SmoothSpan Blog

For Executives, Entrepreneurs, and other Digerati who need to know about SaaS and Web 2.0.

Amazon Should Launch a Kindle iPhone App

Posted by smoothspan on December 3, 2008

There was news today that Amazon has launched an iPhone application.  The application is Amazon Remembers.  It’s an interesting application where you can photograph something you want to buy and Amazon will try to match it to a product they sell.  You can also just browse the Amazon shopping experience, but the “experimental” photo matching feature is the real news.  The photo recognition is done by real people via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk facility.

This is all well and good, but it just makes me wonder why Amazon hasn’t launched the real killer iPhone application:  a Kindle-style reader that runs on iPhones.  Assuming Amazon doesn’t think it makes most of the money from sales of the Kindle itself, the iPhone would be a huge acclerator for the Kindle business model.  And what better time than now, during the holiday season, to launch such a thing.  Amazon’s updated Kindle version 2 was delayed until next year anyway.

Can you imagine what a big splash a Kindle reader application for the iPhone would make?  Heck they could charge $50 or $100 for it and sell a bunch at a nice profit..  It might cannibalize some of the Kindle hardware sales, but I’ll bet not that many.  I’d sign up for an iPhone Kindle application in a heartbeat.

Posted in apple, business, gadgets, strategy | 1 Comment »

SaaSGrid: An Operating System for SaaS

Posted by smoothspan on December 3, 2008

Apprenda has announced that SaaSGrid has moved from closed Beta to public availability today.  I had the pleasure of interviewing Sinclair Schuller, Apprenda’s CEO to learn more about SaaSGrid recently.  It’s a fascinating offering, and I can definitely see how it makes it easier to create new SaaS applications.

Apprenda calls SaaSGrid a “Cloud Operating System.”  I don’t know if I would call it that or not, but at the very least it is a SaaS platform that offers a lot of benefits not unlike Force.com from Salesforce, but with some key differences.  First and foremost in my mind, is that there isn’t much of anything proprietary about SaaSGrid.  It’s a framework that makes it easy for .NET developers to move their applications to a SaaS Cloud-based delivery vehicle.  Looking at the services provided by the framework, it isn’t hard to see that Schuller & Co. have had experience building SaaS applications before (in fact quite a few of them), because it solves many of the SaaS-specific problems I’ve seen in my career as well.

SaaSGrid covers two bases.  First, it offers plumbing and delivery infrastructure services.  In my mind that’s the “Cloud Operating System” piece.  But, at least as interesting is their Business Engine, that helps simplify a lot of the operational aspects of SaaS.

Let’s describe the OS piece first.  Schuller says it is a “contextual execution environment.”  Think of that as a way to virtualize the multitenant aspect of SaaS so that the application developers don’t need to worry about it much.  It happens almost for free.  This makes a lot of sense if you think about it.  The app developer shouldn’t have to think about tenants any more than the tenants think about each other.  What happens is the developer deploys a single instance and SaaSGrid figures out how to extend that for many tenants.  In doing so it manages data isolation, execution isolation, tenant load balancing, scale out, and those sorts of problems. 

Now what about the Business Engine (or Business Services as they refer to them)?  I thought this part was really cool.  Basically, the Business Services provide a metering and security framework that’s tied to monetization management.  These are common problems for SaaS companies.  We certainly had to solve them for my own company, Helpstream.

To use the framework involves tagging certain features so that they can be recognized as such for security and for offering different levels to different customers.  For example a trial version, a basic version, and a professional version would be very straightforward.  After you tag these features for SaaSGrid, it can then literally structure a web menu that tells what features go in each version, deal with billing, centralize logging, provision, and do the million and one other tasks that plague SaaS developers around these issues today.

Got a request from marketing to refactor which features go into which versions?  No problem.  Need to add a new high end version that costs more?  No problem.  This sort of thing is exactly what SaaSGrid is set up for.

The lifecycle to use SaaSGrid is pretty straightforward.  Develop your .NET app as you’d expect.  The web services and DB layers are SaaSGrid, while the UI layer is your choice.  Bundle that lal up as a SaaSGrid archive, configure in SaaSGrid’s web application, publish it, and voila!  You have a SaaS app ready to be managed via their portal.  You get all kinds of nifty reports on billings, usage, and the like.  The UI from the demo was clean and easy to understand.  There is provision for lifecycle stages including Development, Test, Production, and Archived (old releases). 

