bob ketner

SDForum is hosting a half-day conference tomorrow, and it sounds like a really interesting event.
I’ll see if I can blog some essential points from the event.  Check it out if you’re in the area.
The Consumerization of Software Development Forum
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Location: Cooley Godward Kronish, Palo Alto
3175 Hanover Street, Palo Alto , CA 94304

The cutting edge of “software” is undergoing a structural change as new business models, and new strategies for customer acquisition have supplanted the Y2K era of enterprise software models. Centralized buying decisions driven by the CIO have given way to “democratic” or consumer-like adoption behavior within the enterprise. Open-source software, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and other “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” models are exploiting this trend. In this event on next generation software, you will have the opportunity to hear from next-gen leaders in the software space.

Agenda

11:30 – 12:30               Registration and Lunch
12:30 – 1:00pm            Welcome & The Consumerization Thesis

1:00 pm–1:45 pm       Panel Discussion: “A View on Software from Wall St ”
Moderator: Vince Pangrazio, Cooley Godward Kronish
Brendan Barnicle, Pacific Crest
Charles Carmel, Cisco
Mike Maples, Managing Partner/Founder, Maples

Investments
1:45pm – 2:00       Fireside Chat: Brett Caine, President of Citrix Online
Moderator: Rich Wong, Accel

2:pm – 2:45pm            Panel Discussion: “Beating the incumbents through bottom-up tactics”
Moderator: Rich Wong, Accel
Duke Chung, CEO President and Co-founder, Parature
Satish Dharmaraj, CEO and Co-founder, Zimbra
Mike Ni, Senior VP of Solutions, Netsuite
Javier Soltero, CEO and Co-founder, Hyperic

2:45pm – 3:10pm      Facebook in the Enterprise
Chamath Palihapitiya, VP Prod Mktg & Operations, Facebook

3:10 pm – 3:25 pm    BREAK

3:25 pm – 4:15 pm     Panel Discussion: “Products for the end user instead of the manager”
Moderator: Kevin Efrusy, Accel
Chamath Palihapitiya, VP Prod Mktg & Operations, Facebook
Jason Lemkin, CEO and Co-founder, Echosign
David Thompson, CEO, Genius
Anthony Deighton, SVP of Marketing, Qliktech

4:15 pm – 4:45 pm     Fireside Chat: Clarence So, CMO, SalesForce
Introduced by: Rich Wong, Accel

4:45pm – 5:00 pm    Closing Remarks

Got word of an IBM “Meet the Experts” session being held in Second Life(tm) June 2, 3, and 4. It is part of their Rational Software Development Conference going on in Orlando, FL and sounds really interesting.

It looks like they are using teleconferencing for voice, as phone-in numbers are provided. Here’s the announcement as I received it. I’ll definitely drop in, so look for Orange Montagne if you’re there.
Join us on Codestation in Second Life for the IBM Rational Software Development Conference Meet the Expert Sessions this week June 2, 3 and 4th.

The SL URL for CODESTATION is http://slurl.com/secondlife/IBM%20CODESTATION/130/95/40

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, there will be a Meet the Expert sessions at 10:00 am and 2:00 pm Eastern (New York) with each of the Heroes. As a reward for attending each of the sessions, a superpower will be handed out to attendees at each of the sessions.

Schedule for 10 am ET :
Monday 10am ET – Fee-Chur: The Developer; who can turn anything into code. “It’s not a bug, it’s a “feature!”
Tuesday 10am ET The Gatekeeper: The Release Manager; who can shift shapes to deal with everything internal and external; from bugs to leaks to patches to infinity and beyond!
Wednesdat 10am ET The Time-Inator: The Project Manager; who can bend the time-space continuum… sometimes
http://slurl.com/secondlife/IBM%20CODESTATION/130/95/40

Call in information for 10am ET Expert Sessions
10am ET Mon, Tues & Wed – June 2, 3 & 4
Title: Rational Software Devplr Meet the Expert
Conference telephone numbers:
Participants, Toll free: 888-427-9376
Participants, Toll: 719-457-1509
Confirmation Code: 6768646
Title: Rational Software Devplr Meet the Expert

