The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- TA Associates Invests Over $60 Million In Email Marketing Company eCircle
- Barnes & Noble College Tries To Take On Chegg In Sizzling Textbook Rental Market
- Turn Your iPhone Into A WWII Fighter Plane? Hey, Why Not
- E-book Community Wattpad Scores Angel Funding
- Blindness Organizations And ASU Settle Amazon Kindle DX Discrimination Suit
- CA Acquires Service Level Management Software Company Oblicore
- France Télécom / Orange Exec Confirms Apple Tablet Is On The Way
- MyGengo Is Mechanical Turk For Translations
- Security Flaw Makes It Easy To Bypass Verizon Droid Screen Lock
- NSFW: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crunchies
- This Will Be The Year Adobe’s 2 Million Flash Developers Come To The iPhone
- Tingalin Releases Jersey Shore iPhone App Before MTV’s Official One
- CES Postmortem: So Long, And Thanks For All The Press Kits
- The Coming Tornado: Cloud in the Enterprise
- AsthmaMD Helps Asthma Sufferers, Gathers Aggregate Research Data
- Googlle Gets A Sexy New Logo; Remains Sketchy
- CrunchGear’s Best of CES 2010
| TA Associates Invests Over $60 Million In Email Marketing Company eCircle Posted: 11 Jan 2010 08:34 AM PST  Private equite firm TA Associates announced this morning that it has signed a definitive agreement for a majority investment of over €60 million in eCircle, a decade-old email marketing service provider headquartered in Munich, Germany. Founded in 1999, eCircle specializes in a range of digital marketing solutions, but it's mostly known for its high-end email marketing software and related services. The company says more than 550 enterprise clients, including Argos, Nintendo and Samsung, are currently using its eC-messenger Web-based email marketing software, and the company has a transmission volume of over 5 billion emails per quarter. eCircle has over 200 employees, spread across offices in Germany, the UK, France and Italy.
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| Barnes & Noble College Tries To Take On Chegg In Sizzling Textbook Rental Market Posted: 11 Jan 2010 08:26 AM PST
After test-piloting a textbook rental program at three campus stores, Barnes & Noble College is rolling out the program more broadly to 25 U.S. colleges. Students will be able to rent textbooks from their campus bookstores, online, or from Barnes & Noble stores on campus. Students who want to rent online will be able to do so through their campus bookstore websites, such as Ohio State’s or the University of South Carolina’s. Barnes & Noble is playing catch-up to Chegg, a startup which offers textbook rentals online to any student across the country. Chegg has raised $144 million in venture capital, dominates the budding textbook rental market, and is often whispered as a future IPO candidate. It claims on its Website that it has already saved students $100 million. Barnes & Noble, meanwhile is taking a campus-by-campus approach. The match-up is reminiscent of the battle with Amazon. Barnes & Noble is responding, but perhaps too slowly. Going from 3 to 25 campuses is not much of a competitive response. Meanwhile, another startup, BookRenter, today announced new partnerships which expand its rental library to 3 million textbooks. It serves students across 5,000 campuses in the U.S., and says that it’s business is growing 300 percent a year. Campus bookstores still have a lock on a lot of textbook purchases because professors order their books through those stores. But the rise of these rental options has students asking themselves why should they pay $150 for a textbook when they can rent one for $25 instead? As more students do the math, Barnes & Noble had better hurry up and roll out textbook rentals across all college campuses.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Turn Your iPhone Into A WWII Fighter Plane? Hey, Why Not Posted: 11 Jan 2010 07:24 AM PST
That said, with it’s ability to turn grown men into excited children, it may also be a work of pure genius. The app turns the iPhone itself into a WW2 fighter plane that you hold in your hand and fly around the room, accompanied by flying and shooting noises, and attachable paper wings. Check this out: Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| E-book Community Wattpad Scores Angel Funding Posted: 11 Jan 2010 07:11 AM PST