The process of migrating folks to new releases can be particularly problematic for SaaS (where everyone runs the same release), but SaaSGrid works with you there too.  Later versions can either be patches with deltas, or completely new images.  The patches do schema migration via scripts you provide.  The last piece to be aware of is that SaaSGrid doesn’t own a data center (good call!).  Rather, they partner with various organizations. 

There’s a lot more to SaaSGrid, more than I can cover in a simple blog post, but it’s something to take a look at if you need help getting a SaaS application to market sooner.  I queried Schuller about the availability of Unix (versus the current .NET) versions and he mentioned their software is all Open Source and Linux under the covers, so that won’t be hard.  He just felt like the .NET community wasn’t getting enough attention yet in the Cloud.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see unix versions of the platform at some future point if there is demand for it.

Posted in platforms, saas | No Comments »

What is the Pit in Your Cherry?

Posted by smoothspan on December 2, 2008

Another great pithy idea from Seth Godin:  cherries can be seedless, but they cannot be pitless.  Without the pit, there is no cherry.  He doesn’t require the pit to be unpleasant, it’s just the nucleus that must exist for the rest of the fruit (or institution) can be built around it.

For Enterprise Software startups, the pit is the referencible customer.  Without those references, it’s just too hard to sell enough customers to be economically interesting.  Moreover, most enterprise software needs segmented pits.  Sell a good reference or two in a market segment and you’re ready to roll up the rest of that market segment much more easily. 

Bringing the absolute focus required to get the references is the hard work of an early stage startup.  It requires focus on small segments and not broad shotgun blasts to succeed.  That focus (decide who you don’t care to appeal to) has been an essential part of the strategies Godin espouses.

Posted in Marketing, business, strategy | No Comments »

Flixwagon: Instant Video News

Posted by smoothspan on December 1, 2008

There’s a lot being written these days about the potential for the web to overtake conventional news sources.  Most of it has to do with newspapers (like Fred Wilson’s blog post this morning), but television news is also vulnerable.  I interviewed Ken Zamkow, Flixwagon’s Executive Director of Marketing and Business Development to find out more about the emerging combination of web and video news.

I had been curious about Flixwagon since hearing about them via Robert Scoble (looks to me like they’ve fixed most of his gripes, BTW), who is always on about video and the web.  It had always seemed to me like video on the web could be the most difficult of propositions.  After all, doesn’t video require more production than any other form of media to be successful?  Little did I know that is actually far from the truth.

Of course Scoble himself has made a career out of video, even though he started more as a blogger.  The photo on his web site shows a video camera with tripod slung over one shoulder.  More recently he’s become a devotee of cell phone video, simply because you can shoot it in places that just aren’t possible with a full sized camera.  Whether that’s because you’re shooting from the tight confines of a Tesla electric sports car, or as a participant in the Davos World Economic Forums, the cell phone can go places that the big cameras can’t and with surprisingly good results.

But could this phenomenon actually he mainstream?  That’s what I wanted to find out from Ken.

As he puts it, Flixwagon started out with a technology and they didn’t know what they would do with it.  The company was founded a little over a year ago by three veterans.  It’s headquarters are in Boston, MA, with offices in New York (where Ken is) and Israel for R&D.  They’re funded by a group of individual investors.

Today, there are two main uses for the service:

1.       Consumer.  Individuals making videos and chatting with friends while doing that.  Sometimes private, sometimes public, and so on.

2.       Business:  More important to us.  MTV, Conde Nast, and others use this to broadcast live content. 

That second scenario, broadcasting live content for various media concerns, is the interesting piece.  They’ve been working with MTV, for example, for most of their history.  MTV sends its reporters into various events with just cell phones.  For Super Tuesday, they had 23 reporters canvassing the event with their phones capturing the video. 

