat hourly rates for cloud instances, while cloud storage is accessible on a pay-as-you-go basis. While most traditional cloud services (IBM, Savvis, AT&T, Terremark, etc) require multi-year commitments, the hosting industry has seemed to embrace commitments… → Read More
A few posts ago Dave Winer continues his criticism of Twitter’s 140 character limit. Never mind that Dave aggressively supported cloning Twitter’s APIs and character limit in the Bearhug days when Twitter needed the support. Never mind that things have changed now and apparently Twitter is too big for our own good. Dave’s back and forth is part of a grand old tradition, where new… → Read More
With the Gillmor Gang shut down, I’ve been shifting my attention to the Realtime Stream CrunchUp Eric Schonfeld and I are hosting July 10 at the Fox Theater in Redwood City. Growing interest from startups, bigcos, open standards developers, and investors augurs for a valuable event. I hope you’ll join us. Some of the areas we expect to see explored include, obviously, Twitter, its… → Read More
There has been some doubt lurking in the trenches about whether Google has a solid, organized enterprise strategy. But there have been some recent developments that indicate that Google might have a viable game plan to become a player in the enterprise space. Yesterday, Google rolled out Google Apps Directory Sync, a tool that will let businesses sync the user account information in Google Apps… → Read More
IBM is advancing its aggressive cloud computing strategy with a string of announcements this week. The most recent was IBM’s partnership with Amazon Web Services to allow access of its software to solution providers using Amazon’s cloud computing applications. The partnerships offers pay-as-you-go access to development and production versions of IBM Information Management database… → Read More
Marc Benioff has an uncanny sense of how to stitch together the multitude of social media and Web service resources that dominate the technology space. While many of the audience decry the notion of the enterprise applicability of these tools, Benioff and Salesforce think they’re on the way to what he calls “the next billion dollar opportunity” on top of this realtime platform. → Read More
Encoding.com has relaunched to address the new cost, quality, and scalability encoding issues that have emerged with the explosion of internet and mobile video applications. As a company that formerly hand coded and archived source video content, Encoding.com believes they can bring Internet and mobile video applications to the next level by providing a cost efficient, robust, and scalable… → Read More
Microsoft has announced it plans to acquire MobiComp, a Portuguese software company. MobiComp’s software allows users to back-up, share and discover content on mobile phones. The company sells their software to mobile phone operators including Vodafone, TMN and Cellcom. Founded in 2000, MobiComp has been privately funded and according to its website has been profitable since its first year… → Read More
Steve Gillmor and I are here at the Sun Campus in Menlo Park, CA for a conference on Open Source Business Intelligence. Zack Urlocker is the VP of the Database group at Sun, he came to the company via MySQL. 12:40 – Zack came to Sun through MySQL. MySQL were planning to IPO, but they were interesting in what Sun were doing. Says that Sun has come a long way in the past 5 or 6 years as being… → Read More
In addition to the re-org at Yahoo, the company is also creating a new division to focus on building and implementing a cloud computing platform. Google and Microsoft have each released or announced parts of their cloud platform plans, while Yahoo had previously kept a tight lip. From Yahoo’s press release… In order to expand its cloud computing capabilities, the Company will form a… → Read More
Synchronization, backup, and sharing solution Syncplicity today announced the launch of a new open platform that they hope will enable the next generation of Cloud Computing applications. The new platform allows developers to extend their web-based applications directly to the desktop, creating seamless interaction between online applications and files stored locally on the desktop. The service is… → Read More
Cloud computing management system provider RightScale has today announced at the Structure 08 conference that they have released a new utility to allow customers to deploy and manage MySQL instances on the Amazon Web Services platform. Using the new MySQL tools, customers can automate the configuration and deployment process, and manage multiple MySQL instances. RightScale allows users to scale… → Read More
BridgeWave was founded almost 10 years ago, but has only recently become known for their high-end high-speed WiFi equipment and solutions. Today they announced that they have closed a Series D round of $10M lead by existing investor Intel Capital and co-lead by new investor Core Capital amongst other participants. BridgeWave raised the new round to assist them in further establishing themselves as… → Read More
Mosso today launched a new control panel for their application hosting platform. The new panel allows users to easily manage files and assets, upload new files and content, extract new packages and more. They have built a whole new interface using the Google Web Toolkit, and their plan is to incrementaly extend the features of the control panel to features that were previously managed manually by… → Read More
