Twitter and CEOs

Great story from BusinessWeek. So the big guns are using Twitter  – great. It’s about as close as we can get to presence-based social networking.. we are surely connected together in an event stream. But still, we miss the visual presence. And this is where In Real Life (IRL) comes in. On January 5, you will see the power of presence-based social networking. Stay tuned!

Tags: IRL, IRL Connect, Twitter

How to tell your mom what Twitter is

So you know when you have those conversations with your mother and try explain what social networking is all about? And then you get frustrated and just end up telling her she will never get it so why bother? Well this blog should do th trick. Great great entry on what Twitter is all about, and how to use it to grow your business. It’s a great story with fantastic references. Read it and go forth and Twitter!

Tags: Facebook, Social network service, Twitter

Some things may not need to be measured

Measurement. It’s only because the ad world has to justify themselves because people pay them gobs of money to get us to buy stuff.  So this need to measure the ROI on social networking is on everyone’s minds. There is a lot of talk out there to try and find the right way to measure social networking even though measurement doesn’t quite fit, it’s like the shoe you really want, but its too small for your foot.  Everyone is crazy for social networking -but we aren’t even quite sure if it can be measured.  And we have a suspicion that maybe we all don’t want to know.  We know it works, well we are pretty sure it works, but we seem to really like it so we don’t want measurement to come and ruin a good time. Which is why we like this recent article in Contentinople about monetizing social networks.- JLH

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Tattletech Hot Seat – Tideway CEO, Richard Muirhead

This one we couldn’t wait to post – Tattletech met Richard at Red Herring‘s ETRE in October and immediately liked the way he talked about his company and the value they brought to the market. Richard is the CEO of Tideway which clearly has the best tagline we have ever seen – Get a grip on it. They seem to have made data center search software cool – including winning a World Economic Forum pioneer. We had a virtual chat with Richard and still marvel at the company’s innovative approach to market. - JLH

Tattletech: Explain to us all about IT automation. What is it and why is it important?
Richard Muirhead: IT automation holds the promise of enabling real-time infrastructure management that will help companies optimize and maximize IT investments, improve efficiency and lower their total cost of ownership. Businesses now realize they need some process around the distributed, diverse technology they’ve implemented over the years, which is where IT automation and management tools come into play. These types of solutions can accelerate cost-savings initiatives, streamline virtualization ventures, and lay the groundwork for cloud computing projects. To realize these benefits, companies need an automated picture of the complete IT infrastructure that is constantly updated and reconciled and can help them move from individually held tribal knowledge and data silos to a more shared view of their IT environment.

TT: What are the benefits of automated discovery and application dependency mapping software?
RM: One way to describe it is this: Automated discovery and dependency mapping software acts like a thousand well-behaved “systems administrators in a box” working 24/7/365. It continuously maps your entire IT infrastructure, including virtual components, across all technology layers, in hours rather than months – from business applications to switches and all the dependencies in between. This type of transparency gives you a complete picture of how IT supports the business to quickly cut costs, reduce risk and better manage change in your IT environment.

TT: Who is your target audience? Any particular industry where you focus?
RM: Tideway has particularly strong customer success stories in the financial, insurance, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, outsourcing and public sectors. Companies today are turning to Foundation to take the cost and risk out of their critical data center projects, including migration, consolidation and virtualization initiatives. Foundation is valuable to companies that are IT-dependent, have a high cost of IT downtime, need to meet compliance requirements like PCI, SOX and software license management, and are looking for fast time to value.

We also recently made a Community Edition of Tideway Foundation available so we could put it in the hands of people in these organizations who would be using it on a day-to-day basis. The free download gives end-users the opportunity to try before they buy and deploy Foundation in their own IT environments. Community Edition is available to anyone for download, and can be found here: http://www.tideway.com/downloads/foundation/ <http://www.tideway.com/downloads/foundation/> .

