Good News for the Little Guys

Targeting what it considers to be “one of the brightest areas of social media,” Visible Technologies today releases VI-LITE, a compact version of its more expansive software made for small to mid-sized businesses (SMB), who are anticipated to show 57 percent growth in social media usage this year. The company, a provider of social media monitoring, analytics and engagement software and services, has also added engagement features to its Visible Intelligence platform, made for enterprise customers like Microsoft, Fed-Ex and American Express, along with V∙IQ, a social performance dashboard.

VI-LITE allows those with smaller scaled platforms to engage their customers and chart the impact without mulling through a seemingly endless pile of tools fostering a piece-mail social strategy or paying big bucks to have someone else figure it out for them. Braced for the challenge, the newest edition from Visible Technologies helps SMB brands to host and monitor more impactful discourse with their customers. The software comes with on-demand intelligence to monitor perceptions, gauge trends, and gain insight on customers and competitors.

It also spreads the company’s influence wider in the field of social business, now able to assist all types of enterprises with their advanced technology.

Kelly Pennock, CEO of Visible Technologies, had this to say about the release:

We continue to push product innovation for enterprise customers who rely on the Visible Intelligence platform for listening, analyzing, and engaging with consumers in the fast paced social media market…With VI∙LITE we’ve leveled the playing field for small to medium sized businesses by providing access to the same technology being used by large enterprises. A key to this is having a real-time understanding of what the market is saying and making better informed decisions based on social data.”

Neglecting A Burgeoning Market

According to v3im.com, SMB marketing expenditures came in at about US$ 1.1 billion last year, and are expected to climb upwards to US$ 2 billion in 2012. However, as the article also points out, there’s a difference in merely using social media and using it well. Capitalizing on likes, shares and the enormous wealth of user data does not always come second nature to those new to the field, and many business are missing the boat even with the obvious. Constant Contact pulled together some new figures last year and found that few SMBs were utilizing daily deals like Groupon, despite all the attention drawn to the new IPO.

Thus, a company like Visible Technologies could be just what the doctor ordered. It provides a simple solution with enormous potential that assuredly was never possible in the past.

As marketing guru, Mark Harai comments on his blog, “You now have the ability to create content on a media platform you own and control for about the cost of a cup of coffee a day. What more could you possibly ask for?”

And it was great for end users. Not only because it drove system costs down, but it also created a rich market of add-on products — everyone could mix and match hardware to create their optimal system, whether they cared about cost or performance or maintainability or upgradability or whatever. Corporations could spec out and build standard low cost machines, enthusiasts could build super-tweaked machines, verticals could build out specialty machines, all on the same open hardware platform.

In the last 15 years, though, the market has shifted dramatically towards the laptop form factor. This shift has been a relative disaster for MSFT. The industry has moved away from an open hardware chassis with mix-and-match components, to closed tightly-engineered all-in-one machines. This shift has played to Apple’s strengths in design and integration and has negated many of the benefits of the PC ecosystem. The PC industry is still struggling to figure out how to regain design and profit momentum — Intel’s Ultrabook effort being the latest scheme. But the Ultrabook is just a direct response to the MacBook, it does nothing to recapture the open hardware experience of the 90s.

The open hardware community still exists in various forms, but is no longer focused on the PC platform and is not much of an asset for MSFT. Enthusiasts still build PCs, mostly for gaming — Maximum PC for instance has a good guide to components, Newegg is the place to buy. But this isn’t mainstream any more. The “maker” community is vibrant but is focused on other platforms largely — Arduino, the Kickstarter community, etc. The vibe and energy around open hardware is great, but it is no longer tied to the PC experience and is no longer an asset for MSFT.

MSFT has always been great at chasing taillights and is hard at work supporting the Ultrabook, competing with the Apple stores at retail, pushing Windows Phone, etc. But chasing Apple’s taillights results in products that are more and more like Apple’s — fully integrated hardware/software/services, a captive retail experience. MSFT has to do all this, the mainstream of the market is here, but there is nothing distinctive about the resultant products and experience. The Ultrabook/Windows/Microsoft Store products may equal the Apple experience, and may offer users a few more choices of hardware brands (does anyone care?), but the experience won’t stand out. Necessary work but not sufficient to recapture thought leadership in the market — at the end of the day, MSFT will be able to claim parity but no more than that.

