It is a testament to the times that as a new burgeoning technology is hatched by an ”army of geeks” in a caffeine drenched frenzy, I can have a conversation at a party with a lawyer from a completely different field and find that he already has a rudimentary grasp of that same technology - Cloud Computing. 

Even if I normalize for the natural demographic skew of my location (San Francisco), it is impressive to consider how quickly this phenomenon has progressed towards the mainstream.  Clearly, the message has a lot to do with the rate of transmission. 

“Software-as-a-Service“, or worse “SaaS”, didn’t catch the imagination as well as “Cloud” did.  Which is ironic considering SaaS is actually what the consumer/user really interacts with.  What was originally represented by “The Cloud” was a metaphor for all of the networking, server hardware, protocols, etc. that no user in their right mind would want to know even existed, never mind have to understand. 

Even Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, the original “Software-as-a-Service” company, writes in his letter to shareholders, “We have become the first enterprise Cloud Computing company to report more than $1 billion in revenue.”  He may argue that this is in line with their Force.com strategy - providing their compute power in the form of a “Platform-as-a-Service” (here we go again) – Sales Cloud 2.  But considering where the vast majority of those $1 billion came from, it more reflects the company’s savvy marketing team.  If a Cloud Computing company were to be defined as any company that provides compute resources as a utility, then wouldn’t Amazon have been the first $1 billion Cloud Computing company the moment they turned on AWS?  “SaaS” appears to have lost its luster and “Cloud Computing” is the “new black”.

The reality is, what you call something does matter.  And every successful company out there knows this.  To throw up your arms and quote Shakespeare is to miss the point, and likely doom your company/product to failure in the process.

To give something a name is to give it meaning.  Even better – a name should imbue the audience with a passion, an image, something that goes far beyond its function.  “Cloud Computing” does that, with very little effort….”SaaS” needed an education cycle, time, and resources, and the market really doesn’t have that kind of patience.

(If you’re curious, in 2006 SFDC was all about “CRM”, and press releases in 2008 described the company as “…the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)”.)

Posted under industry, marketing

Courtesy EcoScapes (http://www.ecoscapes.net)

Last year was my first time attending DVCon. So, that was the first time I got to witness the infamous EDA Troublemakers Panel. Last year Peggy Aycinena channeled her inner John Cooley with a provocative panel discussion entitled “EDA: Dead or Alive”. Of course, the EDA world looked very bleak back then, just months after the financial meltdown, Cadence financial woes, EDA layoffs left and right, VC funds shutting down … a forest fire of bad news sweeping the industry.

But just as the wildflowers bloom after the wildfire, optimism is returning to the EDA industry. (Gosh, that sounds really corny, huh). So it’s not too surprising that two EDA veterans will be at DVCon this year heralding EDA’s return. Fellow EDA blogger Paul McLellan and EDA Hall-of-Famer Jim Hogan have become the Captain and Tennille of EDA. They spoke at ICCAD on the future of chip design. And now they are giving another talk during DVCon entitled “So you want to start up an EDA company? Here’s how…”.

I don’t know what these guys are going to say, but if I were them, here are a few things that I’d point out that make for some optimism for starting up an EDA company now:

• There are lots of good EDA people looking for work, so this is a good time to partner with them or to get them on board for a lower salary than you’d have to pay otherwise.
• Small companies are able to use technology to their benefit to lower their cost of development. Development hardware is cheap and even rent-able through cloud computing providers. Open source software tools abound. The biggest cost will be your time.
• The cost of sales is dropping due to new technology. WebEx. GoToMeeting. Skype. Xuropa. These tools and others enable you to reach out to customers globally while never leaving your office.
• Then again, who needs an office? Working from home has never been easier.
• And who cares where you are located? It’s easy enough to collaborate with your virtual team globally. (Xuropa has people in the Bay Area, the LA Area, and France).
  
• The lack of VC money can also be a good thing. You retain ownership and control of the company and don’t have a “timetable” to “cash out”.
• The lack of VC funding also forces you to think about getting cash flow positive as quickly as possible. Rather than wasting time and money designing the perfect product, you’re forced to start selling it early which leads to better feedback and a better product.

The idea that the downturn is an opportunity is not new. In fact, Sean Murphy has been spearheading the whole concept of bootstrapping for some time now. Check out his site for some great advice. Also, Dharmesh Shah, founder of Hubspot, writes a great blog on this subject as well.