TT: Without Tideway, how do IT departments manage their data centers?
RM: IT departments that haven’t deployed automated discovery and dependency mapping typically rely heavily on manual efforts to baseline their data centers. Unfortunately, a manual approach to gathering this information is error-prone, time-consuming and takes so long that it’s almost immediately out-of-date. These organizations are also taking a large risk by allowing key “tribal knowledge,” as we like to call it, to reside within the brains of a few individuals. The absence or departure of any of these people means your critical data is walking out the door, and that can create unforeseen incidents and additional management costs. Organizations that rely on a manual approach and don’t have accurate, automated information can lose money at an alarming rate. For example:

…When you don’t know how many servers you have that have been decommissioned but are still running, you can lose money on powering and cooling those servers.
…When you’re planning a data center move and don’t know which business applications rely on which IT assets, you can lose money due to unplanned outages.
…When you need to deploy a company-wide patch or upgrade and don’t know which machines will be affected, you can lose money by having staff spend time figuring this out or deploying redundant upgrades/patches.
…When you don’t know how many instances of a piece of software you’re using, you can lose money by over or under-licensing and forfeiting your bargaining power with software vendors (or worse, paying fines after a license audit).

TT: Tell us more about the Configipedia and the social networking aspect? Did Tideway create this?
RM: Tideway created Configipedia as an on-line, community-directed site that provides a forum for Tideway customers, partners and the IT community at large to share best practices, content, and configuration management intelligence openly. This can include up-to-date patch, vulnerability, hardware reference, end-of-life and license information for common data center assets. By making this open to all IT professionals, inside and outside of our customer organizations, we are harnessing the IT community’s collective knowledge of best practices and configuration management tips to the benefit of our customers. We believe that sharing intelligence like this and making such collective wisdom open and accessible will set the stage for faster innovation.

TT: We noticed you work with several banks. What effects has the current economic crisis had on their IT departments?
RM: M&A activity will certainly add to the complexity of their IT environments, and there is a focus on reducing IT costs in the current economic climate while maintaining rigorous levels of application resiliency and availability. These firms have a great opportunity to rationalize and optimize their IT environments and ensure continuous efficiency improvements and cost savings for years to come. There is an ongoing business need to renew data center infrastructure and ensure IT can continue to support the business in these challenging times. By employing solutions like Tideway, companies can keep pace with dynamic data center requirements and prepare for future changes, in a cost effective way that will save them money in the long run. More and more companies will start putting these practices into effect now so they can ultimately generate significant cost savings and free up some of their IT budgets to accelerate innovation.

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Tags: Cloud computing, Red Herring, Richard Muirhead, Tideway, World Economic Forum

Top 100 products of 2008

We really like it when people make lists at the end of the year-so here is a great list from Read Write Web and they did all the work. Enjoy!

Super cool – on the spot disease detection – with a cell phone!

Wow! What a story today in Wired Magazine — using a cell phone to do on the spot disease detection! Scientists at UCLA who must love their job in a McGyver like project – used only an LED, plastic light filter and some wires have modded a cellphone into a portable blood tester capable of detecting HIV, malaria and other illnesses.

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Joost lets go of P2P service

We didn’t like reading this story in Contentinople, but thought it might happen. Joost recently stopped its P2P services that was launched in 2007 because they just didn’t have the views like Hulu (plus their name is just fun to say). But don’t count them out – -where there is a will, there is a way and they are turning to niche programming and turning to social networking tools.  And on the same day, Brightcove let go of its consumer product the Brightcove Network Service, leaving YouTube standing in the ring – this doesn’t mean that YouTube is the best, its just the biggest and in our opinion, sevenload should be seriously looked at because it was built around and from the ground up on social newtorks via your videos. Technically and business savvy global team.

But it’s a bit easier for Joost and Brightcove to breath with mostly deep pockets in the funding arena, but it sort of makes us crinkle up our nose when we see true innovation coming from companies like Yasmo Live and In Real Life (IRL) companies with dynamic CEO’s, great business models based on achievable ROI and a “change agent” attitude about their respective markets (IRL wants to make presence part of society’s infrastructure by adding it to your social media and social networking and Yasmo Live wants to make your life at a conference much more productive through a mobile application that lets you see who is around you via your own mobile) These CEOs are working with some advanced technology  and right now some of the money stream is blinded by all things mobile and all things video. We believe that there are some angel investors out there that will see the light – maybe grabbing onto a company that is a true trail blazer and propelling it to become the fabric of our social and digital lives. – JLH

