LoudSpeakers

I was asked to put together a group of interesting folks to discuss issues related to, the oft abused moniker, Web 2.0 for the TiECon East event held in Waltham, MA on May 30.

I picked people that I thought were the most interesting and capable of having a conversation about the future of the Web and business models related to it. Thanks to the following folks bringing their insight to the panel:

Fred Wilson - A VC from NYC is a thought leader in this space with a wicked (we saw that word here in Boston) sense of humor to boot.
Don Dodge - The man with the coolest name in Tech is in BD with Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. He always has insights given his vast operating experience.
Brian Balfour - Founder of Viximo, based in Cambridge, MA, is leading the charge with new ways to monetize social networks with digital goods.
Nabeel Hyatt - Nabeel runs Conduit Labs, a social gaming platform. You can find him sipping lattes at Open Coffee Boston and talking entrepreneurship.

And David Cancel, Lookery CTO and Founder, asked the interesting questions and steered the panel.

There’s insight into Twitter’s rumored recent $15M venture round. Apparently, it hasn’t closed and anything you read in the blogs was pure conjecture.

The conversation is great. But the video quality sorta sucks. Oh, and the sound needs to be fully jacked-up. But if you work in this space, this video should be of interest to you.

I use Dreamhost quite a bit for a variety of domain hosting.  I recently tried using it for DNS services for a custom domain name that I was using for a tumblr tumblog.

It didn’t work so well.  (the Dreamhost DNS part that is)

The idea itself is simple:  You create a CNAME DNS record pointing to the Tumblr IP address.  And then they handle it internally when requests come in.

The problem with Dreamhost is that it creates a number of CNAME records for domains that they are managing as part of your account.

Dreamhost allows you to create multiple CNAME records as expected, but doesn’t consistently work.  For some unknown reason, my CNAME record that pointed to tumblr’s IP address would occassionally resolve to what appeared to be an HTTP directory listing enabled site.  I mean, WTF? 

In any case, I forgot that DynDNS was the best solution.  I pointed my rajzilla.com’s nameservers to DynDNS (rather than through Dreamhost) and then created a CNAME record there that points to Tumblr and now it consistently works. 

You have to use the DynDNS custom domain service in order for this to work, but these guys have been super through the ~8 years that I have used their paid service.  And it’s cheap as hell.

Sanjay Kumar, the former CEO of Computer Associates, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his part in the accounting scandal that shaved billions of dollars from the company’s market cap. 

He plead guilty for his part in masterminding a 35–day accounting month that also allowed for software sales to occur during a given quarter, but allowed the customer to return products or not pay for the transaction.  In effect, the company’s performance was artificially inflated to achieve revenue targets.  Meanwhile, he personally profited from the company’s perceived strong performance. 

The blogs are buzzing on the news of Google acquiring YouTube.  Plenty of people have been musing about the intellectual property issues surrounding YouTube, the competition with MySpace Video, and Yahoo’s failure to acquire.  And YouTube has been busy striking all sorts of interesting deals with traditional media companies.  But no one’s really talking about the real loser in this deal:  Adobe. 

YouTube pioneered Flash based video presentation for the public internet, but they did it using Adobe’s technology.  Now everyone is using Flash for online video.  Simply selling Flash creation tools doesn’t seem to me to be an incredibly interesting business compared to the possiblities of monetizing the content which are disproportionately larger. 

Berkeley is offering a series of lectures from various classes in podcast and/or video format for general public consumption.  I love the open format of it all and applaud the use of new media.  There are a number of classes that I am interested in.  One in particular entitled “Data Structures” is something I have always wanted to take, but the subject matter of classes offered is rather broad. 

Here’s a list of the courses.

BusineekWeek has an article about the spread of Linux in India.  It’s a great read for anyone interested in the philosophical spread of open source software and the inherent challenges of proprietary wares in the developing world. 

“We’re using something called Linux,” says 12-year-old Arya VM as she plays with Tux Paint, a Linux drawing and painting application. And Windows? “Never heard of it,” she says.

Digg appears to have become a cross between high school and a soap opera.  Melrose Place, maybe?

http://digg.com/tech_news/Gaming_Digg_New_Changes#c2960255

Poor Patricia Dunn.  She’s being butchered by the blogosphere and the mainstream media.  But, rightly so.  She was caught spying on her board members and journalists. 

