Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by technology executive Roman Stanek 

Despite all the inroads cloud computing has made among business users, it still hasn’t broken through the enterprise IT logjam. I see it as a cultural issue: IT organizations love control and complexity. They love being able to code, flip switches and grab control of their systems. And they love complexity because, frankly, they think it saves their jobs.

Unable to free themselves of this anachronistic mindset, IT departments live in the land of the “no.” That’s “no,” as in: “No, you can’t bring in your own device,” and “no, we can’t build this new function you need because we’re too busy just keeping the lights on.”

So while business people are bypassing IT and subscribing to cloud-based apps that help them manage customer relationship management (CRM) functions with Salesforce.com, connect with customers using Zendesk, and collaborate with Box, most IT organizations remain focused on the mundane. And the irony? By embracing control and complexity, IT organizations have effectively isolated themselves within a technology ghetto. They are the opposite of strategic. And that means they aren’t protecting their jobs — they have become expendable.

I believe it’s imperative for SaaS providers to help IT people accept a new mindset and help them make the transition to what I like to call the age of IT enlightenment. Instead of owning the infrastructure — and spending 90 percent of their time just to “keep the lights on” — they need to assume new responsibilities related to governance, capacity planning, security, workflow across apps, and the rise of BYOD.

How we as an industry handle this challenge — in essence, how we help IT folks into the age of IT enlightenment — could reshape the entire market. Some IT organizations have already begun this transition, and are seeing the rewards. But for the rest…..

It starts with psychology: convincing IT folks that that they are not abdicating responsibility. They are delegating it. This will be easier said than done, since IT craves control especially when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will. The solution?

Deliver excellent SLA: Google Gmail, the world’s biggest cloud-based e-mail system, has an average uptime of 99.99 percent. Amazon targets 99.95 percent uptime for AWS. I challenge any IT organization to come close to those levels of reliability. Even so, we as SaaS providers need to show customers that our levels of reliability are at least the match of their legacy systems. Statistics like these are our friends.

Be as secure as a bank: Make sure you’ve checked off all the legal, security and governance requirements: SOC2, ISO/IEC 27000, PCI. Certificates like these are the best way to clear away the misperception that cloud computing isn’t secure. People put their money in a bank and not under their mattress because they trust a bank’s security system. As an industry, we have to show we’re just as trustworthy when safeguarding customers’ data.

Show IT how cloud computing can make them heroes: The days of touting cloud computing as the way to save money or increase flexibility are behind us. Cloud computing will replace legacy systems because it can transform IT into a strategic arm of business. The successful SaaS companies are fluent in explaining how that can happen. And that fluency can help bring more IT organizations out of the land of “no” and into the promise land of cloud computing.

My hope is that SaaS providers will be able to more easily sell to IT; as they’ll both be speaking the same language: the language of business.

Roman Stanek is the founder and CEO of GoodData, a company that offers a range of business intelligence software and reporting tools to help companies monetize big data. Prior to this, he was the founder of NetBeans.org, sold to Sun Microsystems, and Systinet, which was acquired by HP.

Follow him on Twitter @RomanStanek

Top image via © grafvision, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Information may want to be free, but the organization behind Wikipedia wants knowledge to be free, too. So Wikimedia has formed a partnership with the world’s sixth-largest telecom, VimpelCom, to deliver Wikipedia mobile sites for free to developing countries.

It’s part of the Wikipedia Zero program, which is the project to deliver Wikipedia “free of data charges” on mobile devices in developing countries.

“The world’s sixth-largest telecommunications company and fifth-largest website globally are coming together to offer our customers a better mobile experience and greater access to free knowledge, particularly in emerging markets,” Mikhail Gerchuk, VimpelCom’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement.

You’ve probably never heard of VimpelCom — the organization typically does business under other brands, such as Wind and Mobilink — but the telecom has a strong presence in Russia, former Eastern bloc countries, parts of south-east Asia, and Africa, with 212 million subscribers in a service area with 780 million people.

With this partnership, Wikipedia Zero now will be providing free access to 330 million mobile users around the world, Wikimedia’s Kul Takanao Wadhwa said, adding that it was an important step towards the organizations’ ultimate goal: “free knowledge to everyone on the planet.”

The 18 countries that VimpelCom is bringing onboard include Russia, Italy, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Laos, Algeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burundi, Zimbabwe, and the Central African Republic.