Their biggest success to date has been an MTV event covering the Jonas Brothers backstage at a concert.  They followed the group through Jones Beach, Long Island, and Madison Square Garden, backstage, on board helicopters and limos.  It’s unique footage and you can see again where it would’ve been hard to capture this sort of thing with a conventional video crew.  This footage all led to some of the biggest mobile video numbers ever recorded.  We’re talking streaming 6 million videos in 36 hours, live TV replays shown at a rate of 2 clips an hour, and over 90,000 blog comments left on the videos.  Those kind of numbers would get any media company interested!

Lest you think it’s just the edgy music crowd that would go for such a thing, they’ve also had good success covering fashion shows for Conde Nast property Brides.com.  Once again they’re sending reporters to do live coverage of fashion show for Brides.com’s blogs.

So Flixwagon are intent on establishing themselves as the new media platform for video.  I asked Ken to speculate on some of the factors that have made this format more acceptable.  From my own perspective, I think video like the Blair Witch Project got people used to the idea of consuming video with these sorts of production values.  The thing about this kind of video is not only can it be tremendously more candid, opening the door for more interesting kinds of content, but it is also connected with web communities, which also drives a more interesting experience than plain old video (remember when we called ordinary telephones Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS?).

Ken’s comment was:

People are used to a more handmade production value.  They’re okay with content shot on a smaller camera.  Blair Witch opened that door.  The key is the informational value.  Is the content engaging and interesting.  People enjoy a broader diet of media.  They enjoy HiDef movies, but they now have more room in their entertainment diet for variety.  They snack on short form videos and consume a lot of other types throughout the day.

It really is about whether the content is engaging or interesting, isn’t it?  We’ve all seen shows with incredible production values that were duds because they weren’t engaging or interesting.

What’s the relationship of YouTube to services like Flixwagon?  Obviously YouTube is the Big Kahuna for video on the web, but there’s more to it than that.  First, there’s the cell phone angle, which opens up whole new avenues for content.  Then there are Flixwagons efforts to become a media platform.  For the commercial video producers, the MTV’s of the world, they don’t want to send their traffic out to YouTube, they want to keep that community for themselves.  Flixwagon facilitates that.

At a high level, Ken characterizes Flixwagon in this way:

We think this is a great technology because it makes things easier and simpler.  It costs a fraction of what a broadcast crew costs so it is a way to revolutionize broadcast content.  You can create a lot of engagement with much lower cost than ever before.  That’s what the web is all about.

Indeed, this sort of thing is exactly what the web does well.

Posted in Web 2.0, business, platforms, saas | No Comments »

Free Social Media eBook

Posted by smoothspan on November 25, 2008

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing has written a little eBook called, “Let’s Talk: Social Media for Small Business.”  You can go to that link and find out how to download it instantly and without registration.

I loved the book from several aspects, and had a few criticisms.  Let’s start with the love.

I think the vehicle is great when you have a lot to say  to your audience and want to do so in a way that delivers value to them in exchange for their giving you their attention to read your work.  It’s short at 23 pages and has a fun approachable tone that makes the reading even more fun, which is a good thing.  Anyone can read through it quickly.  And, it’s super easy to get your hands on a copy. 

The only trick he missed to making it truly viral is you do have to go to a Microsoft site to download it.  The folks at Rally Development use a content-rich marketing approach and place all of their similar materials under a Creative Commons license so, “we share it, and we let others use it for their own businesses so long as they don’t compete with us.”

What about the contents of the book itself?  Lots of good stuff there.  The book proceeds through a sort of “Social Maslow Needs Hierarchy” that purports to show how to go about engaging with the Socialsphere.  At the bottom is the most-used foundation, blogging.  This proceeds up through RSS feeds, Social Serach, Social Bookmarking, Social Networks, and finally into Micro, where things like Twitter and FriendFeed dwell.

I guess all things (at least in the Western World) benefit from an organizational framework to put it all into perspective, and this book is no exception.  My complaint about this particular framework is it focuses to much on an approach to Social Media that is skewed towards old-fashioned marketing.  In other words, it focuses almost entirely on outbound messaging rather than conversation.  I am fond of the notion (brought to me by Seth Godin), that old style marketing is about shouting your message at the customer, while Social Marketing is about having a conversation with the customer.  Certainly you can have a conversation with a blog, but it’s not a level playing field and as Social Media goes, it is therefore closer to that old style shouting idiom.

