Chris Crosby

A big cheers to one of my favorite start-ups, DimDim (see blog post here). They just raised $6M in capital. Nice work guys. It demonstrates what’s possible if you come to market with a viable product in the right niche and execute well.  These guys didn’t come out of the gate as a “Web 2.0″ company trying to boil the ocean. They started small and grew organically through partners and beta customers until they worked out the bugs and kinks. My guess is that these guys will continue to execute well and get acquired by someone looking to get into the collaboration space to augment their existing apps (Google anyone?)

Here is a useful article for any software company considering using open source components in your applications. I can tell you from personal experience that if you think getting acquired is part of your exit strategy then you need to pay attention to what open source code may find its way into yours, because your acquirer certainly will. If you’re not planning on getting acquired, its still a good idea to understand what your legal exposures might be.

My suggestion is to make sure you document any third party (even commercial) code and how you’re using it across your applications; and then have an attorney review the appropriate license agreements.

DimDim just announced a new version of their open source collaboration suite. Imagine WebEx or GoToMeeting, but thin-client and open source. These guys are the real deal. I spoke with them early on in their venture as I was looking at embedding collaboration into the Latigent BlueVue Architecture. Needless to say we got acquired so that didn’t happen.

DimDim has a free hosted offering which I’ll probably test out for a non-profit I’m working with. Although, they should really partner with somebody like http://www.freeconferencecall.com/ to integrate free voice conferencing in as well (currently they support VOIP via a headset plugged into your PC).

As compelling as free web conferencing is, hosted web collaboration is a rather commoditized market. However, there OEM/ISV approach could be hot. The ability to embed web collab right into applications (like I wanted to do w/ Business Intelligence) could create a new market segment.

Call it Pervasive Collaboration.

Looks like Pentaho closed a $12M Series C round of financing. This is exciting stuff. With the consolidation of large Business Intelligence players its opening the market for the already under served SMB and for Enterprise BI projects looking for a lower cost of ownership.

The only real question is if these guys will join the ranks of Zimbra and become a promising start-up swallowed by a behemoth too soon…

OK, so the title is a bit overstated, but now that I have your attention:

A couple months ago Google [quietly] released a hosted charting API. Albeit it lacks the sex appeal of their big splash products like GMail or Google Docs, it tapped my imagination.

The basic concept is that your application passes parameters to a URL hosted at Google. It allows you to define things like chart type, size, colors, data values, etc. For example, hitting this URL,

 http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250×100&chl=Hello|World

returns the following image:

Part of the reason this grabbed my attention is that its very similar to Latigent’s BlueVue (now Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite ((CUIS))) “API” for accessing reports & charts from other applications (except you don’t actually pass the data to CUIS, since that’s the real point of having a full blown BI App What I find amusing here is that Google, whether intentionally or not, has basically entered into the 3rd party control business. Very few people ever build their own charting control as its not core to their application, and there are inexpensive alternatives to coding your own. Google just introduced another inexpensive option. Now, I seriously doubt that Google will ever cut into the market share of guys like Dundas, but it could certainly address the needs of some low-level apps.

Expanding on this hosted API/3rd Party Control concept, it’s reasonable to think that a creative developer could duct-tape together the APIs from Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Charts, Google Reader (unsupported “API” here) and Google Search Appliance to come up with a rudimentary and functional presentation layer for a reporting application.

When you pepper in things like databases in the cloud, one begins to ponder if every aspect of an application will eventually be distributed, and perhaps the next software evolution will be nothing but middleware that glues stuff together.

Government Transparency is almost as big a buzzword as Web 2.0 lately. And for that matter, you would think the two would go hand-and-hand. With all of the killer technology available in our information age, one would think that it should be relatively straight forward to get a picture of what our government does in return for our tax dollars and votes.

The sad truth is that it is extremely difficult to decipher anything that goes on in Washington, from laws that are passed to how tax dollars are spent.

Jason recently pointed out an article on Why Congress needs version control. I think its a fantastic idea, and certainly serves as an example of how today’s technology can be applied to the governmental processes. However, I think we can go well beyond that.

I’ve spent the last several months scouring the net for what information is publicly available and from where. There are a number of government sites that make pieces of information available, and private sites that take those pieces of raw data and try to make something intelligent out of it.

For example:

• The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) makes available the donor records of everyone that contributes more than $200 to a politicians campaign. But who wants to download all that data and crunch it through excel? I tried, trust me its interesting stuff but tough to glean anything useful from it.
• GovTrack.US does a fantastic job of tracking every bill that hits the floor of the House and the Senate, complete with voting records of politicians. They even make it available in RSS feeds. This is cool, but as a standalone tool you can’t figure out much more than how many Post Offices Congress has named this year.
• Maplight is trying to marry these two concepts together and tie voting records with PAC contributions. That’s an admirable effort and I think with a little data modeling and consolidation we could use this as a starting point to gain some very useful knowledge.

