Monday Tech News: image depicts history of Apple Tablet
January 25, 2010 | Tech Worth Talking About, Today's Headlines | 0 Comments
It’s been rumored, “announced,” and named — but not really. A quick Monday morning snippet from Mashable and lalawag shows an image that depicts the history of the Apple Tablet. Check it out.
Not the most recent rendering, due to copyright.
Startup co.’s should prioritize customer service for early success
January 19, 2010 | Advice for local companies | 1 Comments
Photo credit courtesy of InsideSoCal.com
If you’ve been a part of a startup before, you know that it’s a tough business. If you’re bootstrapping, every dollar counts and most of your employees are doing a four-person job. But the freedom and passion that come with these jobs are amazing…or so I’ve heard. I’ve worked with dozens of startups in my career, they are the clients you want to bend over backwards for. They believe in their product and their future and are working hard to achieve a dream.
So if you’re a tech startup, how do you prioritize your staffing to meet the needs of both sales and customer service?
One of my favorite startups that I worked for was a company called the Rubicon Project. At that time, I was at SHIFT which is lead by Todd Defren and we worked directly with a PR manager who knew the benefit of keeping the agency and CEO in a tight relationship. The company was run by Frank Addante, a successful CEO and serial entrepreneur. I wasn’t on the account long, but I remember meeting with several of their management team members and seeing first hand their impressive customer service to ad networks and ad publishers. If you were a customer, someone was there for you at all hours.
This was probably my first introduction to that type of dedicated service amongst tech startups. As a consumer I had experienced Amazon.com, Zappos, Bloomingdales and the like. But I had also met the horrors of bad customer service and deplorable response time.
Since the beginning, FourSquare seemed like a fun idea to me, especially if it came locally. We are *new* to town and coming from San Francisco everyone seems so spread out here. As I watched the phenomenon grow I quickly became a groupie “in-waiting” for it to go national. When it did, I was so buried I barely noticed, but then I got right on the bandwagon.
Sadly, my introduction to being on FourSquare was riddled with errors. And by errors, I mean my own. I have to thank harryh who walked me through the problems I experienced and did so within hours. I did have to check-in with them a few times but once I did, my problem was fixed instantly.
I also remember FourSquare founder @Dens showing the TwitPics of the office one day and now realize that the small team is in pretty close quarters which is working out to the consumer’s benefit, i.e., people dedicated to answering emails like mine.
FourSquare uses GetSatisfaction.com to begin an online conversation with you and track the conversation as you to solve the problem. They are able to use these conversations to teach others and you can search the forums for problems similar to the ones you’re experiencing. This cuts down on repeat questions and enables self-help. I plan to spend the rainy weekend ahead of us helping with the FourSquare cause by adding a bunch of Capital Region places. Some bloggers today raise valuable points that FourSquare should consider, but on a pure enjoyment level, I find brilliance in the simplicity of FourSquare and what it does for a culture that usually suffers from a delay in adoption.
I experienced similar customer service success with Tungle.me this week. In efforts to get some advice, I tweeted that I was in need of a calendar app — trying to manage multiple calendars and being limited by the capabilities of AppleMail and Entourage was getting to be too much. A friend recommended Tungle.me. I had read about Tungle.me during it’s launch so I appreciated the reminder.
I sped through signing up and quickly kicked the program off to the side when I thought I couldn’t manage multiple types of calendars on it.
A note from CEO Marc Gingras and support guy Jason Knudsen within 24 hours thanking me for my sign-up got me to re-engage and ask about supporting multiple calendars. Jason himself emailed me moments later and I found out that not only could I, but Jason also walked me through their limitations supporting multiple GMAIL accounts and how I was better off to arrange my profile to use the GMAIL account most important to me. Score.
I’ve never asked questions directly to companies until the world of social media gave a forum to do so and demands a quick response time before public floggings start. If you’re a tech startup, I hope you see the benefit of taking even the tightest budgets and accurately splitting them between sales and customer service.
I’ll leave the “how-to” part to the marketing folks, all I can tell you from a happy tech geek is that I appreciate the service more than the sale.
