The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Enterprise Software Is Sexy Again
- GitHub Hits One Million Hosted Projects
- A Must Listen: The Steve Jobs Song [Video]
- Queer Eye-Phone: Gay Social Network Fabulis Gets An App
- NY, NJ Parking Lots Sign Up to Charge Electric Vehicles
- Pinning Down Zynga’s Revenues Is Like Playing Pin The Tail On The Bullet Train
- A Case For AIR: Adobe Evangelist Builds Video Conference App For Android & PC
- Forum Site Lefora Gobbled Up By CrowdGather
- Halcyon Molecular’s William Andregg: “The Only Way To Reach The Stars Is To Live Longer”
| Enterprise Software Is Sexy Again Posted: 25 Jul 2010 08:59 AM PDT
When we think of sexy technologies, enterprise software usually ranks somewhere between the fax machine and a Zune. With prohibitive pricing, long product cycles and user interfaces only a mother could love, the enterprise offerings of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and other big vendors are about as appealing as Steve Ballmer in a bikini. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have been turned off by these unappealing traits, the near-monopolies held by big players, and the suspicion that problems being solved for the enterprise are less exciting. After all, if you want to rapidly develop and release technology to millions of users, build an agile and innovative company culture, and perhaps break a few rules along the way, you certainly don’t build software for the enterprise. You build Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, YouTube or Blippy. Given all this, why have I decided to go down the road of building a hard-core enterprise software company? It’s simple. Enterprise software is sexy again. Just ask consumer tech guru Marc Andreessen, who recently confessed to being attracted to the new wave of enterprise software companies, or Peter Thiel, who thinks Palantir is hot to the tune of a $750M valuation. Palantir is like the Jack Bauer of business software, helping to prevent terrorism and predict the spread of infectious diseases. Fortune 500 companies use Box.net to collaborate on billions of dollars in transactions, streamline national advertising campaigns, and help build new space shuttles (seriously, space shuttles). Cloudera is helping big businesses solve their biggest data challenges. Jive is building a meaningfully large business by bringing social into the enterprise, and just raised another $30M to do so. Zuora is reinventing customer subscriptions and payments, and has quickly grown to manage more than $1 billion in subscription revenue. These companies – along with Workday, PBWorks, Asana, Rypple, Salesforce, and dozens of others – are tackling big problems and even bigger markets, placing a premium on innovation, and building cultures around product execution rather than pure sales. And by doing so, they’re making enterprise software sexy (yes, I’m going to use this word a lot in this post, prepare yourself). Big Problems, Large Markets, New Scale Enterprises today have massive amounts of information to analyze and manage, disparate employees to connect, prospective customers across the world to market to, and business problems that need to be solved in real-time. Buyers across businesses of all sizes are on the prowl for better, sexier technologies to address these challenges, and collectively they have hundreds of billions of dollars in budget. The US government alone will spend nearly $80 billion next year on information technology. Compare that to a $24.2 billion pie for all of US internet advertising, the revenue stream for a large portion of web companies. New enterprise software companies are emerging to address problems that didn’t exist (or couldn’t be solved) a decade ago, and those with the most efficient and effective solution are being rewarded greatly. These newcomers wouldn’t have stood a chance against the behemoths in the client-server paradigm, but the cloud is an inherently democratizing force, removing any unnatural channel, sales, or distribution advantages from providers. With the cloud, every user within an organization is a potential buyer – not just because their usage of your service determines your success, but because more and more we’re seeing bottom-up adoption of technology displacing top-down deployments. New enterprise services that leverage a freemium business model can operate at internet-scale, growing to millions of users as rapidly as the latest hip consumer application. Just look at Yammer, which is doubling revenue every quarter. Startups now have an unprecedented opportunity to disrupt traditional enterprise vendors. Massive Innovation in the Enterprise The latest crop of enterprise software companies are approaching business problems with the agility, speed and mindset of consumer startups, bringing explosive innovation to a traditionally stagnant, slow-moving market. To retain customers in this incredibly competitive landscape, you’re forced to build better technology – technology that customers love, is easy to implement and available across devices. It’s Moore’s Law on steroids, forcing you to constantly innovate and improve your technology at an unprecedented pace. At Box, we push updates that are incremental and sometimes monumental every week without interruption to our users or their IT departments, unlike SharePoint’s three-year release cycles and occasional patches that place the burden on the IT staff. How is all this innovation translating to how users and businesses operate? Enterprises are now getting a real-time, holistic view of content and conversations within their business through activity feeds from Salesforce, Yammer, Jive and others. They’re experiencing more seamless interaction between the desktop and browser with HTML5-powered content viewing and editing, and drag and drop uploading from Google, Scribd, and more. They’re