Schedule for 2pm ET
Monday 2pm ET R-Tek: The Architect with the power to grok future applications just by drawing a picture on a napkin.
Tuesday 2pm ET Hawkeye: The Analyst; whose super A-ray Vision lets her see opportunities hidden in complex problems
Wednesdat 2pm ET Gotcha: The Tester; with the power to clone herself to meet impossible deadlines…
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/events/rsdc2008/rheroes.html
Call in information for 2pm ET Expert Sessions
2pm ET Mon, Tues & Wed – June 2, 3 & 4
Title: Rational Software Devplr Meet the Expert Conference telephone numbers:
Participants, Toll free: 888-378-0344
Participants, Toll: 719-325-2100

In addition, the Conference Keynotes will be posted on Codestation the day after they are delivered at the Conference.

http://www.ibm.com/rational

So the headlines have been blazing about 19 year old John Tyler Hammons (Wikipedia entry) is the “gamer elected mayor”.

Coverage: GamePolitics.com,  Yahoo games, Yahoo news, AP, G4TV

I did a bit of searching but couldn’t find a particular gaming reference but it immediately brought to mind the IBM study with Seriosity on “Virtual Worlds Real Leaders“. This is great reading – (get the full report .pdf here) and I believe there will be a lot more of these gaming parallels given the impact and reach of games on young and old alike.

Some of the folks who participated in the IBM report were presenters and attendees at the Virtual World SIG and these kinds of topics were things I spoke about at both Virtual Worlds 2007, and at NASA Virtual Worlds in Jan. 2008. The notions (or theories/findings) that the gaming environment can generate leadership is encouraging. At least, gaming trains users in online collaboration by default, and we’ve realized that “work is an MMOG” along the way from the SIG presentations.

The fact that so many headlines are running the “gaming” angle on the story just might bring the concept to the mainstream discussion. Can’t wait to see what develops around it.

- Bob K.

An interesting discussion over at TC, apparently Gartner says MS wants Yahoo because Vista is collapsing.

The referenced story is at ComputerWorld.com and affirms what I’ve said for years, which is that if the MS suite has simply never been designed for its users. It never had to be, because there was never competition for that user. Online advertising brings a revenue option to writing and hosting these very simple and most-needed functions (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation) such as found in Google docs.

We are humans that have a limited lifespan and not so much time to weed through a maze of just to achieve simple aims. Lots of businesses use only Macs and lots are switching to OpenOffice. They find it’s increasingly costly and silly to employ a phalanx of specialists just to maintain very basic functions. Then, where’s the motivation to “upgrade” just to acquire a bewildering and unmanageable set of arcane options that destabilize and crash on literally every use?

It’s a bit extreme to say that “Online advertising revenue is their only real hope” but let’s face it, really good usable alternatives are becoming available in the market and the MS suite will have to regain its prior stability and consider “users” perhaps for the first time ever.

At this point, the effort required to switch to an alternative is less than the effort required to invest in Vista and face the scores of head-against-wall moments that await.

Gift sites are notoriously hard to merchandise. Red Envelope did an ok job but apparently not good enough. The chat at TechCrunch speculates management issues because the company has $12.3M in the bank according to TC. Traffic failed to bump much for the big gift days 2 years straight though, indicating that online gift seekers found other avenues online or off.

Their catalog was ok but I’d say could have benefited by having fewer “premium” style goods and more personable items like those found at Etsy which is doing great on traffic. Their catalog did have the occasional jaw-dropper pricey item such as these braided bracelets for $150. yikes.

Again gift giving is a difficult play but still, this should have been a viable business by any measure.

So what wen’t wrong? Somehow the site dropped out of view in the storm that is 2.0. Without a strategy to mix into other sites I’m hard pressed to name any retailer strong enough to be a destination site on its own. Relying on affiliates is like relying on a volunteer workforce – it is outreach but looks like you can’t just sit back and watch the orders come in anymore.

On the other hand, it may indeed have been sustainable in operations, but mismanaged from the inside as some are commenting. This is often the case when things just don’t add up. Interested in avoiding this fate? Call me at 408-667-5949.

Yo yo dawg… check this out…

Via MOU blog.

Philip Rosedale spoke at the US House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet yesterday, April 1. I thought it was an April fools joke at first, but this is real.