If I was in a leadership role at MSFT, I’d invest in strategies to recreate the open hardware platform dynamic around the Windows platform. It is not obvious how to do so with the laptop and tablet as the mainstream platform, but I would spend $100s of millions trying. MSFT clearly has the cash to spend on new frontiers and new adventures, a couple hundred million on an effort to change the basis of competition in the PC market seems like a wise bet, even if it fails.

How about putting a “maker’s corner” in every retail store with modified cases and modified machines, maybe even workshops? Get the energy of the PC gaming community into the store, let people see this energy. How can the laptop design be modified to support add on hardware — super high speed optical expansion busses, wireless high speed expansion busses, novel expansion chassis ideas? Sifteo cubes are kind of cool, can this idea be used to provide hardware extensions to laptops? Are there other ways to “snap on” hardware to extend the laptop or tablet, using bluetooth or induction or other mechanisms? Can MSFT seed the maker community with funds or tools? Can MSFT embrace Arduino somehow, or Kickstarter? Could the PC be the hub for thousands of Arduino-based sensors and actuators and gadgets? These ideas are all admittedly poorly thought out, and I am not sure any one idea is right, or if any will work.

But I would spend a lot of money chasing after any idea that would move away from closed all-in-one hardware designs, and I would experiment with many ways to reinject open hardware dynamics back into the PC/tablet market. Ultrabook is not this — it is a fine and adequate taillight chaser, but it won’t shift competitive balance back in MSFT’s favor.

This is not the only reason for MSFT’s stagnation in the last decade, there are many other aspects to consider, but the dwindling of the open hardware ecosystem has been a loss of MSFT. For another take on Apple’s success against MSFT in the last decade, check out Rich’s analysis – the observations about vertical vs horizontal integration ring true.

But it sounds like this is still a work in progress. Avvo says dentists from all over the country are available to take part in the site’s question-and-answer product, but the actual dentist business listings are only formal right now in seven states: California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Washington, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Dentists in other states, though, can still claim their listing by searching for their name in the directory.

I don’t have a strong feeling right now about where Avvo fits in as a local citation source, or even a source of traffic. I do know that I continue to see Avvo pages rank well when I do searches for local medical professionals, ergo it’s a good idea to at least make sure the profile page is accurate, up-to-date and filled out as completely as possible.

We are experiencing a number of shifts and a true evolution in enterprise IT. It seems like every day there is a new term being coined and new trends “up and coming.” During these past several decades, a few major waves come to mind and can be identified as ongoing trends:

1. Mainframe / mini era (1959)

2. Networked desktops and client server (1986ish)

3. Browser based and app server (1997)

4. Mobile and “cloud” (2008)

Each of these major trends caused transitions that led to a new way of interacting with technology. I like to call this shift, “re-platforming.” It’s bigger than merely a transformation since it affects the way things are “stood-up” in an enterprise. As this re-platforming is a catalyst for IT, which constantly needs to reposition/rebrand itself to meet current times and the needs of its users.

Mainframe/mini era

I don’t have first-hand experience working with mainframes and mini computers, but I did see them fade to the background with the proliferation of microprocessor-based systems in the 1980s. What makes this interesting is with the arrival of the microprocessor-based PC those in the mainframe/mini industry belittled it for not being a “real” computer. Yet, use of the PC grew and soon it took over jobs previously only done on its bigger cousins, such as data entry and text editing – use cases which opened the door for disruption and innovation, arrived by way of Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Word. The PC no longer needed a reason to be, and it ushered in a completely new definition of a computer.

Networked desktops and client servers

As technology advanced, the PC became more powerful and technologists began looking for ways to improve on their performance by connecting computers together, leading to the development of Ethernet in 1980. Ethernet allowed PCs to be connected together, and soon the notion of networking the PC (client) to a host (server) was born. The idea encouraged openness and commoditized hardware and software and gave rise to the idea that your client could be anywhere; it no longer had to be in the same building or even the same state.

Browser based and application servers

In the mid 1990s, the Internet began to take hold and IT experimented with the idea of using a central server to house an application and using the Internet as the access point to the application. Since networking and server disciplines need to exist as a prerequisite, the build out of client-servers laid the groundwork for the application servers – if your hardware (client) could be anywhere, why couldn’t the application be anywhere? This brings us to the browser and application server era. The growth of programmable web servers and browsers shepherded in application platforms like BEA and .NET, and the broad deployment of software such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer resource management (CRM) empowered businesses to garner more value from their data.

Cloud and Mobile

More recently, IT has begun to ride the cloud and mobile wave. Everyday I see new companies and innovative technologies that are emerging to leverage this trend. While we’re still at an early point of adoption with cloud, it is clear that it is and will continue to be a huge game changer for IT.