Wattpad this morning announced that it has secured a round of funding with a number of private investors, although the e-book community operator and mobile app developer declined to disclose the size of the round. The consortium of angel investors that injecting capital into Wattpad include Harvey Beck and Alan Levine, former co-CEOs of ICOM and Bert Amato, co-founder of Delrina. Launched in January 2007, Wattpad is a YouTube-like community that allows its members to read and share e-books on the Web and on mobile devices. According to the company, the site’s catalog boasts ‘hundreds of thousands’ of novels, short stories, fan fiction, essays, jokes and more. Example: Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Wattpad says it has delivered hundreds of million of pages from its 120,000 strong e-book library to mobile devices, having developed custom applications for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Java alongside a mobile website at m.wattpad.com.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Blindness Organizations And ASU Settle Amazon Kindle DX Discrimination Suit Posted: 11 Jan 2010 06:29 AM PST
In June 2009, NFB and ACB jointly filed a discrimination lawsuit against Arizona State University (ASU) to prevent the university from deploying Amazon's Kindle DX as a means of distributing electronic textbooks to its students because the device cannot be used by blind students. Sounds arbitrary, I know, but more on that later. ASU was one of six institutions of higher education to deploy the Kindle DX as part of a pilot project to assess the role of electronic textbooks and reading devices in the classroom. The main contentions in the lawsuit filed by NFB and ACB – which also targeted the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) – was that while the Kindle DX has a text-to-speech feature, the menus to select a book or purchase a book are not blind-friendly, making it impossible to select textbooks for download. The blindness organizations alleged that this was in violation of federal law. ABOR and ASU denied and continue to deny any violations of the law. Either way, the parties this morning announced that they have reached a settlement agreement. The agreement was reached in light of several factors, according to the press release: ASU’s commitment to providing access to all programs and facilities for students with disabilities, the fact that the pilot program will end in the Spring of 2010 and the university’s agreement that should ASU deploy e-book readers in future classes over the next two years, it will strive to use devices that are accessible to the blind. Interestingly, the settlement agreement also stipulates that Amazon “and others” are making improvements to and progress in the accessibility of e-book readers. It’s unclear which what these improvements are and when they will be into effect. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| CA Acquires Service Level Management Software Company Oblicore Posted: 11 Jan 2010 05:57 AM PST  CA today announced that it has acquired privately-held Oblicore, a provider of Service Level Management (SLM) software for enterprises and service providers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although Israeli business news outlet Globes had picked up rumors about the pending acquisition late last year and pegged the purchase price at $25 million. If correct, this isn't a great outcome for the company's investors, who injected at least the same amount of capital into the company since its inception in 2000.
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| France Télécom / Orange Exec Confirms Apple Tablet Is On The Way Posted: 11 Jan 2010 03:28 AM PST
But just in case anyone was still in doubt about its imminent launch, France Télécom / Orange executive Stéphane Richard this morning confirmed on air that the device is to debut in the ‘next couple of days’. Richard, number two at the telecommunication services giant, told French journalist Jean-Pierre Elkabbach that the tablet would soon make its entry into the market, and that it will be equipped with a webcam (gasp!). Here’s how the relevant part of the conversation went:
Which translates to:
Richard was clearly caught off guard, and it’s always fun when such a thing happens on video. The segment, available on NowhereElse.fr, is evidently in French, but if you want to listen in on the relevant part of the chat you can skip to the 6:10 mark. Update: thanks, SlashGear: For your reference: France Télécom is one of the world’s largest telecommunication services companies. The company owns Orange Group, the fifth largest telecom operator on the planet and primarily active in Europe and Africa. France Télécom, through its Orange subsidiary, currently offers the iPhone in some 28 countries and territories. In September 2009, Orange UK announced that it had reached an agreement with Apple to bring iPhone 3G and 3GS to Orange UK customers, bringing an end to the two-year exclusive agreement between Apple and O2. In short, it’s an Apple partner whose management would be aware of plans to bring its new tablet computer to market. Anyone still in doubt over its existence? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| MyGengo Is Mechanical Turk For Translations Posted: 11 Jan 2010 02:40 AM PST