Audio and video is here: http://energycommerce.house.gov/

Philip starts speaking at around 29:00 after an introduction. Almost the entire 90 minute meeting is focused on Second Life. A major score for Second Life in getting established as “the” virtual world. Dr. Larry Johnson of New Media Consortium likens Second Life to the opportunities that were brought about from settling the wild west, the rollout of electricity, television, and the internet itself.

Stanford Research Institute – Consulting Business Intelligence (aka. SRIC-BI http://www.sric-bi.com) today released results from a survey taken amongst the members of their own  Virtual Worlds Consortium, SDForum’s Virtual World SIG, Boulder, Colorado’s  Serious Second Life, and Stanford’s  MetaverseU.

The  download is available at: http://www.sric-bi.com and directly linked here (link opens .pdf document): http://www.sric-bi.com/news/VWCcollabwksurvey2008-03.pdf

The groups questioned largely focus on collaborative work (serious games) more than entertainment uses, and the survey was geared towards that.  Members of these groups are definitely motivated to use virtual worlds (70% see significant potential) and cite security and eases of use as key to adoption by enterprise and government customers.

The respondents were split 50/50 on whether Second Life would remain the leading VW platform in the next 2-3 years.

At least one quarter of the respondents use virtual worlds over 20 hours per week.  Another quarter only use them 1-5 hours per week.
Another 36% use virtual worlds in a 5-20 hour range, and the remaining 12.5% barely log on and use less than 1 hour per week.
<1 hour           12.5%
1-5 hours        26.3%
5-10 hours     15.0%
10-20 hours   21.3%
20+ hours       25%

That’s as far as I’ve had time to dig into this but there are a lot of forward-looking questions and interesting conclusions  in there – so take a look.

Thanks to  Dr. Eilif Trondsen of SRIC-BI  for conducting and sharing the survey.

-Bob Ketner

* Daniel Chalef, “Knowledge Tree
- started in S.Africa
- no dev world cust. Except China
- premium services
- “if you’re releasing under iso approved then you’re os
- pharma
- key trends: saas, community, freemium,

* Ismael Ghamili, Intalio
- cosmo – commercial open source
- users help each other for free version
- no outbound sales or vc
- virtual nuclear weapons testing
- digg type input for new features
- 2/3 leads from google search
- key trends: subscription not perpetual licensing, drives improvement

* Don Brown, Atlassian
- jira, open symphony,
- 20-30m, 9 products, saas
- 1/3 to 2/3 os products
- credit card purshases <$10k
- get code on purchase
- insane licensing and service and consultants drives govt to os
- co. contributes core but “pure” os is not going to be
possible otherwise where’s the business?
- key trends: free

* Chander Kant, Zmanda
- os backup/dev
- inside sales
- 2.0, defense, archiving
- if you compete with your free version then you are os

* moderator Andrew Aitken, Olliance
- what about multiple versions that get created/modified
- “freemium”

[Other namedrops: sugar crm, olpc, ]

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Global Open Source: VC Panel: Where’s the money?

* Kevin Efrusy, Accel
- must be THE company not A company
- great for the developer who works under a boss who “buys
software he learned about in an airline mag” and who could have completed
the project in the time taken for the server req. [Comment: story of
my life]
_ usage talks
- better to measure production heartbeats than downloads or heaven
forbid, feature count
- os fastest to global but another microsoft? It’s questionable
- downloads gameable – downloader is unlikely convert, -not decision
maker
- you have to sell this stuff, you must sell – money doesn’t just flow
through the home page through happy users this is not what happens
- 2 stages: ubiquity then money
- downtime terror drives paying customers
- sox inhibits ipo goals

* Vineet Buch, Blue Run Ventures
- if you don’t control it someone will give it away for free
- new concept that os is rational choice
- devs in Bangalore hit now by US recessipon
- very early stage, dinner napkin stage
- fire sales from direction disagreements
- acq may be better than ipo with couple of recent examples

* John Occhipini, Woodside Fund
- continued thirst for acqs until big co’s are in os
- global base to avoid recession
- recurring revenue stream
- product + service to run it in cloud model
- repeat entrepreneurs get napkin funding easier
- quality inside sales in marketing model
- speed of community important
- legacy proprietaries still need to migrate, this will drive hi$ acqs

* Philippe Cases, Partech
- microsoft WAS rhe low cost provider

* moderator Joe Brockmeyer, Novell

[Namedrops: recession, add-ons]