Cloud computing encompasses many things and I want to look at both public and private (hybrid) clouds and emerging technologies, which include the development of “as a service” platforms, mainly:

· Software as a Service (SaaS) – the new way software is delivered

· Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – think of it as the new server, network and storage

· Platform as a Service (PaaS) – the new developer tool stack

These emerging technologies are having a huge impact on IT and are put to work differently based on the specifics of each enterprise’s requirements. On-premise, or private, cloud computing (IaaS and PaaS) is important for enterprises looking to maintain the privacy aspect but still receive the same self-service semantics as public cloud. Public, or hosted, cloud computing enables central IT managers to have the flexibility to broker various services to their business users, saving dramatically on costs and time.

In mobile, as always, history repeats itself. For just as the mainframe computing world belittled the PC, so the PC world belittled the mobile handheld device. Think back to 2007, when the iPhone was first introduced. The cool mobile phone was the small sleek Motorola Razr – and its champions poked fun of the iPhone and called it a brick. And yet, what happened at the end of this year’s Super Bowl? The TV cameras charged into the field as the Lombardi Trophy was about to be awarded. What did viewers see? A sea of iPhones in the hands of NY Giants players as they rushed to capture the winning moment. Yes, the iPhone and the other smartphones it ushered in have won. They are first-class computing citizens with capabilities that laptops lack including location-based services and truly continuous connectivity. Mobile devices as enterprise IT endpoints are no longer the exception but rather the rule.

Users are enamored with their smartphones with always-on connectivity and easy access, visually exciting applications that find their favorite restaurant, or keeping them connected to family and friends. These very same users want these attributes in their business applications too. They want to point (or touch) and shoot, and within seconds have their application up and running. They don’t want to have to enter a URL in a browser – it’s the last resort now. So on the surface one may say “so what” the phone is a micro computer with a little OS and some APIs, just hire a developer to create little applications for that small screen. If only it were that simple. The phone is outside the corporate network completely and the apps need to deal with network latency that would give inside the house app timeouts left and right. The phone doesn’t readily give an end user the opportunity to authenticate with Active Directory and needs its own functionality and development framework, which turns out gave birth to mobile PaaS. The establishment never sees the disruption in its true glory.

What about getting apps on to the device and managing them? Is this an IT function? What traditional PC and app lifecycle management tools are built for this? Ah, the web app. IT moved away from heavy weight apps a while ago and now we’re back to doing that again for mobile. So the net of it is all the challenges equal opportunity where desire is high at the point of attack.

The next big shift

With each new trend disruption followed and brought along opportunity. Opportunity for the next brilliant mind to create a technology that saw the solution to the obstacle. Each trend was accompanied by the creation of new companies and technologies. What disruption will arise from the mobile and cloud trend?

I’m betting on technology born in and enabling the success of big consumer facing properties like Facebook, Zynga and Google as the next shapers of enterprise IT. Examples include NoSQL, Hadoop and social mechanics. Unstructured data is growing faster than structured data and is being mined for business intelligence and productivity. Organizations are attempting to leverage social networks, fascinated by the interaction people have with each other and their ability to rally a protest or crowdsource the facts of a news story. It’s only a matter of time before our yearbook photos and status updates are part of the company directory.

We’re at the start of a wave and new companies are being created on a daily basis to lead the way to innovation. Each previous wave resulted in the creation of great enterprise software companies and we are sure to see this continue. Disruption creates opportunity and the desire to grab the opportunity yields outstanding innovation. At Ignition Partners, we are investing in this latest wave now and will continue to invest in technologies that are addressing the needs of future waves. As operators during the previous waves, and now as investors, we’re excited to be part of it.

via GigaOm, Brad Silverberg shares his perspective on how Facebook’s IPO could impact company culture…

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Get ready for a blockbuster — and almost nuts — technology 2012. Why? Because Facebook is doing the mother of all initial public offerings.

And much like Netscape and Google before it, the $5 billion offering is being viewed as the much-awaited catalyst for the technology industry and is expected to set off a flurry of activity. I have been here long enough to cover the IPOs of both Netscape and Google, and on both occasions, the tailgate effect was enough to pull even the clunkers (read: marginal startups) to the proverbial finish line.

We are already seeing four recently public companies — Pandora, LinkedIn, Zynga andGroupon — ramping up their efforts to buy little startups. Google is competing for talent and so are other Internet giants. And now Facebook!

