Native Advertising …

NexGen Voice Commands from Google

$100 Billion Cloud Index

Still doubtful about the whole cloud computing thing? Here’s a new metric that should probably change your mind. The combined market capitalization of the Top 30 cloud computing companies is now north of $100 billion.

http://allthingsd.com/20130729/bessemer-venture-partners-launches-100-billion-cloud-index/

How SMBs use (Cloud)startup software to save big bucks

Its a cliche to say Cloud is disruptive. Its already mainstream as evidenced by the adoption across the spectrum. I came across this article which expounds on this theme. Below are some excerpts:

CEO and founder David Soutar said that almost all of the software they used had come out of the startup community, and that because they can relate to how the development process works, they are willing to accept a few bugs here and there. But it also means that the businesses creating these products understand that startups don't have a lot of money to spend, and price themselves accordingly.

"The companies that come from startup roots understand that as a startup company, you don't have a lot of money to spend.

In fact, Soutar sees the minimal features of Google Apps and similar cloud services as being a cost saving compared to "installable" applications.

And there are areas where enterprise systems haven't yet caught up. For example, WattCost is using Flowdock to tie everything together on the social media and, to a degree, customer relationships management side. It's a combination of an internal instant messaging system and an inbox that can be hooked into other services like Twitter, Facebook, Zendesk, and GitHub.

http://www.zdnet.com/case-study-how-smbs-use-startup-software-to-save-big-bucks-7000017488/

Brilliant Definition of a Evernote User

Someone who has a poor understanding of life-work balance. They’re always thinking about everything. Someone who’s answering email at 11 p.m. on a Saturday, but also someone who’s reading restaurant reviews and recommendations at the office. The modern knowledge worker.

Read on @ http://www.wired.com/business/2013/07/evernote-10-questions/

The History of Website Development

 

Accidental Architecture

An interesting term which has come up given the proliferation of Data and Devices. As users run helter skelter to manage the huge data flows, they start reacting and apply common sense solutions to technical challenges. Giving birth to “ Accidental Architecture”. A recent CIO article states “ users are addressing individual data protection challenges reactively, as they arise, and they're applying costly siloed or "one size fits all" products and solutions that are difficult to manage, optimize and pay for. You've got desktop backup, virtualized backup, cloud backup, different forms of backup for different applications. In effect, organizations are creating "accidental architecture."

Backup isn't exactly the sexiest area within an IT organization. In many cases, it's perennially understaffed and under-resourced. But as data becomes an increasingly valuable commodity in the enterprise, and the volumes of data generated by the enterprise expand exponentially, backup is buckling under the strain. A new way of thinking about protection storage architecture may be required.

"Imagine a dam with a single, small sluice gate near the bottom, and there's water just gushing over the top," says Guy Churchward, president of Backup and Recovery Systems at EMC. That sluice gate represents your backup platform and the water represents your data. "Backup can't handle the load."

And worse is coming, Churchward says. If you were to pan the camera back from your little dam with water spilling over the top, you'd see 15 other raging rivers rushing toward you.

Read on @ http://www.cio.com/article/736179/EMC_Bringing_the_Sexy_Back_to_Data_?page=1&taxonomyId=3000

Key to Govt Cloud Success

As the dust settles down and the G Cloud emerges, a key success factor which is potentially emerging everywhere is for the Cloud solution to be fully integrated than individual parts. Smart Govts are deciding along the same course. This has been borne out of the recent article in Forbes as well.

One Washington, D.C.-based privately-held company, IQ Business Group (IQBG), has led the way in bringing one of the largest federal agencies, the Department of the Interior (DOI), into the 21^st century.

Last year the company scored a $53 million contract with the DOI, the federal agency that is responsible for federal land and natural resource conservation. The eight-year contract for IQBG’s software as a service (SaaS) platform is part of DOI’s IT Transformation initiative, which is expected to save $100 million annually. Known as the eMail,Enterprise Records, and Document ManagementSystem (eERDMS), the platform captures and auto-classifies (stores in folders according to subject) 100% of a staggering 75 million e-mails per month.  One impressive feat: it took only 45 days for IQBG to get eERDMS up and running for the DOI, which has nearly 100,000 employees nationwide.  This compressed time to going live illustrates the advantage of software based solutions: cost savings.

Michael Beck, IQBG’s CEO, notes that his company’s contract with the DOI is among the largest information technology initiatives in the federal government.  “We’re the first to provide a comprehensive solution for  e-mail archiving and journaling for an entire cabinet level agency,” he says, “and our competitors [which include companies such as IBM] do not have a fully-integrated product in production like ours that includes auto classification, record keeping and eDiscovery support.”