The roll out will start this year, Wikimedia said, with a focus on Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.

photo credit: Absolute Chaos via photopin cc

DNA is a fantastic medium from a storage perspective. Its storage density is one million gigabits per cubic millimeter. A gigabit is a billion bits, and one gigabit equals 125 megabytes. So a million gigabits, if I’m not such a math idiot as some have said, is 125,000 gigabytes … in one cubic millimeter.

That’s a little more storage than fits in your new MacBook Air.

The Harvard scientists followed a four-step process: encoding the book into the zeroes and ones of computer storage, and then into the language of DNA. To read the data, they then synthesized the DNA and decoded the gene sequences:

Source: Harvard

Storing data in DNA

The key, according to author George Church, is that “most non-DNA methods store on a plane what DNA stores in a volume.” That 3-D storage method is about as good as it gets: According to Sri Kosuri, one of the scientists who made it happen, the storage density compares “favorably with other experimental storage methods from biology and physics.”

In fact, it’s so good, according to a Harvard Medical School write-up, that all the data the world creates in a year could theoretically fit in four grams of DNA.

In addition, DNA is stable at room temperature, unlike other high-density storage methodologies such as quantum holography, which requires near absolute zero temperatures and massive energy expenditures. One downer: encoding is slow, and decoding is also.

And the book?

It may not exactly be bedtime reading unless you’re actually trying to sleep … “Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves” … but there are now more copies in existence, sort of, to make it far and away the biggest bestseller ever.

If only each one was paid for.

photo credit: kevin dooley via photo pin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Much-lauded startup Qwiki — an online Wikipedia-esque service that throws displays information with computer-generated voices, images and video — is coming out of private alpha and opening up to everyone today.

The service basically feels like it’s from the future. Actors asking like questions to a computer and getting large swaths of information back is basically a sci-fi trope in movies like Wall-E at this point, and that’s exactly what Qwiki does — though sans Sigourney Weaver. Users simply type in something in Qwiki’s search bar and get a two- to three-minute clip of spoken information and a few pictures or videos.

Qwiki launched its private alpha at TechCrunch Disrupt, an industry conference, in September last year raised $9.5 million from the likes of Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin in a short few months. The service got more than a hundred thousand requests to join the private alpha, according to a spokesperson for the company.

Qwiki has around 3 million topics in its database, ranging from geographic locations like San Francisco to actresses like Natalie Portman (though being a math nerd, I went straight to pages with information on meromorphic functions and the Riemann-Zeta function.) The information presented is surprisingly comprehensive without throwing out a tsunami of facts that might pop up on some of the largest Wikipedia pages.

Doug Imbruce, the company’s co-founder, said the service was going to make its way to smartphones and tablets at Disrupt in the fall. The idea would be to wake up in the morning to a quick feed of some of the most interesting news, weather and traffic data presented in the same style as the rest of Qwiki’s pages. Other website owners can also embed Qwiki widgets on their pages for specific topics.

Qwiki’s largest investment actually came from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, Juniper Networks co-founder Pradeep Sindhu, Lerer Media Ventures, Tugboat Ventures and Contour Venture Partners also invested in the company.

The new live alpha won’t require any kind of special account to execute searches, but users can still sign up and leave some feedback if they like. There won’t be any kind of cap on the number of users visiting the site or signing up.

Qwiki was the darling of last fall’s TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 competition for start-ups, winning a $50,000 prize and the Disrupt Cup. Qwiki was also the runner-up for best technological achievement at this year’s Crunchies awards — an academy award-style ceremony for start-ups and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

Live Matrix doesn’t host any content, instead it links to sources like shopping sites or streaming video sites like Justin.tv and USTREAM. The types of events it indexes include sales, gaming tournaments, streaming videocasts and more.

Users can RSVP to individual events and get reminders as the event start time approaches, as well as share the site with the typical smattering of social networks.

But the company does sell advertising space on its site to capitalize on the time users spend browsing through events, in addition to sponsorship deals with event providers. Live Matrix also has plans to sell its analytics data for individual events.

The hope is that individual hosts — like ESPN3, for example — will provide Live Matrix with event details so the service won’t have to crawl the web for them. Founder and CEO Sanjay Reddy, former senior vice president at Gemstar-TV Guide, and his team are also working on a way to let users submit events and crowdsource the data-mining process.

The site has already been active for four months, with about 100 pre-approved beta users after launching at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this year. As of May, the company had raised around $250,000 from angel investors.