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| Sep 29, 2008 in Entrepreneurship, Startups, Web/Tech |  1 |
Just read over on Feld Thoughts about the AWS Startup Challenge. If you are building a web app utilizing Amazon Web Services you should check this out. The grand prize includes $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS service credits, and a potential investment offer from Amazon. The application is short and straightforward. Deadline for entry is October 3.
| Aug 14, 2008 in Entrepreneurship, Internet, Web/Tech | 16 |
Last week I delved a bit into the concept of business clusters and made a promise to address the subject of how a stronger consumer technology cluster may emerge in Atlanta. In the post last week I spent a lot of time focusing on one of Michael Porter's key findings in cluster development, that anchor companies play a disproportionate role in seeding cluster development. This week I want to pull another key finding that is not only important to cluster development but also to entrepreneurial opportunities into the discussion.
New firm and cluster opportunities arise at the intersection of existing clusters.
This is really an important concept and leads of course to the question of what types of clusters currently exist in Atlanta. As pointed out in the Porter report financial services,transportation/logistics are strong broad clusters and the technology cluster draws its roots on telecommunications and media. Beyond that I personally believe that we have strong technology clusters in logistics, Internet security, and payment processing. Maybe Internet services as well if you include the likes of Cbeyond, Cox, EarthLink, and Knology in that mix.
But roots in telecom and media. That is interesting. Real interesting. Particularly when one starts thinking about "new" media. I kinda hate the term. Nobody really knows what it means. Even Wikipedia, a new media form in and of itself fails. Webopedia has the best definition I could find:
New Media is a generic term for the many different forms of electronic communication that are made possible through the use of computer technology. The term is in relation to old media forms, such as print newspapers and magazines, that are static representations of text and graphics. New media includes: Web sites, streaming audio and video, chat rooms, e-mail, online communities, Web advertising, virtual reality environments, integration of digital data with the telephone, such as Internet telephony, digital cameras, and mobile computing.
In other words it includes a lot, including the fine content you can find on FoG. But it is much more than that and it just so happens that Atlanta has a pretty strong foundation in new media.
Atlanta has a strong foundation in new media? Here I go, being all crazy once again. But I typically like to back up my crazy statements with specific facts, so here goes.
According to Comscore Media Metrix (part of a long forgotten Atlanta win), three of the top 50 Web properties in the U.S. are based in Atlanta and have a combined reach of just over 50% of the Internet audience (in a given month half of the Internet user in the U.S. visit these properties). The properties are Turner at #12, Weather at #16, and Cox at #44.
Yeah folks, Turner's Web properties are the 12th largest in the country in and of themselves reaching 23% of all Internet users. This includes not only Cartoon Network but NASCAR.com, PGA.com, and PGATour.com among their smaller properties like TNT and TBS. Turner is a new media powerhouse. Larger then Facebook. By about 15%. Can you say anchor? And remember:
Anchor companies play a disproportionate role in seeding cluster development...producing numerous spin-out companies, which strengthen key elements of the cluster.
But that's not all. I wish I had full access to Comscore's numbers so that I could get a bit more granular, but I don't. Regardless, both Careerbuilder and Time Warner with CNN have significant presence in Atlanta. Significant like buildings full of people working on core new media services. In you include Careerbuilder and TW in the Internet reach numbers that I outlined above the total reach jumps to 78%. You can discard this if you want and my argument still holds. There is a strong new media cluster in Atlanta. Why no one talks about this is beyond me, but its there. I know it's there. And I am not alone. That gives me hope.
The 250 or so people packed into Turner last fall that sat and listened to 60 companies pitch their wares at the New Media Business Exchange gives me hope.
Noro Moseley Partners hiring Greg Foster to head up a new media practice gives me hope.
A very prominent new media entrepreneur/executive working behind the scenes to put together, for lack of a better term, a MediaLab (think a VentureLab that extends beyond the boundaries of Georgia Tech) focused on new media startups gives me hope.
Having 60 people come together over a weekend to create Skribit gives me hope.
The Boostphase effort, a seed stage investment company for capital efficient startups gives me hope.
Seeing two very interesting companies emerge from Turner in the past two months give me hope.
GVU's Journalism 3G gives me hope.
Sitting down with Georgia Tech students and watching their excitement as they explain their startup concept gives me hope.
AngelLounge gives me hope.
More Atlanta startups in the new media space then I can mention gives me hope.
I could go on. And I hear it in the comments already. Hope is not a strategy. And it's not.
But to paraphrase a certain senator from Illinois, that's not the type of hope I am talking about. It's much larger than that. It's the same hope that makes you want to go out and start a company. Or grow a company. It's the hope of a much larger opportunity. The hope of being part of something larger. A larger opportunity that we need to seize.
For me, it's more than hope. It's a belief. A belief that in the next ten years Atlanta can establish itself as strong in the new media space as we have in the Internet security space.
But hope and belief is not a strategy. Where does that leave us?