realizing the long overdue promise of the “mobile workforce,” thanks to sophisticated business applications that let them collaborate and communicate from mobile devices and the iPad. There’s more ground-breaking innovation going on in enterprise startups today than most of the consumer web; we just don’t see it because we’re conditioned to think enterprise software is dull. Culture and Execution Matter More Than Size Not surprisingly, company culture at these new enterprise software contenders looks a lot more like their consumer counterparts than the enterprise behemoths they’re attempting to disrupt. Rather than trying to build aggressive sales teams, many enterprise software startups are focusing on product execution as the best means of acquiring customers. The days of “elephant hunting” are quickly disappearing (it always seemed strange to associate customer relationships with killing large and mostly-friendly mammals, but what do I know?). Consumption and subscription-based billing, in contrast to the traditional licensing model, forces vendors to build amazing software that your customers need and use, not just software that you can sell better than anyone else. In today’s world, you only get paid if people are using your product. Furthermore, without the hooks of costly infrastructure and rigid licensing, scaling in size is no longer an excuse for slowing down. In the highly democratized, competitive world of the Web, companies that let their bulk get in the way of innovation and user experience will quickly see a customer and employee exodus. Salesforce is sexier today having passed the $1B annual revenue mark than it was a decade ago because it has continued to innovate and build a culture around its core mission: “The End of Software.” SuccessFactors has aged gracefully to become one of the leading SaaS cloud companies by executing against five founding principles that include “No Jerks!” NetSuite, Taleo, LogMeIn and SolarWinds have also managed to maintain their sex appeal through recent successful IPOs. Others like Cast Iron and Greenplum have been snapped up in a recent wave of acquisitions as giants like IBM and EMC try to spice up their images and offerings. So how can today’s business software vendors, as they grow, see similar success? 1. Make customers feel like they’re a part of your company — all enterprise vendors could all learn a little from Zappos We’re going through a major shift in the technology landscape. Yes, photo sharing is fun, but the upside of creating the eighth service that lets you post photos of yourself to the web is becoming smaller than solving massive problems for enterprises. Organizations have unprecedented amounts of data, global and virtual workforces, and markets that change in real-time. It’s easier and more compelling than ever before to build, launch, and sell scalable enterprise solutions. There are billions of dollars to be made just by keeping it (don’t hate me) sexy.      
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| GitHub Hits One Million Hosted Projects Posted: 24 Jul 2010 10:51 PM PDT
GitHub has seen rapid growth since it launched in February 2008, all despite the fact that the company has eschewed the traditional venture capital funding route. In an exchange that took place, appropriately enough, via the messaging system built into GitHub, Chacon stated that the company is still “funding free and very profitable” and that they are seeing “incredible growth for GitHub and Git usage in general.” In January 2009 they won a Crunchie for best bootstrapped startup. The profit comes from the paid plans that GitHub offers for those developers and companies who want to host their repositories privately. GitHub offers essentially unlimited hosting to anyone who is willing to make their code open source, but charges based on the number of private repositories and the number of contributors for other projects. This profitability has spurred the launch of a number of new features of late, such as Organizations, which offers more advanced workflow tools for projects with multiple contributors and varying permissions, and support for fifteen new languages. GitHub is a key part of the software development ecosystem, hosting a number of notable code bases, including Ruby on Rails, the jQuery JavaScript library and the Linux kernel. Git, the distributed version control software that GitHub is based on, was in fact built by Linus Torvalds, the lead developer and maintainer of the Linux kernel, and the source code for Git itself is also hosted on GitHub. TechCrunch hosts a number of repositories using the service, including some that are open source, and Twitter has recently been publishing the source for several of their gems and other code, using GitHub to do so. Ruby and JavaScript are the most popular languages on GitHub, with 19 and 17 percent of the hosted code respectively, but there are currently projects in over 50 languages on the service: everything from Visual Basic to Go.      
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| A Must Listen: The Steve Jobs Song [Video] Posted: 24 Jul 2010 05:30 PM PDT
I thought I was a fanboy. I’ve got nothing on Jonathan Mann. Regular readers may recall that Mann is the guy behind the Bing jingle (which we didn’t like – but students did, or were forced to), the song about me (which we did like), and most recently, the iPhone 4 antenna song (which not only did we love, but apparently Apple did too). Mann, touched by the fact that Apple decided to play his song at their press conference last Friday, decided to follow it up with a serenade for CEO Steve Jobs. Warning: if some of my posts about Apple drive you crazy, this song is going to make your head explode. We have lyrics like:
But the craziest thing about this song is that it’s good. Seriously. It’s so damn catchy. Mann continues to impress.