The basic facts are these: HP’s general counsel, at the request of its board, hired an outside investigative agency to determine who on the board had been leaking information to the press earlier this year. When the agency reported back that the leaker had been director George Keyworth, a former science advisor to President Reagan, Keyworth admitted it and was asked by Dunn to resign. He refused.

There followed a long chain of events, including the resignation from the board of Keyworth’s friend and fellow director Tom Perkins. Now, largely because of prodding by Perkins, it has emerged that in order to obtain those phone records, HP’s agent used methods that are unethical at best (and probably illegal as well).

The company admitted in an SEC filing yesterday that its contractors had lied to the phone company - on how many occasions remains unclear - by pretending to be someone they were not. They then were granted access to personal phone records.

If she was investigating the HP board by examining their HP email and internal HP telephone records it’s all fair game.  Accessing the home and cell records of board members AND journalists by hired private investigators who are pretexting crosses the line. 

The unethical (and possibly illegal) practices authorized by the Chairwoman of HP are reprehensible.  She’s claiming ignorance.  She didn’t know the precise methods that the PI was using to figure out which board member leaked information to the media.  Bullshit.  She’s responsible.  She has to go. 

And it’s comes at a time when HP was finally recovering post-Compaq-Carly ™.  Profits are up, Dell looks more and more like the ugly girl in school, and Mark Hurd looked unstoppable as HP CEO. 

And poor HP.  The shareholders and employees deserve better. 

I have been writing about software for enterprises for a long time.  Some of that writing focused on the new era of applications and some of it was more focused on the traditional side.  In either case, I felt that it needed it’s own life rather than continue to be mixed with things like my personal opinion and my podcast.  Introducing Kung Fu Apps.  To my knowledge, there’s not another blog with the same type of focus on enterprise startups and applications with a similar approach. 

It also plays into BigSwerve, my consumer facing startup.  I can’t say exactly why they’re related, but they are.  Kung Fu Apps allows me to continue to write about subject matter than I know about extensively and care about deeply. 

Kung Fu Apps was named by my friend Jerry.  I expressed to him what I wanted to write about and he came up with the name and a catch phrase:  Kickin’ Apps in the Enterprise.  It is brilliant —  a catch phrase with a double entendre.  And the name, Kung Fu Apps, is something that the enterprise publications lack:  a little levity. 

Hat tip to Mike Arrington of TechCrunch for the inspiration to do what he did for the consumer space. 

Btw, here’s the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kungfuapps

Kiko closed it’s doors.  Everyone in the echo chamber knows that now.  All 90,000 of us.  They have important lessons for startup guys like me:  Keep focused, build smart, keep it simple.

But my issue with any online calendar application that’s not Google Calendar or something integrated into Microsoft is that you’re not part of the transaction.  Google Calendar and Outlook are integrated into a host of other functions. 

It’s like the issue with Rapleaf.  Portable reputation is a cool concept, but how do they get into the transaction?  They’re not part of the eBay transaction when checking out especially now that they have been banned.  They’re not part of the Rent-a-Coder transaction when I finish paying a guy to do some work.  They’re not part of any system unless that vendor agrees to eliminate its own process for rating members for some 3rd party application.  It’s like outsourcing your logins to OpenID.  Great concept.  Tough sell.

I heard about the problems faced by the FBI regarding the development of their Virtual Case File (VCF) while I was working for Documentum/EMC.  The case is only unique in that hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted rather than hundreds of thousands by private firms.  We saw this type of failure frequently in all sorts of sectors, not just the government, but we never saw anything that was quite this massive. 

There’s a certain baseless reluctance by governments and large firms that sometimes only small businesses seem to understand.  “Commerical software can’t possibly do what WE need it to do.”  That’s the assumption that plagues some govt organizations (and sometimes big businesses) that think their problem of dealing with data is unique.  Sure, the business problem at hand is inherently different, but the technology and methods on the back end are mostly identical.  But it doesn’t help when you have a government contractor steering or allowing you to steer in the wrong direction when they should be calling the turns.  After all, that’s why consultants exist, right?

The most amusing example of this problem was when a hospital, for instance, would try to write their own custom applications because somehow they care for patients differently than the rest of the world and their applications should reflect it.  Or a bank that tries to write it’s own system to manage checks from the ground up. Um, hello!  (Pssst:  the rest of the world writes checks too.) 

It’s like the government saying that they needed to buy dump trucks to clean up after 9/11, but the commercially available ones were not sufficient somehow.  So they contract with a firm to build dump trucks completely from scratch.  Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

The FBI’s failed system is a classic case of trying to reinvent the wheel rather than just acquiring off-the-shelf applications and customizing it to spec.  There’s not a developer of software that doesn’t have an API that allows for customization or integration with other apps.  It’s common practice.

