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There are still many start-ups (young and old) clearing the path towards virtual worlds.  ”Portals” that allow us to dive into digital realms to inhabit new personae to slay dragons, get a date, or just IM with a sales rep.

More recently there has been a lot of work in blurring the boundary between the real and virtual in the opposite direction.  Augmented Reality is easy to spot with applications like the iPhone app from Acrossair below - a very cool app launched last year. 

Now there are companies that are taking or creating social data and transposing it onto the world around us through location.  It’s all very, very new so the data is raw and many will just scratch their heads.  But watch the video below that maps the activity at South by Southwest (SXSW) of users of Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, Flickr, Bump, and a couple of other social platforms and apps.

Beyond the long touted “advertise coffee coupons as people walk past a particular Starbucks” application, there are infinite Social Media opportunities in both the consumer and enterprise world.

If you’re in an office of 5 people and you’re all using Yammer or Twitter, then it’s maybe not so interesting.  But what if you’re working at a huge sprawling campus in HP, Kaiser, or Stanford University?  Get’s interesting huh?

Imagine not only reaching out for help or information on a corporate wiki, but you could see where people are and walk over and ask as they walk down a corridor.  Or you could join in on a “water cooler” discussion about a product roadmap item that your CTO just got into with a bright-eyed intern, or the VP Product Marketing. 

You can see barriers start to be broken down in the physical as well as the virtual worlds.  And that’s a good thing for productivity and creativity.  It’s not just for selling Starbucks.

(Props to Robert Scoble for the video and inspiration.)

Posted under industry, marketing

For many of us, to say that Social Media Marketing is “Right here, right now” would appear anachronistic.  But a conversation I had recently reminded me that for Hi-Tech the Techno-bubble we live in can sometimes operate in reverse.

When the Techno-bubble is behaving normally, “everyone” inside the bubble rushes out to buy the latest gadget, or adopts SaaS CRM (or whatever) the moment it comes out.  And then we assume everyone else on the planet has the same gadget and know exactly how to use salesforce.com (or whatever).  “Heck, hasn’t everyone written an iPhone App already?”, we think.

And then you pick up the phone and say, “blah, blah, blah Cloud, blah, blah, blah” to your artist/doctor/lawyer cousin and wonder why the phone went quiet.  (Actually, “Cloud” appears to have already moved across that chasm…bad example.)

When it comes to B2B marketing however, the Techno-bubble slowed adoption of Social Media Marketing.  For years consumer marketers, PR firms, Hollywood, etc. have been using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, etc. to launch products and revive careers.  But you take a look at B2B and we’re still a long way from those heights.  However, I think that the change is really picking up momentum and Social Media Marketing has pierced the bubble from the outside in.

Here are some great Social Media Marketing stats (although 9 months old) and a cool track for your enjoyment.

Posted under marketing

Great news from Amazon Web Services (AWS) yesterday - they’ve made it easier to get your data up into the cloud.  All you have to do is ship them the raw SATA drive and they’ll plug it in.  Easy!  And they’re now accepting capacities up to 4TB.

This is why we work with AWS - they’re constantly raising the bar higher and higher.  They take care of the infrastructure, and we deliver the Platform and Software layers to our Enterprise Software customers.

Anyone out there need more than 4TB?

This announcement got me thinking about the other direction of the data transfer that still hounds Enterprise Software vendors.  Most vendors still deliver most if not all of their products as client-side installs. 

With the goal of lowering the cost of sales, software and tools vendors enable customers to download from their website (the cloud) evaluation versions of their products.  This would be fine if these distributions hadn’t grown to be hundreds of megabytes themselves!  A very large semiconductor vendor told me that it takes a customer 3 1/2 hours to download their software over a T1 line in North America.  And of course, it takes many attempts for it to be successful.  Not a scalable model and one of the many reasons why we promote moving evaluations and pre-sales training to the Cloud using Xuropa.

The reality is, this problem is only going to get worse.   (Numbers provided by OECD.)

WW Broadband Penetration, OECD 2009

Broadband Pentration Growth, OECD 2009

Software distributions are only going to get bigger, and with broadband penetration low and not climbing at a huge rate, something needs to change.  Of course, corporations will always be at the forefront of broadband adoption, but the rise of virtual teams and off-site workers will continue to exacerbate the problem of a lagging telecommunications infrastructure.

Although a full SaaS model would remove this problem.  There are many other obstacles and reasons why a complete move would not work for many of these software vendors.  However, moving the front end of the acquisition process (pre-sales training and evaluations) just makes sense.  Doesn’t it?

Posted under Xuropa, industry