     
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| Queer Eye-Phone: Gay Social Network Fabulis Gets An App Posted: 24 Jul 2010 04:28 PM PDT
The app offers all the best parts of the website, but extends upon them by utilizing the location element that the iPhone offers. The default view of the app is the “nearby” tab which shows fabulius members, known as “fabbits,” that are close to your actual location. If you find someone nearby that you want to engage with, you can chat with the click of a button. There’s also a “shake-it” functionality, which launches a fabulis slot machine. This returns you a random fabulis member nearby who you may or may not know, and allows you to view their profile and chat with them. The other major functionality of the app is the Plans area. This gives you access to what fabulis says is the largest directory of gay-related events in the world — over 71,000 events, with thousands more being added each day. And again, thanks to the use of the iPhone’s GPS, you can sort by events that are close to your location. And, of course, there is a way to view your messages, and look at other fabbits’ profiles in the app. Some other stats from fabulis:
It’s hard to top CEO Jason Goldberg’s quote that fabulis for the iPhone “is like carrying the big gay world around in your pocket,” so I won’t even try. You can find the fabulis iPhone app in the App Store here. It’s a free download.
     
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| NY, NJ Parking Lots Sign Up to Charge Electric Vehicles Posted: 24 Jul 2010 03:26 PM PDT
The Car Charging Group, Inc. (CCGI) this weekend announced a partnership with LAZ Parking in New York and New Jersey to begin outfitting its facilities with smart, electric vehicle charging stations. The Miami-based CCGI installs and maintains electric vehicle charging stations in government-owned lots, and at commercial sites like shopping malls, hotels, stadiums and corporate parking garages. LAZ Parking operates over 1,300 parking facilities in 21 states and 99 cities. The LAZ Parking sites will be equipped by CCGI with smart, ChargePoint Level II, 240 volts charging stations, manufactured by Coulomb Technologies. Smart charging stations, unlike those designed for home-garage use, have metering and e-commerce capabilities, and are visible online. Drivers can find smart charging stations on Google Maps, for example. Coloumb Technologies, the recipient of a $15 million Department of Energy grant (funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the Transportation Electrification Initiative) is a leader in sales of charging stations in the U.S. The company is, with some of its government grant money, setting up — sometimes temporarily free — public electric vehicle charging stations throughout the country, including New York City’s first. General Electric and Toyota have announced that they are developing and will sell their own smart charging stations, as well.
The Department of Energy estimates that charging station locations in the U.S. will increase 41 times over between 2009 and 2012. Citing consumer demand and a slew of new charging station technology, and vehicle models — like the Nissan Leaf, GM Chevy Volt, Fisker Karma, and Tesla Model S — Car Charging Group, Inc.’s president Andy Kinard said Saturday that he wouldn’t be surprised if the Obama administration fulfilled its goal: getting one million plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles on the road by 2015. To recharge at public or commercially installed stations, Kinard says hybrid and electric vehicle owners should be prepared to pay about $3 per hour. He noted: “It’s hard to get 220 volts out into the streets. [Parking facilities] do have to charge more than it would cost an electric vehicle driver to plug in at home. But that’s nothing compared to gas prices now. And it will still be cheaper than what you spend driving an internal combustion engine.”      
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| Pinning Down Zynga’s Revenues Is Like Playing Pin The Tail On The Bullet Train Posted: 24 Jul 2010 03:19 PM PDT
The New York Times has a feature on Zynga that’s online now but running the paper tomorrow. In it, they cite data from Inside Network, a service that tracks Facebook and social games, stating that Zynga is on pace to make $835 million in revenue this year. That huge — unfortunately, it’s not true. NYT actually read the data from Inside Network’s wrong. Their data said that $835 million would be the revenue for the social gaming market as a whole in 2010. We’ve confirmed with both Inside Networks and Zynga that NYT got that wrong. That said, even though it’s inaccurate right now, that moonshot estimate may not end up being that far off. Two weeks ago, we broke the news that Google had secretly invested over $100 million in Zynga earlier this year. For that story, sources told us that Zynga’s revenues for the first half of 2010 would be an amazing $350 million. So if you double it for the other half of the year, that’s $700 million in revenue for 2010. Not bad. Actually, amazing. But it’s certainly seems likely that Zynga will continue to grow and make more money as the year goes on, so again, the $835 million number may end up not being that far off. It’s just not correct right now. Those numbers are up hugely from earlier this year when managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Jeremy Liew, broke down what he believed Zynga’s revenues to be for us. At the time, Liew estimated that Zynga had made about $240 million year to date. That was May, so extrapolated out, that would equal a little over $500 million in revenue for all of 2010. And those numbers were up from a BusinessWeek article in April, which stated that Zynga should do $450 million in revenue in 2010. Yes, the revenue estimates are soaring each and every month, it seems. Two weeks ago, our sources told us that Zynga is projecting revenues of at least $1 billion in 2011. So it seems we’re going to be playing this game into next year as well. And at least until Zynga goes public, at which point they’ll have to release their actual numbers. As a side note, the NYT story also confirms our Zynga Google-funding story from two weeks ago with their own sources. According to them, the Series D round was $300 million split “roughly” equally between Softbank and Google. This means Zynga now has about $520 million in funding. Update: NYT has now updated their story with the following:
[image via ubergizmo]      
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| A Case For AIR: Adobe Evangelist Builds Video Conference App For Android & PC Posted: 24 Jul 2010 12:07 PM PDT
Earlier this year, you probably heard that Apple blocked Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone App converter from the App Store on the eve of the tool’s launch. That may have crushed Adobe’s dream of allowing developers to write their Flash apps once and deploy them wherever they’d like, but its AIR platform still works with Mac, PC, and Linux, with support for Android devices coming later this year. That means developers will soon be able to write applications that will work on both the desktop and smartphones. Of course, the prospect of running cross-platform applications is a lot more impressive when you can see one in action. Which is why Adobe Technical Evangelist Christophe Coenraets has put together a demo showing off what AIR can do when it’s used to deploy the same application across both Android and desktop computers. He’s built a basic video conference app in 30 lines of code, which he demos in the YouTube clip above (the heavy lifting was pre-written, powered by Adobe’s LiveCycle Collaboration Services module). Obviously the application is quite basic, but it’s pretty impressive nonetheless. I’ve never been a big fan of AIR — I’ve yet to run into an AIR app on my Mac that didn’t feel a bit out of place, with quirky window behavior and decidedly non-native UI (though this may be the fault of third-party app developers building on the platform). Still, it’s hard not to see the benefit of being able to build an application that runs on both mobile and PC.      
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| Forum Site Lefora Gobbled Up By CrowdGather Posted: 24 Jul 2010 10:13 AM PDT
Lefora, founded by Paul Bragiel, first launched in 2008. It’s notable because of how simple it is for users to create and embed forums onto their sites. The much larger CrowdGather boasts around 4.5 million monthly unique users and 80 million monthly page views. The company has raised $3 million or so in funding and has been on an acquisition tear – albeit always very small deals. CrowdGather is also licensing technology from Tal.ki, another company founded by Bragiel. Tal.ki is acquiring the remaining assets of Lefora as well. Bragiel also recently cofounded i/o Ventures, a work/cafe incubator located in San Francisco.      
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| Halcyon Molecular’s William Andregg: “The Only Way To Reach The Stars Is To Live Longer” Posted: 24 Jul 2010 10:00 AM PDT
Andregg grew up in Arizona. There’s a song by The Orb called Little Fluffy Clouds that describes the light-pollution-free Arizonan sky quite perfectly, with amazing clouds, sunsets and stars. Most Arizonans – at some point in their lives – will lay on the hood of their car and gaze towards the grandness of those fluffy clouds and the Milky Way, but most probably won’t come to the same conclusions that William did about it all. William yearned to travel beyond the clouds to the stars, but become perplexed by the fact that he most likely wouldn’t make it due to an unfortunate condition that plagues us all — mortality. He knew that in order to reach the stars, which he so desperately wanted to do, he must dedicate most of his life to prolonging and increasing human lifespans so that he or others like him might have a chance to go where no man has truly gone before. In order to go big, he went very small. Our DNA. Halcyon Molecular has come out of stealth mode, letting William tell his story in order to encourage a few good business women and men to join their plight to end aging. They’ve discovered an inexpensive and most importantly, fast way to sequence the entire human genome. If commercialized successfully, their discovery will change the world of medicine as we know it and increase our chances of living even longer. Biotech startups are rare now, but we’re going to start seeing more and more of them pop up over the next decade. Technology that was once incredibly expensive is now becoming obtainable and the next wave of tech startups will delve into the largest market of all, human health. William is the only person I know with one of the world’s most powerful electron microscopes operating out of his garage, which is pretty damn cool. What about frogs? Well, the dissection of frogs in high school almost led to William avoiding an entire career in biotech, which struck me as one of many things we should consider revising in our public education system. We need more Williams, not fewer. (Exciting Note! Speaking Of… is now available via RSS/iTunes Podcast:      
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This guest post was written by 
Since its 
One of the most exciting things to watch in tech these days is various groups’ estimates for Zynga’s revenues. Depending on what you read and on what day, they are all over the map. It’s been that way for a long time too, because the social gaming service is simply growing so fast and monetizing the hell out of their properties. Now that we’re more than halfway into 2010, the consensus seems clear that Zynga made about $300 million in revenue in 2009. But 2010 is proving even tougher to nail down, it seems.
Los Angeles based 
This week's episode of 
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