The concept was shelved later, and now it’s a startup called MyGengo that tries to become the world’s Mechanical Turk for translations. MyGengo offers human translation services between English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and Russian. And it does work much like Amazon’s crowdsourced marketplace: The site’s 600 “certified” translators wait for a customer to upload a document or text and take care of those jobs they can deal with. Customers can choose between three quality and pricing levels and usually get the translations back within a few hours, saving up to 70% in costs when compared to professional translators. MyGengo says their system makes it possible to accept just about any job size, including those usually denied by traditional translation agencies. Customers can have books, office documents, newspaper articles, blog posts or even tweets translated. (MyGengo itself translates selected English tweets from TechCrunch, Ashton Kutcher and others into Spanish to show how that looks like.) The service offers two specific solutions for people who need to localize a website or an application: Starting March 2010, an API will speed up the process of requesting the translation of frequently updated content, for example blog posts or comments. Another solution dubbed String lets developers manage all language “strings” of a multilingual website through a dashboard during the localization process. This hosted service will link to the API, but using String by itself is completely free (more background). Founded in Tokyo in 2008, the startup can count on the support of Silicon Valley-based investor Dave McClure in its efforts to conquer the American market for web-powered translations. McClure, who discovered MyGengo during the previous Geeks on a Plane trip to Japan, decided to make a personal (seed) investment in the company just last week and became an advisor, too. MyGengo and their new investor are looking at a large market: The language service market as a whole is worth over $14 billion dollars already (MyGengo estimates web-based translations are worth around $3 billion), with some sources predicting it will balloon to $25 billions by 2013. (See this industry report for details). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Security Flaw Makes It Easy To Bypass Verizon Droid Screen Lock Posted: 11 Jan 2010 12:18 AM PST
Exploiting the bug is fairly simple: while receiving an incoming call on a Droid that has its Lock screen activated, you can simply hit the dedicated ‘Back’ button to bypass the lock and jump to the homescreen. This, of course, gives access to the owner’s Email account, cookied web pages, phone directory, and everything else stored on the phone. You can take a tiny bit of solace in the fact that the thief would have to know your phone number or wait for someone to call your phone to exploit the bug, but that’s not particularly reassuring. The issue was first reported earlier today by The Assurer, which says that it is apparently only affecting Android version 2.0.1 on the Droid (which already represents a large chunk of Android’s userbase). We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us the following statement:
Android isn’t the first smartphone OS to fall prey to security bugs like this. In August 2008 a similar flaw with the iPhone allowed people to easily bypass the phone’s lock screen. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| NSFW: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crunchies Posted: 10 Jan 2010 08:31 PM PST
Why in January – a month set aside for recovering from the excesses of the holiday season – thousands of people would fly to Las Vegas for a gigantic tradeshow. Why they’d even consider spending four days wandering around an aircraft hanger filled with vastly oversized television sets, or sitting through endless product launches that are being simulcast online anyway. Why they’d subject themselves to three nights of well drinks at a succession of disappointing after-parties before passing out in overpriced, soulless hotel rooms that charge $10 a day for wifi. Frankly why they’d willingly submit themselves to any of those horrors when they could simulate the entire experience from home simply by wiring a thousand dollars to Steve Wynn, dropping a tab of acid and then heading to Best Buy with a hooker. Still, there was a moment earlier this week when I thanked the gods that CES exists. And that was the moment when Heather Harde emailed Sarah and me, politely but firmly informing us that we were introducing this year’s Crunchies. CES clashes directly with the Crunchies, an overlap that at least meant fewer people would be in San Francisco to witness the inevitable train wreck of us standing on stage, trying to make jokes about Twitter. Which is not to say that we didn’t do our best to write a non-trainwrecky introduction. On the contrary, the day before the ceremony we decamped to the lobby of the W Hotel for two whole hours