I’m still not sure if I’ll make it to DVCon this year, but if I do, I will definitely attend this session. If not, I’m sure someone from Xuropa will be there. Just like my EDA SaaS and Cloud Computing Roundtable last year, it’s not part of the regular program. It will be held Tuesday evening Feb 23rd from 6:30 – 7:30 in the Oak Ballroom at the Doubletree Hotel (where DVCon is going on). This will be right after the DVCon reception, so grab a beer or a glass of wine and head on over.

I hope to see you there.

Posted under Xuropa, business, industry, marketing

Scott Hamilton

With the 2010 Winter Olympics approaching, there has been some talk recently about those sports that Americans talk about once every 4 years. One of them is figure skating.

Now, I’m not much of a figure skating fan myself, but my mother-in-law is. And all this talk reminded me of the time we took her to an ice skating show at the LA Forum. It was not just any old show … it was Scott Hamilton’s return to figure skating after a fight with testicular cancer. Scott was as close to a superstar as there was in men’s figure skating, having invented the back-flip and won the Gold medal in the 1984 Olympics. So seeing him back on the ice was a feel good story.

The show featured a lot of other well known figure skaters, including Dorothy Hamill and Katerina Witt, but the climax was towards the end when Scott Hamilton took the ice. Cheers went through the crowd as he performed move after move, if not flawlessly, at least without major error. Then came the moment of truth. Scott would now perform his famous back-flip.

The lights dimmed. A lone spotlight. A drum roll. Scott Hamilton took a deep breath, began his run, turned backwards, took off ……. and fell

Obviously, it was disappointing. This show was being recorded and going to be shown a week later on Network TV, so unfortunately it would not be as great a moment as we’d anticipated.

When the show ended we started to gather our things when an announcement came over the PA that went something like this: “we’d like to do some extra takes of certain parts of the show. If you would like to stay, please come over to the west side of the forum and fill in the seats over there.”

What happened next I should have anticipated, but for some reason I was naive. The show producers proceeded to repeat parts of the performance where skaters had fallen or stumbled.  And of course, that included Scott Hamilton’s back-flip. Time after time the lights dimmed, the spotlight fell, and Scott skated and tried his back-flip. Finally, I think it was after 4 or 5 tries, Scott Hamilton nailed it and a roar went through the crowd.

I made a point of watching the performance when it aired on TV a week or so later. And sure enough, nobody fell or even slipped up. And of course, Scott Hamilton successfully executed his back-flip on his first try, to the cheers of a huge crowd.

Having been in the EDA business for many years, I know that a lot of EDA tool demos are a lot like Scott Hamilton’s return performance. If features don’t quite work, the demo avoids those features. Or if the feature is critical, then that is the one that gets fixed while other not-so-critical features may be left broken. It’s part of the smoke and mirrors that is the least well kept secret of EDA tool demos. The customer knows that the EDA company is avoiding the holes in its product.

But what if you don’t have big holes in your product? What if your tool really can nail that back-flip on the first pass? What if your tool really is a “game changer”? Won’t they believe you if you show them? After all, seeing is believing!

Unfortunately, customers have become so cynical and jaded about EDA tools and EDA salespeople that they hardly ever believe what they see anymore. I know. I’m also one of those customers. Read ESNUG or any one of the many EDA forums and you’ll know that I’m right.

But what if they could try the tool out themselves? No strings attached. That’s what we are trying to do with the Xuropa labs. To give your jaded, non-trusting, cynical customer a chance to try your fabulous tools himself.

“Seeing is believing” is no longer good enough. “Doing is believing” is the new reality.

If you’d like to see what a Xuropa Online Lab is like, you can try it out here. We’ve got some tools loaded and you can play with them as long as you like. No strings attached.

Oh, and to be fair to Scott Hamilton, here’s a video of him nailing that same back-flip just a few weeks ago. In this case, seeing is believing.

Posted under Xuropa, business, industry, marketing

Maybe you missed the news (as I did), and only caught it once the Thanks Giving turkey had settled - but great news it is indeed!

Slower than other platforms (eg. Facebook Connect), LinkedIn has been integrating out into the web, but now the pace is really picking up. 

On November 9th LinkedIn announced the Twitter partnership, and then came the really exciting news - the doors really flew open with an official LinkedIn Platform play on November 23rd.

We’ve been waiting for this a long time.  Ever since we enabled the import of LinkedIn Profiles into your Xuropa Profile we’ve wanted to enable our users to move data smoothly between the two platforms. We’re not about re-inventing wheels if we don’t have to.