Lots of other good tidbits along the way though.  I particularly liked the idea that marketing with Social Media is about the 4 C’s:

Tons of relevant education-based, and perhaps user generated Content that is filtered, aggregated, and delivered in a Context that makes it useful for people who are starving to make Connections with people, products, and brands they can build a Community around.

Now that’s a solid foundation, and I prefer it to the Maslow Pyramid.  There is reason to believe, BTW, that Jantsch’s pyramid is as much a function of giving small business a road map of what they can succeed at more easily than in showing them the ideal of where they need to wind up.  Maslow’s hierarchy is, after all, about stages of need in accordance with ability to need based on what has been achieved.

The blogging section is good, though there are a couple of missing pieces I intend to write about over time.  I’ve been giving a talk around Silicon Valley to various companies that want to get started blogging and I’ll likely present that talk as a series of blog posts here.  By the time you finish with blogging, you’re halfway through the book.

RSS is next, and then Jantsch launches into Social Search.  These are sites that rate small businesses.  This is followed by bookmarking and the two together take little space.  Last up is Social Networking with an emphasis on Facebook and Linked in.

But what about owning your own community of customers?  What about giving customers a place to communicate with each other?  What about trying to be a Best Practices Destination Community for your industry, local geography, or whatever Tribe (in Seth Godin’s terms) you are choosing to create?  I see those as the places where you really start to leverage Social Media, quit shouting your message, and quit just trying to draft on other communities.

Perhaps there is a volume 2 in Jantsch’s series coming.

Posted in Marketing, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

When Different Worlds Collide: Social Media vs Knowledge Management

Posted by smoothspan on November 25, 2008

I just posted an article on the “war” between Knowledge Management and Social Media in the Enterprise over on the Helpstream blog.  It was prompted by an Andrew McAffee post that I found fascinating.   Give it a read and before sure to click through to McAfee’s, Venkatesh Rao’s, and Jeff Kelly’s posts for some good background.  The articles give a good overview of how different approaches to the same problem can lead to conflicts and friction in the adoption of either approach in the Enterprise.  The winning strategy is to take the best of both worlds and combine them, which is what we’ve done at Helpstream.

Posted in Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Salesforce Bucks the Trends. Again.

Posted by smoothspan on November 20, 2008

Salesforce just reported they beat analysts estimates, had a good quarter, and grew another 43% versus the quarter a year ago.  Same growth the reported last quarter. 

I can’t tell you how many arguments I’ve been involved in where there was someone trying to say that SaaS is a very limited phenomenon, that it hasn’t impacted any large players yet, that it won’t ever go into very many markets (”just a few are suited to SaaS”), that it isn’t a megatrend in the same sense client-server or thin clients were, SAP grows as much as the whole SaaS industry’s total size every year, and on and on.  The last time I was in one of these I was told that I just sounded too “boring and desperate” to make SaaS seem like a winning strategy.

But here comes Salesforce wtih good numbers again.  Here came Concur again with good numbers.  Even NetSuite, which has to sell a whole ERP suite (one of the areas these anti-SaaS pundits seem to argue can’t be penetrated by SaaS) seems to be doing reasonably well against the backdrop of this economy.

Like so many paradigm shifts, SaaS seems to be analagous to a war time piece of advice:

Despite how loud artillery seems to be, you never hear the shell that lands in your own foxhole.

Posted in saas | 2 Comments »

Why Are iPhone Users So Much More Likely to Embrace Apps?

Posted by smoothspan on November 20, 2008

Compete recently ran a story in their blog that I thought was fascinating.  They’ve measured a dramatically higher uptake of applications among iPhone users versus other Smartphone users.  Here’s the graph they presented:

The bars represent number of apps on the phone.  As you can see, only 7% have no apps at all on the iPhone versus 34% on other Smartphones.

I have a theory about all this that’s resonated as I read various folks comparing various phones to the iPhone.  It seems to me that other smartphones trade principally on their keyboards as the advantage.  They appeal to people who are really tied in to email, or perhaps text messaging of various forms. 