where – fuelled by Champagne (Sarah) and cheeseburgers (me) – we brainstormed ideas. We are after all, professionals. “How about this? ‘Hello and welcome the Crunchies. We want to start with a couple of jokes about Spotify, mainly because if we wait until the end they’ll probably be out of business’”. “Meh. It’s only funny ‘cos it’s true.” “Good point. Okay, how about a Bing joke? Are there any Bing jokes?” “No. But I just got another email from Heather. She says she’s willing to dress up in a gorilla suit if we think it’ll be funny.” “It may yet come to that. What else is funny?” “People slipping on banana skins are funny.” “People slipping on banana skins are funny.” “Shall we do that?” “No.” Still at least by agreeing to open the show, our night’s work would be over after four minutes and we could head out to the auditorium to watch the award presentations. Like hundreds of thousands of other people, I’d cast my votes in the awards – although I’d completely forgotten for whom – and so was eagerly anticipating the results. More specifically I was looking forward to bitching when my preferred winners inevitably failed to even scrape in as runners up. (My inability to pick winners is just one of the many reasons why I made a terrible book publisher.) Sure enough, barely ten minutes into the main event, I found myself gripping the arms of my chair and gnashing my teeth in frustration and despair as yet another of my votes turned out to be for nought. “The Nook as best gadget?! No one even has a Nook!” Talking to friends after the after-party, I realised I wasn’t alone: almost everyone I ran into had a complaint about at least one of the results. But, then again, that’s how it was supposed to be. The whole point of the Crunchies is that they’re voted for by the public – the readers of TechCrunch, GigaOm and Venture Beat – and as such they represent the wisdom of the crowd, not some cabal of Silicon Valley insiders – soi-disant experts, out of touch with what services and apps the real Internet users use. Vox populi, vox dei. Sure. Okay. That kind of democra-fetishism might make sense for consumer awards like The Webbies – which, perversely, are awarded by a cabal of insiders – but it’s completely ludicrous for an event specifically aimed at industry professionals. Don’t get me wrong, there are some seriously smart and well-informed people who read TechCrunch – you, dear reader, are one of them. But for every one of you, there is your polar opposite: the kind of knuckle-dragging jizz-wit who is – even as we speak – scrolling down to the comments to ask what, exactly, about this column is Not Safe For Work. And I have no reason to believe that the same ratio of smart to dumb isn’t true for GigaOm and Venture Beat. We wouldn’t trust these people to review a dive bar on Yelp so why on earth should we trust them to vote whether Jeremy Stoppelman & Russ Simmons are worthy Founders of the Year? “But” – you might argue – “that’s the great thing about the masses; if you have enough people voting then the majority of intelligent people drive out the minority of idiots.” Sure. Okay. Even accepting that the majority of our readers are smart and well-informed, there still remains an inevitable problem that occurs whenever huge numbers of people vote for something: the most popular nominee – as opposed to the best qualified – always wins. It could be total coincidence that Facebook has won the Overall Best Startup for three years running, but it isn’t. 2009 was, by any metric you care to use, the year of Twitter. And yet we’re supposed to believe that Facebook – a company that more than any other has been racing to mirror Twitter these past twelve months by buying Friendfeed, changing the language of its status messages and rapidly shifting from private to public – is a more worthy winner? Because of Facebook Connect? Oh please. Facebook won for one reason: it has between 15 to 20 times more users than Twitter and so is at the front of more people’s minds when they come to vote. Worse still, public voting is such a flawed way to hand out industry awards that even sensible results are rendered all but meaningless. Consider Ron Conway: a more deserving winner of Best Angel it is impossible to imagine. Not only did Ron keep his investment head while all those around were losing theirs, but he is also a dedicated philanthropist and one of the nicest men you could wish to meet: if he hadn’t picked up the Best Angel gong, then the world would have been destroyed in a supernova of wrongness. And yet, as Heather pointed out as she handed over the award, Ron has invested in hundreds of companies – to the point where almost everyone in the theatre, and by extension, thousands of those who voted for the Crunchies had some kind of connection with him. As a result, it’s impossible to know whether Ron won on his obvious merit or simply because he