Let's go back to Porter's key finding, new firm and cluster opportunities arise at the intersection of existing clusters. Is he right? Yep. The most recent example. Firethorn. Financial services meets telecommunications. Acquired by Qualcomm for $210. Cha-ching!
Look at opportunities at the intersection of existing clusters. They are big. That really gives me hope.
But what would really, really give me hope is if everybody stops comparing here versus there. There wins. End of discussion. So let's talk about something interesting. What do you do to seize the opportunity?
What gives you hope?
| Aug 04, 2008 in Angels, Internet, Startups, Web/Tech | 6 |
Big day for Purewire. Today they announced $2 million in funding, Tom Noonan joined their Board of Directors, and the general availability of the Purewire Web Security Service.
The Purewire team quietly formed about nine months ago and began working on their concept. They announced the formation of the company in May. And now today.
The company was founded by my former partners in crime from CipherTrust, which was acquired by Secure Computing in 2006 for around $300 million. The founding team included Mike Van Bruinisse, President & COO; Dr. Paul Judge, CTO; and Mark Caldwell, Vice President of Sales. Since then they have recruited Steve Raber to join as CEO, Brad McArthur as Vice President of Operations, and Mary Catherine Peterman as Vice President of Marketing.
The $2 million raise was a "friends & family" round led by Imlay Investments. Those guys have some really great friends (one of them is me) to pull together that much coin. They can do so at this stage because the story is compelling, they have done it before together, the team has the passion that it takes to succeed, and MVB and company are thinking big.
Essentailly Purewire is offering a cloud computing security service. The product platform is strong. The four core technologies are Sandbox which protects browsers from script-based attacks; Reputation, a real-time URL classification engine; Trust that correlates user reputation, Web reputation and other heuristics; and Webcelerator an acceleration technology that maintains speed and responsiveness while all the other activity is going on in the background.
If you are looking to join an early stage company that intends to make a big splash Purewire is hiring developers and engineers.
Tell them I sent you. I don't think they will hold that against you.
| Jul 24, 2008 in Web/Tech | 13 |
Today Amazon reported earnings and they were pretty outstanding (I do not own any AMZN and have not since I unloaded what I purchased as "a friend" on their IPO). Profits doubled. Sales up 41%. Not a bad quarter.
Except it reminded me of what happened this past Sunday.
Amazon's S3 online storage service experienced significant downtime. It was not available for about 6 hours (they were also down for about 3 hours back in February). That is a ton which I will explain shortly. But for those that do not know, S3 is a distributed storage cloud that many applications such as Twitter and SmugMug use. They charge $.15 per GB/month and $.10 per GB of data transfer in and a sliding scale starting at $.17 per GB of data out (this is more because Amazon has less slack data out due to the site traffic www.amazon.com generates, is mostly all out).
To provide a little background here, it is a little known fact that for a period of time I ran MindSpring's product development team. The developers all reported up to me. The short story is we were growing so fast we started having some issues pushing products out the door, we went away for a few days to something that became known as the "technology summit", and at the end of the said summit the president of the company gave me the dev team because he wanted one person responsible. We fixed the issues. It is during this time that I become intimately knowledgeable about things such as reliability and availability.
Availability is simply the amount of time a service is available (scheduled maintenance downtown excluded). Availability is typically measured by the number of "nines" delivered. For example the plain old telephone service that you get from AT&T has an availability of five nines or 99.999% (this is sometimes referred to as telco grade). Now back in my ISP days we did not shoot for five nines for core services such as mail and web, it would cost too much to so do. Our objective was four nines or 99.99%. Now removing one little nine may not seem like much but it makes a big difference in the amount of downtime a service has as you can see in the table below.
| Uptime (%) | Downtime/Year |
|---|---|
| 99% | 87.6 hours (3.65 days) |
| 99.9% | 8.76 hours |
| 99.99% | 52.56 minutes |
| 99.999% | 5.256 minutes |
| 99.9999% | 31.536 seconds |
99.99% still seems an acceptable level for a mature Internet service. A startup can get away with two, an emerging company three. So how is Amazon doing? For S3 it is pretty straightforward. S3 year to date is less then 99.9% available, which to me, for a paid service is not acceptable. This got me to wonder how Amazon's own site faired. So I did a little investigating. And to do so I used information from a neat little company called Pingdon that issues reports on such things from time to time.
The only report on amazon.com was from last April, but through that point of the year the site was only down 21 minutes which on an annual basis equates to just under 99.99% . I find the disparity very interesting.
Now granted most newer web apps are not going to deliver four nines and this pingdom report shows that. The 17 social networking apps that they reported on had an average availability of 99.7%.
Here's the point. Back in those days of providing Internet services we had "14 Deadly Sins". One of them was "Rely on outside vendors who let us down". All the cuteness of the Twitter fail whale meme aside (which i believe is making some companies/individuals behave like excessive downtime is acceptable), if you are going to build a healthy web or SaaS application business the service needs to be available. If you rely on S3 alone to deliver that availability in a production environment you will fail. You need an effective fall over plan for when S3 goes down.
| Jul 22, 2008 in Web/Tech | 4 |
This is a review of the TypePad app for the iPhone. I created it on the iPhone.