The examples go on and on, and if you have some good ones, I’d love to see them. But the point is when you step back from all of this it starts to resemble a corporation, or “the enterprise”, with multiple data points and silo vendors trying to address individual application needs.

Enter Business Intelligence.

First we start with a data mart. We identify all the publicly available data points (there are far more available than I mentioned above), and we create a data model that does some cool things like create unique identifiers for congressmen and candidates and Bills that hit the floor, etc. It will take some leg work to get all of the ETL loads, or automated data pulls, set-up. But as the sites mentioned above have demonstrated this is not insurmountable.

The next step is the presentation layer. Once we have all the data and its modeled appropriately, the sky is the limit here. If built correctly, every U.S. citizen could have an almost real time dashboard on Congress, or run an ad hoc report on budgetary spending, or create a scorecard on their local Congressman, or… (more on these in a later post).

I think the key to this is to treat it like an open source project. So perhaps MYSQL and something like Pentaho are in order. This would keep commercial conflicts out of the equation and make people feel like they are more apart of the process.

I don’t see Washington creating a tool like this anytime soon, therefore we’ll have to take a step forward in doing it ourselves. Any takers?

politics

“Open Source” and “Software as a Service” (SaaS) are big buzzwords these days. And rightfully so. Both are viable approaches to mitigating the often high cost of software and infrastructure. However, to date these two approaches have largely existed separately. There are a few exceptions to this, such as SugarCRM who offers their software with both the ability to download the open source version or pay a small monthly hosting fee.

I won’t go into the advantages of either approach here as a simple Google search on either term yields more than enough information on the topics. I’ve also touched on some of them in a previous post.

However, recently when I was looking at how to set-up a website, email and blog for my wife’s business, I stumbled across a plethora of new options that simply didn’t exist a couple years ago when we set-up Latigent.

With a little research I figured out that the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Joomla would be the easiest way to get something up and running. The software was free and the options for plugins was mind numbing (similar to my theory on salesforce.com’s success).

The next trick was to find someone to host it for me. That’s when I found BuyHTTP. They have several economical plans starting at $4.95 a month, but for only $24.95 a month I get unlimited websites and MySQL databases.

So why would I need unlimited websites and MySQL databases? Good question, let me explain.

My wife is in real estate, so my first inclination was to create individual websites for each of her property listings and interlink them all. Google traffic in the making, I thought.

As I was configuring the first site, I stumbled onto Fantastico, which is an autoinstaller for several open source programs (Joomla included). What I found next was like opening Pandora’s box.

Inside the Fantastico control panel I discovered that I could install any of roughly 30 open source applications directly into the website. These cover everything from blogs and wikis to online chat and e-commerce; so basically most anything I would need to run a small business on the web.

With a little elbow grease I was able to install the core apps and hook them into the main Joomla site. No Consultants, No Developers, No Headaches…

Also during this I migrated my TypePad Blog over to Wordpress on this website. This alone saves me $11.95 a month.

Now, just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, check this out. I downloaded SugarCRM, uploaded it to my managed server, and installed it on its own subdomain in less than 15 minutes. I was prepared to cough-up the $65 a month for the basic salesforce.com account but this new solution saves me that cost and I control the domain and database.

I truly feel this model is the best of both worlds for the SMB. It allows me to be in control of my own destiny without having to host everything myself.

I foresee a real market opportunity for someone to stitch together and integrate these open source apps more closely, as well as bundle some baseline consulting around the installation.

So for now, I will enjoy running almost all of my wife’s business on the web for $24.95 a month. Somebody pinch me…

-Chris

This morning I read a review on Intelligent Enterprise by Serdar Yegulalp on Microsoft’s new Live Writer Beta, the newest addition to their “Live” offerings.

This is my first post using the product and I must say I’m pretty impressed. Set-up was amazingly simple. I just punched in the URL to my blog and username/password. It connected and recognized that I have a custom installation of WordPress. It immediately loaded a new post complete with my blog’s theme settings.

Now I know that in a 2.0 world, using thick client applications is considered taboo, but as a non-programmer who gets the very basics of HTML, I often found myself spending a lot of time in FrontPage modifying my posts to get the layout right. This seems to solve that need. I also like the ability to manage my draft posts in an “offline” fashion so that I can write while traveling and post when I come back online without having to copy and paste from a Word doc.

It also has some simple, yet cool features like the ability to add maps and technorati tags. And of course no Microsoft product would be complete without a preview in browser option.

Below is an aerial shot of Latigent International Headquarters using the mapping feature.

This obviously is not a revenue generator for Microsoft, but I think that it sends a signal that they see the need to appeal to the next generation of web users.

In typical Microsoft fashion they entered the ”Live” market with a giant THUD, yet have continued to build on the base and add improvements around the edges. Still a long way to go, but in this case I certainly appreciate the effort. For Microsoft though, I hope that it’s not too little too late.

-Chris