The Web 2.0 Diaspora - profitability now matters

The term diaspora is normally associated with the scattering of a people group geographically from their homeland. The term is originally Greek and is literally translated "a scattering or sowing of seeds". There is little question that the original homeland of Web technology is Silicone valley California but I often find myself mildly annoyed when listening to a Twit podcast or Buzz outloud and hear long narratives about local valley activities or politics. Don't they know there is a whole generation of us Web 2.0 businesses born outside the beloved homeland?

Being outside the valley has a few notable drawbacks. We are less subjected to the clouds of money floating down from the VC sky. Many of us started online businesses with the mistaken idea that a business model that included a plan to generate revenue was necessary. Oblivious to the obvious drawbacks of charging a fee for our services, we blindly went forward telling customers what value our service could provide and insisting they pay us for using it.

Lately I've been hearing how the winds of economic trouble has begun to blow the clouds of money away from my distant cousins in the valley. There is much fear of drought and disaster among the sequoias and other farmers in that region. I fear many of my friends in the valley may become chafe, blown by the winds of trouble and scattered abroad.

I would like to share a small lesson learned from those of us scattered beyond the reach of the money clouds. There is hope, even now if you stop relying on the rain and start digging wells. There is money in the fertile soil of software as a service (SaaS) but you must have the vision to build something of value that you can bring to the "farmers market" and sell.

Open Source Moodle is Driving Blackboard Innovation

We recently announced an integrated solution using Moodle on Amazon Web Services that provides a highly scalable option for schools and Universities running or interested in running Moodle. This give us the option to do single sign-on integration with DigitalChalk and offer a combined package that will work both inside and outside the Amazon cloud. The really interesting thing about this deal was how rapidly were were able to create this solution using open source. From inception to delivery took about six weeks to complete. Most of the development actually fell into our codebase, the open source SSO server and Moodle required very little work. For almost two years we have struggled to address SSO with the commercial market leader, Blackboard. Their building blocks toolkit were poorly documented and questions about supporting authentication outside their app architecture was addressed by telling us that Blackboard must be the primary athentication mechanism and they will provide very little to the external app.

Our announcement about Moodle on the Amazon Cloud got picked up by a prominent ZDNet blog about open source (thanks Dana!). The Blackboard World conference is going on right now and someone chimed in on comments to tell us how great the new Blackboard is. One thing is for sure, Blackboard has remained on a very Web 1.0 archtecture for many years. Feeling the heat from open source may have forced them to innovate and catch up. Disruption in the marketplace always forces innovation! (See the BB reps comments below)

Keynote speaker Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen demonstrated the power and direction of Blackboad NG at today's afternoon session of Blackboard World '08 in Las Vegas. TRULY a Next Generation product that makes any institution's 'learning' go everywhere. + It will now wrap Moodle & Satai. + Courses will be available from Facebook and other social networking sites. + Content displays on iphones, cellphones and other mobile devices + Open API's and Open Source code development for Building Blocks, Modules, add-ons and more! Blackboard is no longer a stand-alone Learning Management System---it just made "learning" ubiquitous to a new generation of users. The glimpse on their web site (http://www.blackboard.com/projectng/) is only a peek compared to what CEO Chasen demo'd today! (not a Blackboard employee but someone who was at the presentation and more impressed with NG then ANYthing I've seen in a decade of online learning/teaching/CMS/LMS)

-YEA RIGHT.....

Greed Tarnishes Salesforce Reputation

On Thursday I was almost giddy when I found a link to get the iPhone upgrade for my (now legacy) iPhone a day early. I upgraded iTunes and my iPhone and started installing new applications. One of the first choices (and high on the most popular list for business.. hmm... who else broke in early?) I made was to get the Salesforce app. This was particularly interesting for me because as a Salesforce user and compulsive slave to my email, I regulary access my Salesforce account on my iPhone to view incoming sales leads as soon as I am notified. The Safari browser is ok but with the scrolling and zooming required it is always slightly annoying.

The Salesforce App looked like a great find, views formatted and scaled to the iPhone screen. I installed the app and entered my account information. It gave me a message saying there was no user in the account with that ID. Odd I though, so I retyped and got the same results. Ok, I'm in a hurry. I'll just wait a day and try to access the system on Friday, after all, they aren't expecting users today right? Next day, same deal, no user in the system. I went so far as to research things on Salesforce support but found nothing. I got busy and didn't get back to it until Saturday. A Google search on Saturday gave me the sad results, I must purchase a Mobile user account to access the system. How much is a mobile user account you ask? $50.

You have to be kidding right???? The app is free but access to the system is $50?!? I get their business model but this really was a bone headed decision, I'm already paying over a $G per user per year to access the system. Accessing the system on mobile Safari cost me $0.00 extra. Salesforce is missing a great opportunity to increase my addiction to their product. Right now they own the CRM SaaS market and they have my data. I've been willing to live with a mild case of vendor lock-in because their technology is so good but now I am beginning to wonder if someone from Redmond recently got hired in their product planning department.