Opera Software is building a team of “web evangelists” whose job it is to find sites that do not display correctly in Opera and are not standards-compliant, and then email the site owners. They are sending emails with specific tips on how to fix HTML, CSS or other issues that don’t make sites compliant. Opera has always been a strong advocate for web standards, and this… → Read More
Marc Benioff took the stage at the first of a global Tour de Force to get out in front of the scramble for software as a service bragging rights. On the surface, the event features a continuation of the alliance between Salesforce and Google’s Apps services. Behind the scenes, this is an old fashioned land grab for developers, trying to pry them off Visual Studio and .Net and into the… → Read More
At the O’Reilly Velocity conference today, Hyperic will announce and launch their new cloud service monitoring and logging service CloudStatus.com. CloudStatus is a free and publicly available website that allows developers and users of cloud services such as Amazon S3 and EC2 to monitor the performance and uptime (or downtime) of services. Initially five services from Amazon will be… → Read More
Cloud storage provider Parascale has closed an $11.37 million Series A funding round led by Menlo Ventures and Charles River Ventures. The company, which was founded in 2004, primarily targets media and entertainment markets, but also offers platform support to clients in a number of other fields. Parascale intends to use the funds on product development and to help market the upcoming launch of… → Read More
Nirvanix, an Amazon S3 competitor that launched last Fall, has partnered with CDNetworks, a content delivery network that competes with the likes of Akamai and Limelight. The partnership makes Nirvanix’s cloud storage service available to all of CDNetworks’ customers, who will be able to store an unlimited amount of data on Nirvanix’s servers and then push this data out to any of… → Read More
The nominees for the 3rd annual ”Website of the Year 2006” have just been announced today. Beginning today through December 1, UK internet users can vote for their favourite websites by ranking the nominees content, navigation and design. Website of the Year is a pan-European people’s-choice award initiative run by online research agency Metrixlab and supported by… → Read More
dotMobi, the Internet new top level domain for mobile content, launches to the public today, opening up registration to the public. I won’t say much about it here, because I am not exactly unbiased*, but read what BBC and Financial Times are saying. Whatever your opinion on the usefulness of new top level domains, it’s clear that the launch of dotMobi is creating a lot of buzz about… → Read More
If you read sites like TechCrunch, then it is a fair guess that your friends and family probably think you are some sort of computer expert, someone they can turn to when they need computer related help and advise. This is often a blessing in disguise because once you’ve been successfully identified as an expert, often what was supposed to be a five minute quick question soon becomes a time… → Read More
If you are a British expat like – Alex Barnett and Ben MetCalfe - then getting hold of Tetley teabags, Heinz Beanz and/or Marmite can prove difficult. Asking friends to send you food parcels every now and then maybe one solution. Another maybe to use UK2YOU, a new UK focused website with more than 200 shops ranging from Hamleys to Harrod’s to Thornton’s chocolates… → Read More
They say there is a mug born every minute and the internet is clearly no sanctuary for mugs. Irish Actor Stephen Francis Brady recently launched a new website with the intention of giving away £1 Million ($1.8 Million) to someone out there. How very nice and grand of him but it’s not his money! He has setup a website called “Step up to a Million“ or should that be pyramid… → Read More
Ian Forrester from BBC BackStage is holding a VERY last minute Geek Dinner tonight. “If your in London today and would love to meet up for Dinner with Howard Rheingold of the SmartMobs and Virtual Community fame please email on mobileian at cubicgarden dot com or text me on 07870554816. This is very last minute and we are going to have a meal rather than the usual geekdinner. So expect… → Read More
In the world of Mobile Web 2.0 applications, ShoZu has been an early winner. When it was launched last October, it was the first widely distributed application to support Photo sharing directly from the mobile. and promotion on Flickr and other sites gave it an early boost. Cognima CTO Andy Tiller wowed the attendees of Mobile Monday London in March of this year with a live demo of ShoZu… → Read More
It seems the expected merger of BT and Vodafone has taken another step forward. Currently BT have an MVNO agreement with Vodafone to provide BT Mobile and today Vodafone announced it has signed a deal with BT Wholesale to sell the telco’s fixed-line broadband services alongside its traditional mobile packages. According to VNU, “Vodafone refused to comment on whether there would be a… → Read More
I first started blogging in November 2002, using Dave’ Winer’s Radio Userland. The blog was called Second Thoughts and it covered topics such as web services, DRM, open source, start-ups, Microsoft and Google. Oddly looking back at some of the posts, nothing seems to have really changed, other than the fact I moved my personal blog to Six Apart’s Typepad in July 2003 and changed… → Read More
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