Or perhaps I should say started on an iPhone because I inadvertently published it after two sentences. More on that later.
First, the setup did not go off without a hitch. I downloaded the app last week. The first thing you have to do is enter your account info. Which I did. The TypePad server did not like my creds so it returned a username/pass error. I tried this a few more times (including on my MBA to check I was using the right login) to no avail. So I opened a ticket with TypePad on Saturday and received a reply Monday.
Laura from TypePad told me to uninstall/reinstall the app. So I uninstalled on both iTunes and the iPhone, downloaded the app via iTunes and synced it over to the iPhone. This resulted in an "unknown error" response when submitting the acocunt info. So I uninstalled again. And decided to install the app via the App Store accessed via the iPhone itself. This seemed to work. I logged in and quickly made a test post with a picture which I published and deleted. Very easy to use.
Then I started this post. And while the TypePad iPhone interface is pretty straightforward there is one area that is a bit confusing and resulted in me publishing the first two sentence of this post before I meant to do so. To the left is a screenshot that I ripped from TypePad that shows the Create a Post interface. Once you start a post you have two high level options, to Cancel or Publish. Publish does just that. Tapping Cancel does not actualy cancel the post but leads to a sub menu that provides options to Save to Drafts, Don't Save, and Cancel. Having a Draft button at the high level sure would make things more clear.
Adding pictures to posts is a snap.
I could find no functionality to create a hyperlink and given the speed at which I can type on an iPhone that sure would be nice cause doing HTML is just not going to happen.
While I think that this app is a must for anyone with a TypePad blog, like Dave whose WordPress app article inspired this post, I don't think I will be using this app on a regular basis (if TypePad added the functionality to manage existing posts and comments that would certainly change). The overall experience of typing on the iPhone is much better suited to microblogging platforms such as Twitter.
Here is the article on the TypePad blog announcing the iPhone app.
| Jul 07, 2008 in Personal, Web/Tech | 0 |
Dan Greenfield is putting a list of Atlanta's top 50 technology leaders. Somehow or the other I made the Dan's initial short list. Hop on over to Bernaise Source and let Dan know who needs to be included.
| Jun 19, 2008 in BarCamp, Startups, Unconference, Web/Tech | 6 |
This fall Atlanta is going to host its second version of BarCamp and Startup Weekend.
BarCamp Atlanta2 is being planned for October 17 and 18. Michael Mealling is picking up leading the effort from Jeff Haynie. If you want to reach out to Michael try twitter.
Atlanta Startup Weekend 2 is being planned for the weekend of November 7th. I am currently leading the effort again but looking for some folks to help with the effort this year. You can learn a bit more about the first effort at the Startup Weekend Atlanta blog. You can show support for bringing Startup Weekend to Atlanta again by voting here (it's gonna happen).
We are seeking sponsors for both events.
Save the dates. Spread the word. More to come as summer winds down.
| Jun 17, 2008 in Web/Tech | 0 |
As brought to my attention by Mr. Jeff Hayine there is an Atlanta Firefox Launch Party at The Park Tavern located at the 500 Tenth Street (corner of Monroe and 10th) from 7:00 - 10:00 this evening. I intend to make the scene after a meeting with Twelve Foot Guru.
Firefox is also is trying to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period. So download today and let's make some history.
| Jun 02, 2008 in Personal, Web/Tech | 0 |
Golly I have been busy.
Lent ended on March 23rd and along with it my experiment in giving up social networks. Unlike 2007 when I gave up Google and Yahoo! for Lent and quickly returned to them, I have yet to really engage again with LinkedIn and Facebook. I deleted my MySpace account. I cheated with the social networking aspects of Twitter long before Lent was over.
I don't miss LinkedIn or Facebook at all. At the moment I have 119 messages in my LinkedIn account and 49 messages in my Facebook box and 2 requests. I try to keep up with requests for joining the groups I created on Facebook but other than that interact little with either site. I did try to use LinkedIn to find a network engineer to create a network architecture for Piedmont Park (more on that later) and found their new layout a bit confusing.
When I did the blog redesign I removed my LinkedIn profile. Search works just fine for finding me and getting connected. Interested to know if you find yourself using broad based social nets more or less these days.
| May 29, 2008 in Web/Tech | 6 |
I went offline for six days and returned to a brand new look to FoG. The work was done by Blake Perdue.
Blake read that I was looking to change a few things. He works with me at ATDC when he is not working on his MBA at Georgia Tech. He took it upon himself to come up with 14 different designs before presenting me with three. Made a few minor changes to the one I liked best. My major goals were to make the overall design a bit cleaner with better use of above the fold space. Mission accomplished.
I have enough confidence in Blake's skills that we agreed to deploy via SMS while I was on the beach. Great work Blake!
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