I smell an opportunity. Any of you hot shot Apex developers interested in building your own version of an iPhone app for Salesforce? I'll pay up to $4.99 for your app. Anyone??

Hanging out in the Cloud Cafe

There is beginning to be a nice ecosystem of service providers popping up around Cloud Computing. Today I enjoyed a conversation with John Willis, host of the Cloud Cafe podcast. We spent time discussing the future of cloud computing and where things are heading with regards to standards, cloud portability and the business model of using cloud computing.

For anyone interested in learning more about the geeky things in DigitalChalk, you will enjoy this podcast. John maintains one of the most comprehensive venues for all things cloud computing related. I'm personally excited to see him start introducing Amazon Cloud training courses on DigitalChalk.

Why Yahoo Can't Sell Search

I want to thank Yahoo for sending me a notification today that my credit card was going to be charged $150 again for the privilege of being listed on search index. It allowed me to (try) to remove my payment information to avoid wasting another $150 this year. It seems that with Yahoo stupidity has not bounds. Not only did they charge me to get our site indexed on a timely basis, they failed to deliver on the stated benefits. For the past year Yahoo delivered a whopping .04% of DigitalChalk organic search traffic and it took them SEVEN MONTHS to get us into their index. Of the 492 websites that provided me with referral traffic in the past 12 months, Yahoo ranked 17th behind AOL, ASK! and news.com (all of whom I did not do anything to get indexed with). Do I need to tell you who was first? Of course not. I paid nothing to Google for my site to be indexed and through simple SEO activities we moved from start-up to a PR4 in our first five months.

I'm happy to spend my SEM budget on Google. Now that they are supplying the ads for Yahoo search I'll get placement on whatever paltry search scraps Yahoo throws my way.

Oh, by the way, you can't cancel with Yahoo. Once they take your credit card, it's a black hole. You have to see this from their FAQ to believe it. To stop paying them the $150 I had to change my credit card information to something bogus. There is no such thing as cancellation when it comes to paid listings on Yahoo. The reason given? "For security reasons, we are not able to close customer accounts." Who's security are you protecting Yahoo? Jerry, it's not going to work buddy! Carl, save yourself the humiliation, there is nothing worth saving.

Net Parenting Destroys Productivity

There are two fundamental schools of thought for enterprise IT management. Having experienced both extremes I am convinced that most CIOs are the victim of their own well-intended efforts to enforce boundaries. It is the natural inclination of most IT professionals to place boundaries around what software and and network resources are available. This is a behavior born of necessity, everyone can't have access to everything and the truth of the matter is that it's a matter of self preservation for IT. While acnowledging a need for boundries, productivity is born from creativity and rapid access to content and data. At some point if we take the control approach to an extreme the tools intended to empower users become the shakles that bind them.

I was recently helping in a small organization and during a meeting the presenter approached me to see if someone could play a specific piece of bumper music as an intro. When I inquired about that and suggested we just download the song from iTunes I was informed that would not work because iTunes was blocked from access on the network. Why? The answer I got from the system admin who made the decision was "we can't let people just be downloading music here at the office." "Really", I reply, "why not?" I get a blank stare... I must be stupid, didn't I know music could destroy the business....

Opening up the toolbox to users so they can do things we didn't anticipate them doing is going to clutter up machines and make more work for IT to clean up right? Probably so but then again, maybe it's time for the tail to stop wagging the dog. There are smart ways to establish boundries. We don't have to enforce all boundries with technologies. People are amazingly adept at learning, let's start teaching them how to use technology in a safe and productive way instead of treating them like idiots. If we find we have technology idiots on staff who can't learn then perhaps we can create a dunse community and send them to it.

Here are three ways small to medium sized orgs can reduce IT cost/effort and headache:

1. Outsource your net-nanny activities to OpenDNS.com. It's free, effective and they will do a lot better job of policing the "bad" sites than you ever could.

2. Move your internal mail server and network storage servers to Google Apps for Business and Jungle Disk. It's the 21st century, quit hosting your mail and storage locally, it's a headache and your staff will never be as good as the pro's at the hosted services.

3. Take the dollars saved and buy Macs. Your employees will love you and your PC support cost savings will more than offset the difference in price.

The Dell Cloud a Microsoft Threat?

Dell is quietly moving into the cloud space. Steven Schuckenbrock, CIO of Dell talkes at length about X86 infrastructure in cloud computing in a recent interview with Dan Farber. There is almost no mention of Microsoft when talking about virtualization capabilities. The only mention of Microsoft in the 10 minute interview was in describing competitive cloud computing initiatives, Microsoft was listed along with Google and Amazon as an example of trends in the cloud.

Dell has the potential to be a cloud computing powerhouse and they are clearly thinking about SaaS and cloud computing in a unified strategy. I'd bet on Dell making a strong play for moving enterprise customers over into a cloud delivery approach. They dominate the desktop hardware arena in the enterprise and are a trusted partner for most corporate CIOs.

The message that Steven is telegraphing is that the era of desktop computing has ended, at least from the standpoint of new market share initiatives at Dell.