GlobalFoundries scores 150 new customers and adopts new name
January 14, 2010 | Today's Headlines | 1 Comments
We recently covered the growing list of acquisitions kicking off 2010. Adding itself to that list is our very own GLOBALFOUNDRIES, the company behind, what is now called, Fab 8 in Malta, NY. GlobalFoundries has completed integration with Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing in Singapore making the company the “first full-service semiconductor foundry with a truly global manufacturing and technology footprint across Asia, Europe and the United States.”
Insiders say there’s no local impact that we’ll immediately feel here in the Capital Region, but the acquisition does provide major future stability and a competitive edge.
Without this acquisition, GlobalFoundries found itself coming up as the third largest foundry in the world, but what was more concerning was to date only a few customers have signed on board, the largest of course being AMD. With this larger brand, GlobalFoundries now has 150 customers and reach in Asia, which quite frankly is probably the better place to be up and running right now.
With the addition of the Chartered facilities and completion of Fab 8 here in New York, GlobalFoundries says it will be able to process 1.6 million 300 millimeter wafers a year by 2014. With its new Singapore-based Fab, GlobalFoundries can process 2.2 million 200 millimeter wafers a year.
Will 2010 be a year of acquisitions?
January 8, 2010 | Tech Worth Talking About | 1 Comments
It’s only the first week of 2010 and the technology acquisition space is H-O-T. What an exciting week. With the second day of CES off and rolling plus a slew of exciting technology acquisitions announced this week, it’s why I love this business.
Amongst the most exciting are:
Cisco acquired network security start up Rohati Systems
BMC acquired Phurnace Software (the third acquisition in six months)
Oracle acquired Silver Creek Systems
Seesmic acquired social media syndication site Ping.fm
Dot Hill acquired Cloverleaf and rumored to take on 3PAR
And in more rumors, VMware could acquire Zimbra. (Random, I know.)
Mashable today debunked the myth that AOL was going to be an acquisition and Google sweetened their offer for local On2 Technologies acquisition pending vote in February.
This is an exciting time for technology companies, to rise out of a recession and demonstrate a strong M&A strategy right out of the gates. If we look deeper into these deals, you’ll see what areas of technology are rising in importance. For example, managing apps better in cloud and virtual environments made Phurnace look attractive to BMC. BMC was itself already rumored to be a 2010 possible M&A target. Dot Hill’s acquisition of Cloverleaf and rumor to take 3PAR next points to the need for storage infrastructure in virtualized environments.
In the world of social media, nothing is getting more complicated for users than managing multiple social networks. And as big brand names begin to embrace social media more and more, it will be particularly important to be as productive as possible. Seesmic, which makes access apps for Facebook and Twitter will now have a syndication tool on its side.
I think we’ll see more social media and IT management acquisitions happen in 2010 – it’s like that saying, “when you can’t build, buy.”
Google coming to Clifton Park?
January 7, 2010 | Tech Worth Talking About | 1 Comments
Amendments where announced today to the pending Google – On2 Technologies acquisition:
According to Dow Jones, “Thursday that it has amended it takeover agreement with On2 Technologies Inc. (ONT). Under the revised deal, On2 shareholders will receive 0.0010 of a share of Google Class A common stock for each share of On2 common stock, as previously announced, plus 15 cents a share in cash. Google said the revision was made to reflect the significant rise in Google’s stock price since the merger was announced in August. Google said that the revised price is its final offer. On2 closed Wednesday at 59 cents.”
After a failed shareholder vote in December, where stockholders of On2 felt they weren’t being paid enough for the video platform software Google so desperately needs, new discussions and more offers ensued. Google’s offer brings the original $106 million to $132 million.
The acquisition is important to Google’s online video distribution strategy and keeping things “Googlized” meaning low cost and wide open, as consumers increasingly view media over cell phones and remote boxes.
More to come on the finalizing of this deal in February. For more details, visit On2.com, the homepage has an excellent amount of shareholder information convincing the shareholders to be open to a second look.
Rumor: VMware to acquire Zimbra? Say what?!
