Events

I spent the day at Structure 08 and–at the risk of getting too mereologic–felt that the whole was much less than the sum of the parts. The conference was focused on cloud computing which I believe is an important technology trend. They recruited several very good speakers–and many poor, or at least poorly prepared, ones. […]

Interesting panel on “Cloud Computing: Creating Value for Web 2.0 Apps” cloud computing tonight at VLAB. Here are a couple of key things I took away: Jonathan Bryce, a co-founder at Mosso, gave the history of Rackspace’s incubation of a new model that can disrupt their existing business. At a starting price of $100 a

Tomorrow’s “Engineering Your Sales Process” workshop is sold out: we are at capacity and cannot accept walk-ins. We will offer this workshop again in the fall. We are planning our second half and will be offering workshops both on an open enrollment basis and as custom engagements for one startup. There are advantages to both

Tomorrow’s Getting More Customers workshop is sold out. We are at capacity at FortisGC for this workshop and cannot accept walk-ins. We will offer this workshop again in the fall. We are offering a new one, “Engineering Your Sales Process“, next month: Building a repeatable sales process is key to a sustainable business, understanding how

There has been a last minute substitution and Nick Tredennick will be speaking on the next transition in computing: performance per watt. Full details are on the SF Bay ACM website. Date: Wednesday, 16 April 2008, 6:30 PM Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions), Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room. Cost: Free and open

We are changing things up next week and offering our “Getting More Customers” on a Friday instead of a Saturday at a  location that’s farther north than we’ve ever gone: Redwood Shores. The FortisGC folks have graciously allowed us to use their main conference room. The Getting More Customers workshop will give you focused time

We hosted a roundtable on SaaS sales issues today at Plug and Play in Sunnyvale over lunch. Here are some quotes I pulled off of our feedback cards: Good Discussion, interesting models discussed. Further info separating metrics from models would be helpful in fueling discussion. Great Roundtable. Lengthen the time. Well moderated, very on point.

Spent the day at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus attending Dealmaker Media‘s Under the Radar Conference on “The Business of Web Apps: Where the Web Goes to Work.” A company that would seem to have a lot to lose from the success of web-based applications with an Office 2.0 focus has taken Michael Corleone’s advice to

Looks like we will be in good company. Whether you are considering leaving you day job for a startup, you are consulting while you develop a product, you are open for business and looking for early customers, looking for smarter customers, or you’ve found your niche and you are looking to scale up, drop by.

I was invited to take part in the Mission College Business Department Advisory Committee for 2008 last Tuesday; it was a very interesting experience. There was a cross section of folks from education and business, both large and small. I was impressed by the diversity of perspectives and everyone’s commitment to assisting the college. Community

I will be speaking next Monday at the SDForum Marketing SIG on “Leveraging Your Social Network to Find Early Customers.” Social navigation is networking with a goal. Entrepreneurs will spend social capital navigating their way to getting trusted feedback and early sales. Like Google and web assisted selling tools, social network tools can improve the