It’s 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 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 has done.  Which is ironic, considering SaaS is actually what the consumer/user really touches, and what was originally represented by “The Cloud” - a metaphor for all of the networking, server hardware, storage, and software bits and bobs that no one really wants to know about.  As I said in a previous post, it really does matter what you call something.

So I looked around for some other indicators of “Cloud Computing” crossing the chasm from geekland to consumerland, and didn’t find very many.

• Cloud computing for business goes mainstream
• Los Angeles Moves To Gmail And ‘Cloud’ Computing

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Posted under cloud, marketing

There was a time when everyone was hot about “Location-based Advertising”.  Well, everyone’s still trying to crack that chestnut, and maybe this is a way to do it - Location-based Micro-Blogging.  This is better known as an application called FourSquare, or its closest competitor Gowalla.

Think of FourSqaure as Twitter meets Google Maps with an added gaming concept that reminds me of the old treasure hunts I used to go on as a child with my parents…but without the clues.  Essentially, when you arrive at an establishment, or your home, or your office, or where ever, you use an app running on your smartphone to “check-in”.  That act of checking into that location is then published to the rest of your social network.  You also have the opportunity to receive some points and a virtual badge of honor.  Last, but not least, you can provide a Tip to visitors of the establishment (for more points), or simply post a status update.

Of course, the obvious question is, “Why?”.  But then again, why do we do anything?  Why do we Tweet?  Why do we post videos to YouTube?  Why am I writing this blog?

To be honest, that’s not a very pragmatic question (although it will lead to very deep understanding of what is driving Social CRM, or Social Customer Relationship Management).  Businesses today are trying to get their head around the “How?”, as in “How can I leverage this?”.

Before we delve into the depths of this topic, I think it fair to share some information about whether your business should care.  As usual, we’re at the very beginning of this new technology adoption curve and there’s a long way to go.  Here are some statistics put out recently by RJ Metrics.

As you will see, the numbers are not overwhelming compared to say Facebook, but my guess is that if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, this form of market engagement could get very relevant relatively quickly.

Foursquare

• Number of users: 1.9 million
• Number of registered venues: 5.6 million
• Check-ins: 1/3 of venues only once or never
• Most popular venues: Home or fast food establishments

Posted under Social Media Marketing, marketing

The folks over at Ignite Social Media have done us another great service this year - they’ve collated and published their Social Analysis Report of geographic, demographic, and traffic data from various social networks around the web.

Of course, the list in the report is not complete (there’s not Orkut, for example - and I’m pretty sure there’s a network or two in Japan that have incredible stats, but are not listed here), but anyway here they are for your enjoyment.  You can get the full report here.

For those of you that are wondering about which social network to leverage to get into a particular geography, I’ve taken the geographic distributions and mapped them into a table below.

Here are some interesting observations and questions:

• There are only four truly global properties: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Youtube
• The survey appears US centric in its viewpoint and sampling
• What is the dominant social network in Japan?
• What is the dominant social network in China?
• LinkedIn and Plaxo appear to follow the english speaking high-tech population and its dominant outsourcing partner India (although LinkedIn isn’t as strong in the UK as Plaxo)
• I thought that Hi5 was the dominant Spanish speaking social network, but it does not appear to be very strong throughout the diaspora.
• I don’t see a social network with a distribution that falls along religious lines.  Unfortunately, this may happen in the not so distant future.

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Posted under marketing

Back in March I posted the original version of this video.   After only two months we need an update!  Thank you Socialnomics

Many of these trends are still just unfolding and their impacts are only starting to be understood.

Pretty cool…

Posted under marketing

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

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