January 6, 2010 | Blunders | 2 Comments
TechTarget as well as hundreds of Tweets report a tech rumor that VMware has bid for Yahoo’s Zimbra, an open source email and collaboration company. I’m sure this has left VMware customers scratching their heads. According to TechTarget, “Zimbra, which sold to Yahoo Inc. in 2007 for $350 million, boasts 50 million paid seats for its email and collaboration product, both hosted and on-premise. VMware Inc. has not confirmed the deal; the Monday report by the Wall Street Journal’s “All Things Digital” said it was unclear how much VMware would pay for the company.”
I’d have to agree that with all the crap Webmail-type of interfaces out there, email software like Microsoft would be a much better fit. Everyone is trying to compete with Google, GMAIL and Google Apps — that would make sense then to try an open source model that have real enterprise chops.
I’ve used Zimbra with a client I contract for called rPath, the Web interface is fabulous and allows for great remote capabitlities. Stay tuned for some interesting developments.
Good news for Tech Valley and GlobalFoundries
January 4, 2010 | Today's Headlines | 0 Comments
Via our friends at VentureBeat, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, worldwide semiconductor revenues grew in November, with sales up 3.7 percent from October and 8.5 percent from a year ago.
Sales in November were $22.6 billion, compared to $21.8 billion in October and $20.9 billion in November, 2008. It was the ninth month in a row of consecutive sales increases, with sales growing in all regions. Overall sales for the first 11 months of the year were $202.1 billion, down 13.2 percent from year-ago figures of $232.7 billion.
Stop bitching, stop buying and do your jobs…terrorists are watching.
January 4, 2010 | Is That A Joke?!, Today's Headlines | 0 Comments
Just days after the Christmas terrorist attempt near Detroit Airport, our family experienced such ignorance on behalf of the TSA that we thought it was worthy of our inaugural 2010 post.
Hours after the said attack, every talk show was discussing two things: did our government fail us and how can we add better technology to our airports to make flying safer?
As a technologist, I can tell you there’s always more technology can do, but it costs money, convenience and at the end of the day, nothing is fool proof. Should the government have listened better, yes, but we’re used to that right?!
Sadly, I’d like to think that the hardest thing I’m dealing with today is writing 2010 versus 2009. Instead, I’m still finding it hard to swallow our return flight home from Denver International to Albany Airport.
First let me say I appreciate the efforts to keep traveling with children relatively easy despite pressure to up the ante on restrictions each time our government decides to ignore a terrorist warning and us citizens have to stop an attack.
That being said, I think all parents would agree that we want safety first. So when my husband went through the metal detector first, then my two-year-old daughter followed, and I took up the rear with our bags as they cleared the entry point of the computer monitor.
While putting my shoes back on, our one carry on suitcase was taken for further hand screening by a TSA representative. They caught my facewash, damnit. Then another TSA representative, still looking over my diaper bag in the computer monitor yells to me, “Ma’am, do you have yogurt packed in here?”
Thinking to myself that I know I only have dry foods, I responded no. The TSA representative proceeds to tell me she’s picking up something “dense” on the computer screen and it’s hard to decipher. I tell her there’s no yogurt and so she just approves the bag and sends it on its way back to me.
Something was haunting me…what was dense? We had no liquids, no medicines, a few Barbies, DVDs, M&Ms and animal crackers.
Then it hit me. Play-Doh. We had two containers of Play-Doh.
Now I’m no expert, but I watch enough Discovery Channel to know a bit about explosives. And so I’m sure you can imagine my shock (and my husband’s) when we realized that just days after a terrorist attack, two huge substances involved in bombs and explosives were let through the pearly gates and sent on its merry way to a plane ride. Clay is often used to hold down bomb wires and chemicals in Play Doh are often used as parts of explosive material. My husband the engineer was up in arms.
So I argue that it’s not your technology that’s the problem. And you can’t always blame the government. I argue you need to do your job and help support what technology offers you in assistance.
If there’s a red flag, send it up the flagpole. Children or no children, these are the reasons terrorists keep catching the US with our pants down.
The lesson for today is simple. Do your job. Do it well. Stop blaming and bickering about what is the best thing to spend more taxpayer’s dollars on. Instead, stick to what works and do a better job using it.
On a positive note, this hiccup reminds me of what a great year 2010 is going to be. We have tons of great interviews coming up, tons of company news, new technology to discuss.
Stay tuned for more rants, more raves and more reviews…talking all things tech in New York.
Happy New Year.