The DOI contract has helped IQBG expand its public sector practice, which includes state, local and higher education clients, from 30% of revenues to 65% of revenues.  And the company’s SaaS offering has led to impressive growth — Beck says IQBG’s total revenues have grown “in excess” of 100% over the past few years, and total information captured and processed by the company has grown from 10-15 terabytes in 2012 to an estimated 75 terabytes (eHow.com equates a single terabyte as equivalent to about 143 million pages of stored Microsoft MSFT +0.39% Word documents).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/hilarykramer/2013/07/08/washington-moves-into-the-cloud-saving-money-and-securing-data/

Secret Sauce of the Business Cloud–SaaS

 

The next wave of the Cloud is well on its way. For a good time, SaaS models focused on inevitable Cloud disruptive factors – Subscription, Billing, Hosting, Zero Legacy etc. Disintermediation proved a big success mantra for upcoming SaaS companies. But the middleman took note and turned the tide against itself, defeating the objective of having the Cloud in the first place. Transactions started happening directly. Its now the turn of the new SaaS model – SaaS becoming the System of Record as opposed just a low cost line item. Businesses take note, it may well be the tip of the iceberg!!

I came across an excellent article along the same lines:

By serving as the access portal to the marketplace, the system of record and most importantly, the paywall that drives predictable revenue, SaaS can revolutionize the marketplace model to offer modern advantages the failed B2B marketplaces of the early 2000s never had. These include revenue predictability, favorable unit economics and a barrier to disintermediation.

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/14/why-saas-is-the-secret-to-success-in-the-business-marketplace/#VYgSbOwdc32dTuM3.99

Get your free online personal research assistant…

 

If you are like me, you spend lotsa time researching on your customers before you meet them – (not to mention senior folks from your company). You have back to back meetings, and less than five minutes to run from one to the other.  It will take you much longer than 5 minutes to lookup everyone in the meeting and try to find their LinkedIn accounts, Twitter accounts, Blogs, Company blogs, and news related to their companies.Till date, I used to research by hand on the Net- LinkedIn, the works… Now we have a cool startup, Prepwork(https://prepwork.com) which promises to automate all of that. PrepWork searches for you and sends information that will help you make a positive impression. I have synced my calendar, so should you!

Prepwork, a digital assistant application that aggregates background data from all over the web that applies to each person that you are meeting with during a given day (e.g. alma mater, company news, recent blog posts and tweets, etc.). Then it emails this “intel” to you during the morning prior to your meeting, just like your own personal research assistant.

It gives you insights into someone’s sports interests.  So, in the sample image, this user follows the key players on the Miami Heat.  Because the user follows the Miami Heat, they show you the score from their last game and a link to the ESPN recap. Cool isn’t it …

Add Yesware, Become more productive

One of the key objectives of my blog is to provide my readers details of tools which are cutting edge (and usually free) which moves their productivity needle several notches higher.

So introducing Yesware - the Boston-based startup  that helps sales and marketing people assess how effective  email campaigns are by tracking who opens what  and when. A big part of that story is that Yesware’s service integrates with Gmail and contacts as well as with Salesforce.com, synchronizing appointments between Gmail and Salesforce.com accounts.

Get your free Yesware at http://www.yesware.com/

Product Tour

• Overview

• Team Collaboration

• Email Tracking

• Custom Templates

• Salesforce

• Reports & Analytics

Yesware is a free add-on for Gmail that helps you sell more effectively right from your inbox.

Email Tracking

Get actionable insights into how your prospects and customers are reacting to your messages with our email tracking features.

• Get alerts each time someone opens an email or clicks on a link
• Know exactly when to follow up with your clients and prospects
• Know where in the world your message is being viewed
• View the device that prospects are using to open your email

---

Team Collaboration

Yesware Teams make it easy to share winning messages and viewing detailed team reports.

• Name your team and invite colleagues to collaborate
• Share all of your winning email templates with each other to increase sales and productivity
• View detailed team reports & analytics on emails sent, opens, response rates, & much more

---

Custom Templates

Create personal, customized email templates for every stage of your sales process.

• Choose your best templates by seeing which ones your customers reply to most
• Incorporate links and rich text to send great looking messages at the click of a button—every time
• Use [brackets] to indicate custom fields to make your templates even faster and easier to use

---

Reminders

With Yesware Reminders, you'll never miss a follow-up again.