has name recognition and popular appeal – and that kind of uncertainty does a worthy winner a huge disservice. The same is true of Mark Pincus who picked up CEO of the year. There’s a powerful argument for Pincus winning the award: his response to Scamville and pledge to turn over a new leaf is, arguably, an example to us all. And yet there’s an equally powerful argument that Tony Hsieh was an even more logical winner this year, having built Zappos into one of the best respected ecommerce companies on the planet, before selling it to Amazon for $928m. But again public voting makes that debate irrelevant: thanks (ironically) to Scamville, Pincus has a ton more recent name recognition than Hsieh and so the award was his by a landslide. Hsieh didn’t even come in as runner up. And what about Aaron Patzer as founder of the year? Mint is a cool company which enjoyed a decent enough $170 million exit. But, then again, if you want to talk about cool exists, the runners up – Stoppelman and Simmons from Yelp – just turned down half a billion from Google. The key difference between the two companies is that – thanks in large part to TechCrunch’s championing them since they won TC40 – Mint has an image as the cool newcomer, while Yelp is considered old hat. Meanwhile Elon Musk, the dude who built an electric car company for Christ’s sake, doesn’t fit into the narrative at all and so doesn’t even make the top two. We at TechCrunch need to accept our part in all this ridiculousness. Look at all of the winners this year and you start to see a pattern. Foursquare won best mobile app – an award they should rightfully share with MG; Animoto – Arrington’s favourite – won best design; Chrome OS and Google Wave – which we’ve covered endlessly, despite no one understanding the latter – shared the top spots in Best Technological Achievement. These were awards chosen by the public and yet they almost perfectly reflect the narrative that we have been subconsciously writing all year. You can argue it either way: that TechCrunch writers are freakishly good at spotting what’s popular, or that TechCrunch writers make things popular – but either way, it’s painfully obvious that Crunchies are won and lost based on a media profile we’ve helped to created, rather than any kind of objective merit. So what? So if I were one of the winners this year I’d be rightfully proud of my success, but I hope I’d also be confident enough in my merits to lobby for next year’s awards to be judged differently. Specifically, I’d encourage the organisers – TechCrunch, GigaOm and Venture Beat – to make a decision: are the Crunchies going to continue as a popularity contest, or are they going to become a true award for excellence? If the former, then fine – popularity is a perfectly legitimate metric, especially for an industry where fortunes are built on eyeballs and traction. But then at least the categories should be renamed. Replace “best…” with “most popular…”. Call a spade a spade. If on the other hand, we really want the Crunchies to be our industry’s highest accolade then it’s time we took a leaf from the book of every other media industry and created a formal judging academy, made up of industry experts, succesful entrepreneurs, veteran investors and previous winners. Produce clear guidelines on how each award should be judged and publish those guidelines online for all to see. That way, even though everyone would still disagree passionately with the results, they could at least be confident that something resembling critical and expert thought had gone into the process. Of course no system is perfect – and there’s every possibility that Mark Zuckerberg will still find himself on stage in 2011 picking up his fourth Crunchie. But at least next year he might look a bit less embarrassed when he does so. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| This Will Be The Year Adobe’s 2 Million Flash Developers Come To The iPhone Posted: 10 Jan 2010 08:02 PM PST
It's no secret that Apple doesn't like Flash. It won't allow Flash apps to run on the iPhone or iPod Touch despite all of Adobe's cajoling and pleading, and despite the fact that it’s long been working in the labs. The iPhone's lack of support for Flash is a major inconvenience for both consumers and developers, and is a gaping hole in the iPhone's arsenal. But all of that is about to change because Adobe is going to bring its 2 million Flash developers to the iPhone, with or without Apple’s blessing. As it announced in October, the next version of its Flash developer tools, Creative Suite 5 (currently in private beta), will include a “Packager for iPhone” apps which will automatically convert any Flash app into an iPhone app. So while Flash apps won’t run on the iPhone, any Flash app can easily be converted into an iPhone app. (Microsoft is taking a similar approach with Silverlight). This is a bigger deal