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Tags: Frank Schuil, Hulu, IRL Connect, Joost, social media, Social network service, Yasmo Live

Tattletech Hot Seat – Frank Schuil, IRL

Tattletech didn’t go too far to get the scoop from Frank Schuil, CEO of IRL – being in Amsterdam we found ourselves right around the corner from him and were really into his company – In Real Life (IRL) – currently in private Alpha. Their product is IRL Connect- Sense your Friends! Which lets users put friends on the map  and to find, meet and communicate with (new) friend.  So, we decided he definately had something to say since he is carving out new territory in the over hyped location based social networking. He believes that the next evolution is presence based social networking and explains why. We don’t know about you – but we believe him. He is about the only CEO today that actually is saying something outside of the standard vocabulary. If you want an invite to their private Alpha – @jennalee.

TT: Your company In Real Life (IRL) is really the first presence based social networking application for the Internet – why did you choose to go this route before mobile?

FS: Our initial concept for IRL Connect was actually a mobile social network application that looked a lot like all those fancy iphone apps. But when we saw the direction that the market was moving, we decided not to jump into the mobile space right away  instead we chose the path of the consumer. Our current application is the bridge between the social infrastructure that exists on the web today and mobile future. IRL Connect lets you take your digital relationships and visualize them through Google™ Maps. Take your existing friends from any social network and put them on the map. See where they are, what they are doing, discover new connections.

TT: OK – presence-based social networking or location based – what is the difference?

FS: Most people think that location based social networking is presence-based social networking, but that is not true. You can have all the location features you want and not be able to get that feeling of presence and that, in my opinion, is the key to leveraging this new digital revolution in social behavior. Anyone who actively uses Twitter knows what this feeling of presence is and how it can alter your old fashioned reality.

TT: IRL Connect lets the user take our relationships in real life and actually enhance them through the digital world through social mapping, why do you think this is even necessary?

FS: If the fast moving world we live in, we have less time to spend with the ones we love and easily get disconnected from what they do and what they are. Presence-based social networking allows you to stay attached, to be in the loop with what your friends are doing and where they are doing it. We want to evolve digital social behavior. IRL believes that a new phase in the digital revolution is ahead of us. We believe that the virtual will become part of our physical surroundings and that this transformation will have a major impact on social behavior.

TT: Google is very good at mapping information, but there is really no one doing social mapping, how will this change people’s behavior?

FS: In short, it will increase serendipity. Things happen around you, but most of the time you are not aware of it. By visualizing social activity on the map, people get the opportunity to anticipate their surroundings. And with IRL Connect, you can migrate your relationships from real-life to digital to the next level on the Web.

TT: As a CEO of a new start up during these times, what do you think is your biggest challenge will be in running a start up in this market?

FS: I guess the biggest challenge in general is to get the message across that we know the market, we have the solution and we can make this business feasible. Whereas the latter should be considered an understatement. For this market in particular, it’s a challenge to explain our unique approach because everyone is on the mobile train. But, this is a crowded space at the moment because most people can envision the end point but not the path to it – except for IRL.

– JLH

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Tags: Frank Schuil, IRL Connect

J’aime iCloud

Still we are nuts about iCloud and today a great little story on the Cloud stack that takes a real time look at the users experience. Cool.

But in more Cloud news a great article out today that relates the financial crisis to being good news for Cloud providers. Finally! That and games are doing good with Wii leading video game sales  (up 11% this past quarter . IDC says that the disruptive vectors of the market will be among the highest growth sectors in 2009. Disruptive. This seems to be the key word – even at LeWeb the investors that Tattletech talked to were looking for distruptive companies to invest in. Cloud computing provides a cost-effective architecture that has enabled new business models including Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

And PaaS and SaaS companies were out in full force at the European Venture Summit. Some of our favorites? GravityZoo, Intera and iCloud – of course!

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Tags: Cloud computing, Platform as a service, Software as a service

Get seduced

I bet you never thought we would write about seduction and venture. Well maybe you did but we found this page on Sequoia’s website to be more than right on. Start ups tend try and put the kitchen sink into their investment summaries and in the end its about what you say and if you can compel them to be interested. As one angel investor told Tattletech, “I want to be seduced, compelled to invest – show me the product, people and that you know the market”