• Remind yourself to follow-up on important emails
• Use Reminders to easily prioritize critical messages that don't receive replies
• Get detailed tracking information about your emails when your Reminders come due

---

Salesforce Sync

Harness the best that Yesware and Salesforce have to offer. We let you manage your sales funnel, right from Gmail.

• Create and Edit Salesforce contacts directly from Gmail
• Automatically sync all tracking data— sent emails, opens, link-clicks, and replies— to Salesforce
• Quickly add new tasks to Salesforce while you're reading an email from a contact
• Get activity reporting for each contact, lead, account, and opportunity

---

CRM Syncing

With just one click every email you write can sync automatically with your CRM. You can focus on selling, we’ll take care of the data.

• Ease of use thanks to partnerships with popular providers like Salesforce, Batchbook, Pipedrive, Base, Highrise, SugarCRM, and other services like TimeTrade
• Save time and avoid mistakes from manual entry
• Actionable information when it matters most

---

Reports and Analytics

Our reports and analytics turn you into a sales superstar by helping you close more deals—faster.

• Know exactly who’s best to follow up with by using our personal tracking reports and gauge your email opens for the last 30 days
• See where in the world people open your emails from inside your inbox
• Find out if your message is reaching top decision makers
• Prioritize your email prospecting with subject filters and email activity sorting

---

Team Reports

Quickly and easily monitor your team's performance, and goal progress, with Team reports.

• Learn how your team's messaging is resonating with your target market
• Know what your team is doing everyday without having to rely on manual data entry
• See which emails get high open rates and leverage these insights to share expertise amongst the team
• Reward best practices and winning approaches

SaaS Helpdesk - Best in Class Cloud Based Helpdesk

The startup provides a Cloud based Helpdesk and is used by several organizations globally. It’s a Pay As you go service which means you don’t have to invest in any new hardware,software or other services. The First three Users are Free for you. I would allow you to explore the other interesting options on the site.

You can visit http://www.freshdesk.com/.  You can setup a free account on this site itself through the Get Started button on the Homepage. You could also create a

Custom domain for e.g. mycompany.freshdesk.com which could then be used by employees of "mycompany" globally.

TOP FEATURES

·         Help Desk Ticketing

·         Social Customer Service

·         Time Tracking

·         Built-in Knowledge Base

·         Help Desk Automation

·         Integrated Forums

·         Multi-product Helpdesk

·         Help Desk Reporting

·         Help Desk Gamification

·         Help Desk Mobile App

How Cloud Computing Can Help Small Businesses

Good Read.

Cloud computing makes use of the excess server capacity of specialized providers. Your work may be split among many machines, sometimes called virtual servers, that also work on the tasks of other individuals or companies. (Software-as-a-service, often confused with cloud computing, is a subset of it.) Cloud computing can help small businesses ease capacity issues such as the ones BrickSimple experienced. You don't need to invest in your own servers or employ staff to take care of them. Instead, you pay only for the capacity you need at a given time. And as demand rises, capacity increases without interruptions.


http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_68/s0908060315092.htm

Cloud Cost - Amazing !!

The New York Times used 100 Amazon EC2 instances and a Hadoop application to process 4 TB of raw image TIFF data (stored in S3) into 11 million finished PDFs in the space of 24 hours at a computation cost of about $240 (not including bandwidth)

How The Cloud Works

Pls click for the source : http://www.rackspace.co.uk/cloud-computing/ 

Cloud Hosting

You should visit exult.runhosting.com for a wide range of Cloud options.Much beyond simple web hosting.let me know how it went.

NIST definition of cloud computing

The NIST definition characterizes important aspects of cloud computing and is intended to serve as a means for broad comparisons of cloud services and deployment strategies, and to provide a baseline for discussion from what is cloud computing to how to best use cloudcomputing.

 
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf

Clouds Everywhere

More I read about clouds, more convinced I am on the disruptive nature of the clouds. The advances made in this field are awesome. most of the known problems in terms of security, scalability, business viability are solved. The standards provided by many Cloud forums are pathbreaking.

While Cloud is based on the notion of lower cost, for me its more about doing whats right as per common sense. maintaining massive IT depts and massive resources with equal amount of outsourcing are going to be a thing of the past.

There are several who argue Clouds will be co-exist with IT depts. I dont subscribe to this view point as once the critical volumes start coming down for traditional IT, it will no longer be viable to run.

For Clouds, the ultimate point would be when the current B2B moves to B2B2C and finally B2C. That threshold would be the point of explosive growth for Clouds.

Finally, 3 years would be the time window for traditional IT to morph. else the waterfall is not far away.