than many people appreciate. Much of the focus in the Flash iPhone debate centers around the fact that Flash is the de facto video standard on the Web. For instance, whenever you encounter a Web page in your iPhone browser with a Flash video, instead of seeing it right there in the browser, the phone must open up a separate Quicktime player. Most video on the Web, including everything on YouTube, is displayed through a Flash player, so this gets to be tedious. Apple has always cited technical reasons for why it doesn't support Flash. It's a battery hog, it’s too slow for mobile phones, not capable enough, etc. Some of these issues are valid and Adobe has been addressing them to the point that Flash now works fine on Android. But there is a more strategic reason Apple kept Flash off the iPhone. It wanted a chance to become ingrained with developers. In addition to video, Flash, of course, can be used to create Web apps—the kind of apps that might look good on a phone. Apple had to hold off Flash not so to control the video experience on the iPhone, but because it needed to establish its own Apple-controlled iPhone SDK. The last thing it needed was a competing developer platform getting in the way. Once Adobe publicly releases CS5, Flash apps and video still won’t run on the iPhone. But those 2 million developers will be able to keep working with Adobe tools and simply turn them into iPhone apps automatically. In contrast, there are only an estimated 125,000 or so iPhone developers. This will lower the barriers to making iPhone apps even more than they are today, which may or may not be a good thing. But if you thought there were a lot of iPhone apps now, just wait until the Flash floodgates are open. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Tingalin Releases Jersey Shore iPhone App Before MTV’s Official One Posted: 10 Jan 2010 07:18 PM PST  Tingalin, the makers of the world-famous Tingalin app, have outdone themselves. Their new app, based on the magic of the Jersey Shore but not directly affiliated with the MTV show in any way features a number of useful tools for the Situation-in-training. While the upcoming "fake tan" system is not yet in place, the app does have a nickname generator, a fist pump challenge that acts like Guitar Hero for bros, as well as a list of useful pick-up lines for meeting and wooing drunk honeys. A full video explanation follows.
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| CES Postmortem: So Long, And Thanks For All The Press Kits Posted: 10 Jan 2010 04:38 PM PST  To cap off the CES coverage, we'd like to give a shout-out to our partners and also discuss our coverage. We do this for you guys, after all, so feel free to chime in with your opinion on both the show and us. The biggest electronics show in the world is a difficult thing to report as it is with only a handful of timid bloggers, ripped from their natural habitat as it were, and placed in an unfamiliar environment. But to put them in front of a live camera and ask them to provide meaningful commentary for hours on end is to invite calamity. Fortunately, thanks to our great Livestream team and partners like Alienware, who provided our rendering computers, I think we did passably well. Impressions and notes on the show and our coverage follow.
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| The Coming Tornado: Cloud in the Enterprise Posted: 10 Jan 2010 01:38 PM PST
Consumers have readily embraced the Cloud in the form of services like Facebook, YouTube and Gmail, but businesses are a different story. While small and medium businesses have been drawn to the cost efficiencies of web-based solutions, the Cloud has thus far hovered on the periphery of mainstream business IT, with many dismissing it as unfeasible on a large scale, or at best, a distant solution. But cloud-based services are about to tip for the enterprise, and quickly. The coming shift echoes the disruptive transformation of IT in the ’90s, driven by companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Lotus and Sun. Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm” and “Inside the Tornado,” studied this transition and described the chain of adoption for enterprise technology: innovators are followed by early adopters, visionaries, and finally IT departments. And when enterprise technology hits this latter group, we’re officially in the Tornado. Well the dust is beginning to swirl once more. Over the next two years, enterprise IT will follow in the footsteps of today’s early adopters and visionaries, finally embracing the Cloud and moving content, applications, and processes to the web. So what are the catalysts for this perfect storm? A combination of maturing platforms, generational and cultural shifts, and compelling economics, making cloud-based solutions the undeniable choice for nearly all future non-core technology purchases.