SAIC can’t take all of the blame, but they certainly knew that using commercial software and customizing it would have meant a smaller deal size with the government.  Why save the government hundreds of millions of dollars and enormous risk, not just risk associated with project failure but risk related to national security, with time tested commercial software when they can get paid to reinvent the wheel?  They put their own greed over national security.  Responsible parties at the executive level should have stepped in and put the kibosh on the deal.  What transpired was intellectually immoral.

I wrote about WinFS late last year and provided some of my thoughts on the subject. In the days and weeks after writing the post, I noticed a massive number of referrers in my logs from microsoft.com directly to that post. For a period of weeks, it was my most viewed post — mostly from employees at Microsoft. Apparently, it touched a nerve and people must have received it in widely sent internal emails.

Microsoft announced recently that they’re essentially slowing the growth of the project by including it as a component of SQL Server. I have never fully liked the idea of an object-relational file system —- especially if it comes from Microsoft. That’s not because I enjoy Microsoft bashing, but I have real-world experience with storing massive numbers of files in Windows file systems.  NTFS just doesn’t cut it when you exceed 25 million files per partition. If a machine sets the dirty bit on that partition, a reboot can take days potentially to complete due to checkdsk. Adding layers to the file system to add nifty functionality is great in theory, but in practice it’s almost impossible to make it scale for enterprises when it’s based on a Windows file system.

WinFS sounded better for the consumer in some regards. They’ll never need the same sort of scalability that enterprise data centers demand, but the adoption of such functionality is still dependent on application developers seeing value in the offering.  Bundling WinFS with SQL Server is one assured way of keeping it out of the consumer space unless perhaps an application uses the developer edition of SQL Server.  But this is still a big barrier if Microsoft wanted to see adoption in the consumer space.

I spent the better part of the last decade dealing with issues surrounding adding metadata to NTFS using something called the extended attribute block. It’s sort of a free form area of the file system for low-level developers to store stuff. It was a bad idea to use the EA block to store meta information and I doubt that WinFS was much better.

I received an email from the engineers on my team in India that ISPs have started allowing access to the blocked typepad.com and blogspot.com domains after the Bombay attacks.  Apparently, they weren’t able to selectively block certain blogs (for whatever reason), but have realized how insanely ineffective it was to attempt to block anything at all.  There are numerous ways to get around the block considering RSS aggregators, email notification, and anonymous proxies amongst other things.

Apparently, the basis for the blocking was related to content on 18 blogs that the government deemed to contain “extremely derogatory references to Islam.”  Regardless of the precise content, I find it appalling that the world’s largest democracy would implement such far reaching acts of censorship even in the face of possible sectarian violence.  I’m also quite surprised that the government thinks that it can possibly manage the process of censoring the sites that might contain questionable content.  Only the Chinese are that good.

EMC, my former employer, announced it was acquiring RSA for $2.1B. It’s their ballsiest (sp?) move to date. They’ve been talking about buying into the security wheel for sometime, but I thought it would continue around acqusitions like Enterprise DRM vendor Authentica.

I would suggest that acquisition of RSA is the most radical yet complimentary acquisition by EMC to date. Legato made perfect sense. VMWare was brilliant, but makes total sense. Documentum? 2nd most radical, but brilliantly executed.
After this acquisition, EMC is probably in top 5 largest software companies by revenue in the world. Not too bad for a company originally known for storage hardware. I’m curious as to who else was involved in the bidding war. Aparently, it was fierce.

But don’t forget about EMC as a services company. They have quietly been snapping up professional services firms in the recent months. This is a company determined to win the low-margin hardware game by combining them with high-margin software and services.

Update: This BusinessWeek article mentions that the other bidder was Symantec. This wouldn’t be the first time that Veritas/Symantec lost a key bidding war against EMC. See VMWare…

Vinod Khosla did an interview with Dateline NBC that you should watch if you’re interested in how America will relinquish dependence on foreign oil sources in the future by using ethanol rather than traditional petroleum based fuel sources.

One’s imagingation can run wild when thinking about all the countries that could emerge as future fuel heavy-weights based upon their agricultural landscape.

Link: The answer to sky-high

Note:  MSNBC makes it difficult to link to their content, so follow the link and scroll down or search on their site for Khosla.