The iPhone, by contrast, trades on its web browser.  That’s not to say the other capabilities aren’t excellent, but the web browser is what really makes the iPhone rock.  This was distinctly the flavor I got, for example, from Fred Wilson’s comparison of the G1 versus the iPhone.

That means that if you love the iPhone, you are somewhat predisposed to the notion of a mobile platform.  It’s pretty hard to view a keyboard for email or text messaging as a platform.  They’re just more of the same only you type instead of speaking.  But a web browser truly is a platform.

The other piece is just how easy Apple has made it to download the apps and run with them.  The user experience is completely seamless and straightforward enough that anyone can do it almost automatically. 

Lastly, application developers want to build for the iPhone.  They love it.  I know several different folks who are fighting through what I view as an extremely primitive development platform (Objective C?  Come on Apple, you and Adobe need to bury the hatchet and get a real interpreted language onto the iPhone!) to have a chance to do that.

BTW, the Compete blog is excellent.  I love the insights they pull out of the web using data mining.  Check it out.

Related Articles

No sooner did I post this than Om Malik came out with a post confirming he thinks of the iPhone vs others in essentially the same way.

Posted in platforms, strategy | No Comments »

End of an Era: PC Magazine Goes Out of Print

Posted by smoothspan on November 19, 2008

The last print edition of PC Magazine goes out this January.  It’s the end of an era.

As much as I like the online world, I also love magazines, and PC Magazine was at one time my absolute favorite.  But I haven’t read the magazine in years, so I suppose I’m as guilty as the next guy for its demise.

You could as easily bemoan the passing of the Camaros and Firebirds that were the hot cars in my high school days.  Perhaps this is where GM lost the plot.  Ford was able to keep the mustang revved up.  It wasn’t just a commodity, it was an interesting car. 

Did something similar befall PC Magazine?  Hard to say with certainty, but for me, so many things it used to report on became commoditized that it was no longer interesting.  PC’s were highly commoditized to the point I didn’t care about their reviews of desktop or laptop PC’s.  Instead I turned to building my own PC’s with custom cases and overclocked cpu’s to keep it interesting: shades of the car hot rodding culture. 

At the same time I was pursuing the most bleeding edge performance enhancements to be made to PC’s, I discovered the online PC counterculture.  There were hundreds of PC modding boards that had everything from articles that were just as interesting as the magazine articles, but also communities, which were something I couldn’t even get from the magazines.

PC Magazine may have simply fallen out of touch with that Early Adopter/Influencer crowd that I enjoy being a part of.  Ironically, Bill Machrone, the founding editor of PC Mag, is still around and doing the kind of hands-on work with computers and electronics that I craved from PC Mag and that vanished from its pages.

Raise a toast to the old PC Magazine (and its many cousins–InfoWorld, Computerworld, PC World, etc.), say a fond farewell, and ask whether your product or company is staying fresh with the people that matter, or whether you’re headed down the commodity path.

Related Article

Fred Wilson writes about how important it is for him to blog and about how his article on Boxee led to 100 requests for invitations to their private beta.  His sentiment about why this may be important is related to what I’m trying to say about avoiding the commodity world as your only interested audience:

I know that one person out of the 100 I invited this morning will be incredibly impactful for boxee. It could be five people, it could be ten. Who knows?

But in the world of social media, word of mouth and word of link marketing, it is connectors and influencers like all of you that make the difference.

And that’s one of the main reasons I keep writing, commenting, discussing, and participating in blogs, tumblr, twitter, disqus, and the social media world at large.

Its about the “realest” work I do.

It is the loss of those connectors and influencers that leaves you with an audience that won’t sustain you.  Fred is right: sustaining that sort of audience is the “realest” work you can do too.

Posted in saas | No Comments »

Even Yahoo Understands Why Government Bailouts Are Questionable

Posted by smoothspan on November 19, 2008

Interesting Forbes article making the rounds about what Yahoo’s 5 biggest mistakes were.  I’ll let you read it if you like as I’ve largely moved on from Yahoo.  I did love the quote from one Yahoo engineer when asked whether Yahoo should seek a government bailout:

“If you do, you’re admitting you’ve got nothing left, no future.”

I agree wholeheartedly with the Forbes writer’s response to that engineer:

God bless Silicon Valley.

Posted in strategy | No Comments »

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