The platforms are ready Today’s web-based platforms are finally maturing into real, viable solutions for businesses. They’re not just for small businesses or early adopters. Between Amazon EC2 for infrastructure-as-a-service, Force.com for platform-as-a-service, and Google Apps for software-as-a-service, companies large and small now have enough options to run their entire business in the Cloud. These complementary services can now talk to each other like never before, making it easy for IT administrators to weave connections between web platforms. And unplanned downtime is no longer a valid argument against the Cloud: like most cloud-based offerings, Google guarantees that Google Apps will be available at least 99.9% of the time, and will reimburse customers if this target isn’t met. According to a study by The Radicati Group, companies with onsite email solutions averaged 30-60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and 36-90 minutes of planned downtime per month in 2008. Even after a spat of outages in 2008, Matthew Glotzbach of Google’s Enterprise unit estimated that Google Apps downtime totaled a mere 10-15 minutes per month. Furthermore, cloud vendors front the bill to get the server back online, not your internal IT team. Make way for new workers and a new way to work Not only have our applications and platforms changed, so have the people using them. We’re now seeing the newest generation of the “knowledge worker” emerge in the enterprise. The formative years of this generation were spent chatting online, facebooking strangers and friends alike, and maxing out their hard drives with music and movie downloads. Accordingly, these employees are simply not capable of doing more work to find information than performing a Google search (I know, because I am one). They have no patience for convoluted IT policies, limited email storage and siloed data. Cloud-based IT services are the only solutions that can match the experience, efficiency, and access that we get in our personal lives. We’re already seeing companies like Salesforce mimic consumer tools with offerings like Salesforce Chatter. It’s only a matter of time before more vendors catch on that enterprise collaboration should be as easy as social networking, and must likewise take place in the Cloud. The cloud is cheap Okay, so we’re almost out of the recession. Companies who hunkered down will soon shift from survival mode to winning back marketshare. But guess whose stock is already at an all-time high? Salesforce. Despite the still-fragile economy, businesses are buying into the cloud, and there’s a lot more room to grow. At the risk of sounding completely obvious, they’re buying these services because they cost so much less to maintain and the barriers to getting started are much lower. And although the economy is showing signs of improvement, the past few years have fundamentally changed the way we think about technology purchases. Higher cost does not necessarily translate to higher quality. Products from behemoth software vendors like Microsoft are not necessarily more reliable. And in the Cloud, substantially fewer people are needed to get started: a medium-sized business five years ago required dedicated personnel, consulting, and redundant infrastructure to deliver corporate email. Today, the point of entry is a credit card transaction, with no infrastructure in sight. The time to transition to cheaper, more manageable platforms is now. Momentum in the IT department Managing infrastructure and technology that is not competitively-additive has become competitively-expensive. As we approach the Tornado, IT experts are redefining their roles and priorities from directly maintaining all the “contextual” applications around their business (CRM, email, file servers, search) to honing in on technologies that are core to their company’s performance and competitive advantage. This opens up the IT department to a new world of meaning and purpose. IT will move from a pure systems and process management function to a business success through technology service. How do we know this is happening? IT decision-makers are starting to knock on the doors of Google, Amazon, Salesforce and Box.net. Box’s 10 largest sales in 2009 were made with IT managers at organizations you’d recognize. The common thread linking these IT buyers? In our case, they want to move toward Cloud Content Management, in lieu of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on traditional ECM. This comes from awareness that their role is not about being bogged down in server administration, storage limitations and downtime, but rather about finding best-of-breed technology to solve their company’s issues and enhance their business, quickly. Imagine a world where IT is defined as a means to increase margin through people and process productivity gains, rather than an expense to the organization. Ok, so what’s holding us back? There is no question that Security concerns and a fear of relinquishing control of data and applications are still holding back adoption of cloud technologies in the enterprise. The interconnectedness of our web identities, and especially our reliance on email as a primary authentication provider, limits the level of security possible for web-based software today. We saw an example of this with Twitter’s leaks from Google Docs. But traditional IT has never been fully secure either, and Cloud IT providers have a number of mechanisms at their disposal to improve