Category Archives: Technical

Enterprise Gold at SXSW

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(Cross posted from my work blog.)

It’s panel promotion time for SXSW 2010. This year, I’m going for a panel on selling to the enterprise, targeted at the SXSW crowd, of course. I thought this would be a fun contrast to the consumer-heavy, “free” stuff that the SXSW sessions and panels are usually full of. The best way to “monetize” is to get paid for what you do and sell, to put it one way.

You can help by voting for the panel and leaving a comment, I’d appreciate it!

Here’s the proposal:

Avoid Freeloaders, Go For The Enterprise Gold

Why cater to a market that makes you eat ramen when you can slap on a suit and get budget for sushi? In this panel industry analyst Michael Coté (RedMonk) will lead a discussion with other analysts and experts illustrating how to approach enterprises and large gold-holding organizations with your technologies and services. Selling to consumers is fun, but the pay is poor compared to corporate customers who actually would like to pay for good software. We’ll cover the exceptions these outfits have, what types of technologies they’re looking for, sales processes, pricing, deflecting FUD from incumbents, and other aspects to help you bootstrap into the enterprise market. If you’re just holed up in an apartment waiting to get bought by Facebook or Google, there’s nothing for you here. But if you’d like to find out what all those dry-cleaned people are doing, come check it out and ask questions.

Questions Answered

  1. What types of functionality are enterprises looking for?
  2. How do I get around barriers put in by competitors and people who fear change?
  3. What advantages do new startups and offerings have that they can take advantage of?
  4. How do I build a sales and market program to reach enterprises?
  5. What technologies and services are low-hanging fruit?

While on a bus at some IBM function, I cooked up this idea with fellow analyst Merv Adrian – he’ll be on the panel (it was actually one of my many schemes to get more people to come to Austin for SXSW). Also, I was excited that Austin’s Kenny Van Zant volunteered to be on the panel in Twitter. As one of the long-time, senior executive at Solarwinds, he has first hand experience going after this kind of sell, but through the web instead of the usual steaks-and-strippers channels.

If that sounds interesting, it’d help get us closer to acceptance if you voted and left a comment for the panel. Hopefully we’ll see you at SXSW in March!

Cloud Closures and Server-side JavaScript Injection – DrunkAndRetired.com Episode #165

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Boobs

Charles asked me to think of some ways you’d use sandboxed JavaScript on the server side – I jump right in with some examples:

To listen to the episode, subscribe to the podcast feed in iTunes or whatever, download the episode directly, or click play below to listen right here:

We’ll see if any of it helps Charles out with his talk.

DrunkAndRetired.com #151 – "BAM! What's in your UNDERPANTS?!?!"

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Tuna Steak

To listen to the episode, subscribe to the podcast feed in iTunes or whatever, download the episode directly, or click play below to listen right here:

In this two episodes in one episodes, Charles and I embed an episode of RIA Weekly into an episode of DrunkAndRetired.com. It’s like a taco in a hamburger wrapped in a slice of pizza.

Here’s a brief summary:

  • Detroit’s motto is actually “Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus”, which means “We Hope For Better Things; It Shall Rise From the Ashes” in English.
  • Check out The Bladerunner game FAQ I wrote long ago.
  • Charles gives his love to DonkeyTron 5000.
  • Since both of us have heard the NPR coverage of Detroit this week, I (re-)ask Charles, “what’s up with Detroit?”
  • This gets us into a discussion of the villains plans to tear down the old city and build a new one in movies like Darkman, Robocop, and Bruce Sterling’s recent book The Caryatids, which I give a brief overview of.
  • Don’t forget Charles’ upcoming talk at the Ann Arbor JUG! Charles will try to address Pete F.’s desire for a recording.
  • Charles discusses his concept for “TwitterDick.com,” that is, seeing how much social media ego you have.
  • This leads us to propose the DrunkAndRetired.com Listener Market Research Omnibus Survey. Want to participate, just tell us!
  • For a detailed summary for the RIA Weekly episode, see the RIA Weekly #49 show-notes.

Charles on JavaScript

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The Wrong Way to Drink

Charles has been developing and giving a talk on using JavaScript over the past few months. He gave it up at the Detroit Java User Group, and it looks like he’ll be giving it at the Ann Arbor Java User Group next week, Tuesday April 28th. Charles has been perfecting the “every-day” use of JavaScript for awhile, as you know if you’ve been listening to the podcast, and this talk is a good sum-up of all that work and knowledge.

Here’s the summary:

Charles Lowell will show why JavaScript is like no other major language when it comes to embedding into an application. Drawing from personal experience, Charles will present a treatment of the JavaScript object system and philosophy.

He will demonstrate how to use JavaScript to implement a scriptable webservice and demonstrate the ability to add and remove properties to native java objects and classes.

Episode 136 – Cracks in the Web UI Powerbase

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In this episode, while I’m State-side, Charles is still in Finland. Thus, we start out talking about the wood-burning sauna he’s been using. We then jump into a discussion of Chrome, and then I float the theory that there’s major cracks in the dominance of web-only UIs – what with RIAs and the iPhone.

We wrap up with a special production from Charles.

Episode 130 – Pooping Your Way to Cleanliness

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Pickled Okra

In this episode:

  • We start out talking about Charles’ “cleansing” efforts, which sound terrible if you like food, but he’s down for it.
  • I then tell Charles about how I like FriendFeed a lot now-a-days. As I say in the podcast, you guys should join and link up with me so I can get more content to read.
  • Charles then talks about how dealing with ruby and Java deployments is annoying and we wonder out-loud about how easy it is to deal with PHP installs – which is probably debatable given crap you’ve had the deal yourself.

    • I then detail how a little jaunt to iUseThis.com stuck me a desktop optimization rut, esp. after I found AppFresh.

  • Finally, we learn that Charles is selling one of his iMacs and – shocker! – probably going to get a ThinkPad.

Thanks to John Arley Burns for sending over the Starcontrol sounds.

Episode 127 – Puppet, Skinless Bodies, Rational Tools, Getting Sick of Ajax

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Clown Cup

In this episode, we start out talking about Puppet (whose patron company, Reductive Labs is a RedMonk client). I then re-cap the Our Bodies exhibit Kim and saw, we move onto a short discussion of using Rational Tools from Charles’ consulting days (I’ll be at RSDC next week). We wrap up with Charles’ growing distaste for Ajax, but his lack of anything else to use.