I have been wondering whether we would see a slow exodus of Facebook employees, which in turn would force the social networking giant to go out and start acq-hiring people by buying a lot of tiny startups. And if more of these little companies get acquired, the more dollars would rush into the startups and thus creating a fly-wheel effect. The presence of Facebook millionaires is only going to accelerate angel investment activity….

Brad Silverberg, a veteran of Microsoft and other tech companies and general partner at Ignition Partners, a Seattle-based venture fund, thinks that the IPO could have a corroding influence on the company culture.

One of the biggest challenges Facebook will face is the gulf between the have’s and have-not’s within Facebook.  It can create tremendous internal stress and can result in people leaving to follow their own entrepreneurial dreams. This can be both for early people who made it and love the thrill of the startup, and for later people who are contributing, gain confidence, and now want to go off and make their own fortunes.

I think Brad’s point is pretty spot-on. I have seen this haves-versus-havenots  dynamic create havoc at many companies before. I have spoken to multiple people and there is a general sense in the Valley that there is a large contingent of Facebook-ers who are ready to bolt. Google in comparison didn’t see an exodus of employees till recently, mostly because of its deep engineering-centric culture. Google, before it was grafted with the Microsoft genes, was a company where the smartest people went to be with the smartest people. It wasn’t till 2007 that the company started to lose its top-rated talent…

Read the full article on GigaOm.

Guest post in Forbes written by John Caron, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Modiv Media.

Here’s a quick perspective. If you buy a TV via your iPad, is that mobile commerce? In my opinion, no. Yes, a tablet is a “mobile” device, but the experience the purchaser had was with a tablet-optimized website. Ditto for the person who bought a Mercedes SLR via eBay mobile on their smartphone (for $240,001). This is mobile-enabled ecommerce. Not mobile commerce. For the retail and mobile industries to better understand (and report on the growth of) this crazy thing called mobile commerce, or m=commerce, we need to break it out into three categories

• Mobile e-commerce: Transacting with an e=commerce site via a mobile device. Examples include: eBay mobile, Amazon mobile, the Tesco app in Korea, and the majority of mobile commerce “apps.”
• Mobile payment: Payment using the smartphone as the conduit. Examples include: Google Wallet, PayPal, and LevelUp.
• Mobile commerce (in-store): The ability to purchase physical goods in the store via an app that interacts with the store’s point-of-sale system (and bypass the checkout process). Examples include SCAN IT! Mobile from Stop & Shop, Starbucks Card Mobile app, and Chipotle Mobile Ordering App.

Read more at Forbes or visit Modiv Media for more information.

On the business front, it was announced that we led a round in Symplified. Great company building some pretty essential tools to manage employee identity and engagement across the web, can’t imagine how companies manage their voice and presence without this.

We also joined the investor group behind Whiptail, who build high-scale SSD arrays to replace spinning disks. Spinning disks — seems like we will look back at these in 100 years and laugh, or at least class them as a steampunk kind of gadget.

Excited to work with both companies.

Symplified, which provides identity and access management tools for cloud applications, has raised$20 million in Series C funding led by Ignition Partners. Existing investor Allegis Capital, Granite Ventures, and Quest Software also participated in the financing, which brings the company’s total funding to $38.8 million.

With more than 3.8 million subscribers, Symplified offers a cloud identity and access management service for enterprises. Businesses can use Symplified for cloud identity management, access control, single sign-on for employees, user management and auditing across any access device using a unique proxy gateway architecture deployed either in the cloud or on premises. The company provides secure access to SaaS applications like Salesforce, ADP, WebEx, Xactly, Taleo, Success Factors and many others.

Clients include HP, Blue Shield, ESPN, Forest Laboratories, Moody’s, Zynga, Netflix, Rambus and Dolby Laboratories.

Read more at Techcrunch or visit Symplified for more information.

Ignition Partners is continuing its transformation into a national venture capital firm. The latest example is WhipTail, a Whippany, New Jersey company that today announced a second round of venture capital financingfrom RRE Ventures, Spring Mountain Capital and Ignition. The size of the investment was not disclosed. But, as part of the deal, Ignition’s Richard Fade is joining the board.

WhipTail describes itself as an all-flash enterprise class storage array, a solution that boosts storage performance. More than 100 customers are currently using the technology, including inVentiv Health, The Pension’s Trust and Ohio.gov. Today, AMD announced that it replaced 480 15K spinning drives with WhipTail’s solid-state storage arrays, a move that the companies said will eliminate slow response times associated with the older technology.