lock-down procedures on all fronts – plus, their business survival hinges on reliability and security. Between two-factor authentication, centralized network and hardware security, and other standards now being implemented by cloud providers, I think we’ll see the Cloud as being more secure in aggregate than traditional IT. Vendors of cloud-based services are aggressively tackling security concerns as a final hurdle, and thanks to maturing platforms, a new generation of knowledge workers and compelling pricing, the Tornado is already gathering momentum. Many concede that the Cloud is indeed coming to business, but see it as a distant solution, perhaps five or ten years off. But the Tornado-like transformation of Enterprise IT will soon be upon us. And once adopted, the Cloud is inherently scalable. Internal infrastructure can take months to set up, but cloud solutions can be online within hours. Traditional platforms require ongoing maintenance and tedious administration and training, but web-based platforms can (and should!) be as end-user friendly as their consumer-focused counterparts. And because cloud-based platforms can be woven together, it’s no longer about forcing your business to fit a one-sized-fits-all solution, but rather designing a solution to fit your business. Most businesses have spent the past few years in survival mode, trying to minimize losses and weather the recession. The coming Tornado will be game-changing for those who dive in early, and devastating for companies that continue to resist. Once the Cloud tips for enterprise IT, the whirlwind of adoption will be impressive. We should see major surges of implementation in 2010, with the Tornado in full force in 2011. And unlike the storm Geoffrey Moore detailed in the 1990s, the drivers of this fast-approaching disruption won’t be the behemoths Oracle, Microsoft, Lotus and Sun. They’re too bogged down by rigid ecosystems and product upgrade commitments. Rather, it’s a new generation of cutting-edge, nimble software companies that are disrupting the current order and leading the charge into the storm. A storm that is bringing unprecedented change to IT and competitive advantage to early adopters, ultimately redefining the role of Enterprise IT itself. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| AsthmaMD Helps Asthma Sufferers, Gathers Aggregate Research Data Posted: 10 Jan 2010 11:43 AM PST
A new iPhone app called AsthmaMD, which was created by am Pejham (a doctor and researcher) and Salim Madjd, aims to help some of those sufferers. The application let’s them keep a diary of attacks, helping them keep records of the severity of attacks, medications used, etc. But what’s really interesting about AsthmaMD: users can opt in to share this data anonymously with the service. The data is aggregated and will be shared with researchers. The company says that will help doctors and researchers better understand the disease, and may help people know when an attack is more likely. In an email, Madjd says:
We will see a lot more apps like this in the future. Crowdsourcing is great for fixing pot holes. But it may also give doctors the information they need to better understand a variety of diseases, too. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Googlle Gets A Sexy New Logo; Remains Sketchy Posted: 10 Jan 2010 11:13 AM PST
Last week, we covered Googlle opening a school in India. Googlle, not to be confused with Google. Obviously, this was a site and service set up to trick people, as they were even ripping-off Google’s logo. Well guess what? After the publicity, they decided to switch up some things. Most notably, you’ll see that the Googlle Institute has a brand new, beautiful logo, as Fake Steve noticed today. Gone is the Google font and colors. It has been replaced by “Googlle” written in red. I’m not sure what the font is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Googlle wasn’t supposed to be using it. You’ll also notice a new “declaration” at the bottom of the site:
Poor English aside, I’m going to assume Google India may not have been too happy about the site, and this is Googlle trying to cover itself. They also apparently took the time to fix all the broken links (simply by removing many of them). They’ve also switched up the curriculum, now offering a 1-year program for a “googlle intern.” Hurry, they’re accepting applications now!
[thanks Brinke] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Posted: 10 Jan 2010 10:16 AM PST  CES is over for CrunchGear (we'll still be posting some stragglers today and tomorrow) but we'd like to reflect on the best gear we saw at the show. These few days flew by and even with the glut of 3D TVs and ereaders we were actually impressed by a few small, good things that caught our eye on the show floor. Here are the winners of CrunchGear's Best of CES 2010 informal editor poll.
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Self-employed ad man 
The flurry of e-book readers that are descending upon us has prompted investors to take a closer look at companies set to ride the wave.
Bad news, Droid owners. Android OS version 2.0.1, which all up-to-date Droids are running, has a bug that makes it fairly easy to bypass the phone’s screen-lock security mechanism. The security feature, when working, requires users to input a pattern using onscreen dots before they can access most of the phone’s features (the iPhone offers a similar option).
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