Currently, we’re on a march to improve the overall usability of the Xuropa Platform.  But look forward to some interesting integrations in the future.

Posted under Features, Xuropa, business, marketing

When I was in 11th grade, my Social Studies teacher, Mr. Lewis, took us on a field trip from Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan. That was the first time I ate “real” Chinese food and it was also my first time in a “real” bookstore, The Strand.

Back then, circa 1980, it was very common for people to go browsing in used bookstores, and I caught the bug real bad. Not only was it an affordable way for a kid to buy books, but there was also something exciting and addicting about the serendipity of the process, not the least of which was the intoxicating fragrance of those weathered and worn volumes.  It was like a treasure hunt.

I never went in looking for any one book in particular, but I always walked out with half a dozen or more books on totally different subjects. In fact, if you were to look at my bookshelf today, over 80% of the books were purchased as “previously owned”. That’s one of the great things about books … even when they are used, they still retain 100% of their value!

One of the books I’ve picked up over the years is “John Dewey on Education”, which is a compendium of excerpts of his various writings. For those of you who are unfamiliar, John Dewey was perhaps the most influential educational reformer of the late 19th and early 20th century, best known for his writings on the role of experience in education. In fact, several excerpts in this book are from Dewey’s other book, “Experience and Education“.

In this book, Dewey proposes 2 important ideas. First, that real learning only comes by connecting ideas with experience. Second, that every learning experience influences future learning experiences. For example, consider a child that touches a hot stove. Through that experience, he first learns that stoves are hot and not to be touched. A valuable lesson, indeed. Second, this experience teaches him to be cautious about touching objects he has not touched before. In that sense, it actually dampens his enthusiasm and curiosity for future experimentation, which can be harmful to future learning experiences. Not so good. As can be easily reasoned, the best learning happens through experiences that teach and also encourage future learning.

__________

Last week I came across a blog post by Jim Lipman entitled “So this is where Engineers get their Information“. It seems that Jim attended a seminar by eg3.com on how designers search on the internet. One portion of the blog post caught my attention:

In the “What do Designers Want” category, ‘hands-on’ items such as demos, software and evaluation kits rank very highly. On the flip side, vendor articles and webinars ranked moderately low and podcasts very low in response to a “What Information do you seek” question (the webinar response probably due to the same perception that I have that many are sales or marketing tools).

In other words, designers want to be educated through actual experience with the tools, not by listening to webinars or presentations or even podcasts. If you have spent any time around a teenager, you know that this tendency towards interactive experiences will only increase. No longer will designers be satisfied being passive receivers of information. Rather they will prefer, no, demand to be active participants.

Second, their experience accessing these forms of online learning will have an effect on their future learning habits. If they have to log in through several screens and enter personal information just to get access to a Webinar, fagetaboutit! They won’t come back. But if the process is simple and easy and the experience is smooth, they will come back.

That’s what we are trying to create at Xuropa. An environment where designers can learn by experience, by using your tools hands on and where they will come back again. We’re trying to make the process painless, just a simple password login and there they are using your tools in seconds. It’s not just another form of WebEx or VNC or any other screen sharing program as some have suggested, but a way for the designers to drive the tools themselves and learn first hand.

We’re just getting rolling and we’ve got a lot to learn by the experience as well. The process, although smooth, can still be improved. And we are working hard to get more valuable tools in place for designers to try out. If you are a designer reading this, go ahead and try out one of our labs and let us know what you liked and how we can improve. We really want to make this painless and rewarding for you. If you are in the EDA world, consider putting your tool in the hands of a customer and providing a learning experience whereby they fall in love with your tool.

It’s all about the Experience.

Posted under Xuropa, industry, marketing

We made it this far, and my feet are killing me, but DAC has been incredible for us this year!

We’ve had back-to-back meetings all week and the reception has been great - we had no idea there were so many companies that have been considering moving their tool or hardware to Xuropa for pre-sales evaluations or training.  Most of all, companies are looking to leverage all year-round the time and effort of creating DAC demos.

The economic climate, market dynamics, and the availability of the Xuropa Platform have really got the creative juices of customers flowing!  Some very cool and unique ideas are coming out to leverage a Xuropa Lab and differentiate their company’s go-to-market strategy and better serve their customers.

Cadence were making good use of their Online Labs during their VIP 100 Portfolio presentations in the ChipEstimate booth (#1100).  And this was a very good sight to see:

Engineers Like Test-Driving Products Online

If you click on the image you’ll see that all of the Cadence Xuropa Labs are being used except one.

Back to it for the last day!  See you on the floor!

Posted under Xuropa, industry, marketing

I’m sure there are very few people in EDA marketing departments with the time to read blogs this week, never mind write one - about 96 hours from now the show floor of DAC will open in San Francisco and all their work for the past six months will be front and center.  (No one really thinks about DAC seriously until January is out of the way.)

Anyway, the pressure is off Xuropa.  Being online and available globally 24/7 definitely has its advantages

We won’t have a booth, but we will be there walking the floor talking to vendors and users about what we could do to help their business or experience on the Xuropa Platform.  If you see me walking the floor I’d love to hear your feedback - it’s a great opportunity to meet people that have a passion for EDA, SaaS, and the future of the business of the semiconductor design industry.

If we don’t bump into each other on the exhibition floor (or at the Denali Party), stop by the ChipEstimate booth (#1100) at the below times.  The Cadence Verification IP team will be presenting their products and providing attendees the ability to use the products for themselves on the show floor - using their Xuropa Online Labs.

They haven’t had to worry about installing PC’s and testing them just before the exhibit opens.   Everything is all ready to go and sat up on the Xuropa Platform.  They’ll be using the ChipEstimate PCs with just a browser on the day.  Of course, once the show is over the demos will still be available 24/7 for anyone in the world to continue to go into the Lab and trial Cadence products - a beautiful thing.

So, here are the times.  Susan Peterson will be presenting and I’ll be stood in the wings to answer any questions and get feedback during the demo sessions.

• Monday at 2pm
• Tuesday at 2pm
• Wednesday at 1pm
• Thursday at 10:30am

Enjoy the show, and hope to see you there!

- James

Posted under Xuropa, business, industry, marketing

My son would most likely be an engineer.  He’s already shown a number of traits that leads me to that conclusion:  For his age, he’s very advanced in math and science; He loves building things; He loves being recognized for his work; etc.  And yes, there’s another trait: He loves things that are “free”.  He would spend $10 to get a $5 thing for free!!

To a lot of people, acquiring something for free is in itself a reward worth more than the thing itself.  People most often associate a higher value for something that’s “free”.  But this it true as long as it’s tangible - i.e. it’s a “thing”.

On the other hand, if you offer your opinion for free, it is taken as just that ….  Many years ago, I learned that doing pro-bono consulting as way to get engaged with a client and then grow it into a consulting contract later just doesn’t work.  A consulting contract would only happen if the client sees value in your services.  Once you’ve offered it for free, the value perception of the service is almost entirely washed out and hence it’s almost impossible to recreate it to a point that it’s worth paying for.

Lesson learned: Always combine your pro-bono consulting with a free “thing”!  Make sure there is a deliverable at the end where your value is captured.  If it’s a report or presentation, deliver it in a nicely bound printed on good quality paper.  If it’s something that required a lot of time and heavy thinking, make it large and heavy.  In either case, present it with a big final bang (invite board members, make several copies, etc.).

Once your have the free “thing” delivered, it’s much easier to move to the contract negotiation.

Original post in 1@Market

Posted under business, career, industry, marketing

OK.  This one’s a bit controversial, and I don’t necessarily subscribe to it. But…. someone whom I respect greatly as a high tech executive made that statement in a coffee conversation last week, and I thought I’d be interesting to share his point of view.

Posted under business, career, industry, marketing

I’ve been writing a lot about Twitter recently, as have a lot of other people as it continues to charge into the mainstream.  Read What is Twitter, and Why Should I Care? and you’ll get an idea of where this is going, but we have some recent data collected by The Nielsen Company that talks to its increasing relevance as a communication channel:

It’s growth in terms of users is astronomical:

Fastest Growing Community in February 2009

As Nielsen note, this growth does not take into account the number of mobile users, which could increase these stats incredibly.  Twitter’s use-model lends itself to mobile use perfectly, and is a very valid platform.

There is one piece of this story that I’d disagree with though: the title, “Twitter’s Sweet Smell of Success“.  While Twitter has raised an impressive $55M since its founding, it has yet to find a business model.  I’m sure there’s one out there, and it does not have to be solely ad-driven.  But until they have found the secret sauce to generating revenues, the sweet smell of success is still only appreciated by its users.

Posted under industry, marketing