While you might be interested in a ego vanity iPhone app like the Brad Feld iPhone app, you are probably a lot more interested in an iPhone app for your business. NewsGator has become an expert at building these and has developed a superb framework for branded iPhone apps.
On March 31st they are having a Webinar titled Gain Revenue & Readership with Branded iPhone Apps – Reed Business Case Study Webinar. Walker Fenton from NewsGator and Brien Tate (Reed Business’ CTO) will walk through what they’ve done around the Variety iPhone app including:
NewsGator has learned a huge amount about building, deploying, monetizing, and publicizing iPhone apps. Attend the webinar to find out more for yourself.
I’ve watched (and participated) with excitement as Rally Software has helped move the notion of agile software development into the mainstream over the past few years. In addition to having the leading Agile application lifecycle management solutions, they are tireless educators and evangelizers for all things Agile. Today, over 1500 companies are doing over 33,000 projects using Rally’s SaaS-based ALM software.
Rally has just announced their Agile Success Tours. The first one is in Denver on 3/18/09 followed by similar events in LA on 3/26/09 and New York City on 4/02/09. They are free, but you have to register for them.
Each event is a half-day and is aimed at software and IT executives and managers who are being asked to deliver software faster and with fewer defects. The event will focus on how development teams can adopt Agile practices to achieve the real and measurable results that today’s economic climate demands: faster time-to-market, improved productivity, and fewer defects.
In addition, Rally has recently launched an Agile Blog that is packed with information, advice, and suggestions about Agile and how to implement it in your organization.
If you aren’t familiar with Rally or Agile, take a quick look at their five minute overview or try out the free version of Rally’s Community Edition for up to 10 users. Come join the Agile movement.
I love my dogs. I have two giant golden retrievers – Kenai and Brooks.
Dogster (where I’m an investor) recently launched a new Together Tag pet ID service in partnership with the American Red Cross. It’s a comprehensive and well thought out service that goes beyond things like microchipping your pet.
It’s inexpensive – only a $24.95 one time fee for your pet. As part of this, Dogster contributes $5 of the fee to the American Red Cross to help support pet safety programs. I just got one for each of Kenai and Brooks – the signup process was trivial and took less than five minutes.
Protect your pet!
In case you don’t get enough of me, you can now download the Brad Feld iPhone app. Or – from your iPhone – just do an App Store search on Brad Feld. As a result of the Brad Feld iPhone app you can easily get the blogs from Feld Thoughts, Ask the VC, Foundry Group, Amy Batchelor, and Stan Feld all in one nifty app on your iPhone.
While my ego is satiated, at least for a few days, the really cool thing to me is how this came together. When the iPhone first came out, Brent Simmons created an iPhone version of NetNewsWire which was dynamite. He iterated quickly on this and realized that it could be the core of an iPhone app business built on top of the NewsGator / NetNewsWire framework. This has resulted in a new product for NewsGator – the NewsGator iPhone App Framework.
They needed a “test app” to harden the framework and I quickly volunteered (ah – the special privileges of a nerdy early investor.) The result is the Brad Feld iPhone app, but more importantly a deep iPhone app dev framework. Brent – who continues to do an amazing job on everything he touches – talks about the why and how along with announcing the deployment of a real iPhone app for Variety (vs just his cheesy investor beta tester.)
Gnip has completed the latest version of their schema and is now about to embark on a campaign to integrate at least 100 services by mid year. They’ve decided that rather than simply choosing them by themselves, they’d crowd source the process.
There are currently over 350 web services in consideration with more being added every day. You can vote on which ones you’d like to see integrated by going to https://gnip.uservoice.com. This will be a dynamic process with Gnip tagging the web services that are either in process or completed.
If you build web apps for a living, consume data, or just like to vote on things, come help Gnip prioritize the next services to integrate.
On Monday, StillSecure announced that it has acquired ProtectPoint. ProtectPoint is a managed security service provider (MSSP) and immediately adds a portfolio of managed security products to StillSecure’s award-winning product arsenal. Alan Shimel, the Chief Strategy Officer of StillSecure, does an excellent job of explaining the reasons for the acquisition in his post titled StillSecure acquires ProtectPoint, entering the MSSP market – Why?
This is the second time in less than a month that a company I’m on the board of has made an acquisition. At the end of January, in my post titled Rally Software is a Buyer I wrote:
“[With regard to an acquisition strategy] I’m seeing this pattern with a number of the established companies I’m an investor in. Having gone through this cycle several times and had success and failure with acquisition driven strategies, I’ve got a clear view on when and how it can work successfully. I’m not interested in garbage truck mergers (two crappy companies that get jammed together to hope something good comes out of it) – all of my energy is focused on having a market leader pick up a complementary technology or market “asset” that helps accelerate the product or market roadmap.”
As with Rally’s acquisition of 6th Sense Analytics, StillSecure has been working on building out a set of managed security offerings around their product set. The demand for managed security services (or security as a service, or whatever you want to call it) has been steadily increasing and StillSecure decided to explore a buy vs. build approach to accelerate their entry into the market. StillSecure went searching for a company to acquire and found a great fit (functionally and culturally) with ProtectPoint and now has a fully built out and well regarded MSSP offering as part of its product mix.
Having spent some time with Steve Harris, the CEO of ProtectPoint, I’m really excited about what he and his team bring to StillSecure. I also have another person to hang out besides Alan when I head to Florida for a break from winter. Steve and team – welcome aboard!
Two weeks ago, one of the companies I’m on the board of – Rally Software – announced that they have acquired a company called 6th Sense Analytics.
I’ve been involved in Rally since the very beginning and it has been incredibly rewarding to see them grow from an idea that the founder/CTO Ryan Martens had to the market leader in Agile application lifecycle management. Rally updates quarterly their “by the numbers page” which gives a nice overview of the scale of Rally.
In Q4 of 2008 we started getting some inbound calls from other software companies that were in related markets to Rally. These calls were from companies that had developed significant software assets, but hadn’t really had much market success. In several cases they were companies that had worked with Rally; in other cases they were from folks that thought they might be complimentary to Rally.
In response, Rally’s leadership team identified a number of areas on their roadmap that they could accelerate (or bring forward) by acquiring a small company. They’ve used this to quickly decide whether or not it is worth spending time with the inbound inquiries they were receiving.
One of them – 6th Sense – fit great. Rally has a significant amount activity on their product roadmap in 2009 around development metrics and analytics. Rally and 6th Sense engaged in a serious discussion and within 45 days had closed an acquisition. Internally, Rally went through a detailed build vs. buy analysis; adding the 6th Sense folks to the overall team and incorporating their software into the mix was a no-brainer decision for us.
I’m seeing this pattern with a number of the established companies I’m an investor in. Having gone through this cycle several times and had success and failure with acquisition driven strategies, I’ve got a clear view on when and how it can work successfully. I’m not interested in garbage truck mergers (two crappy companies that get jammed together to hope something good comes out of it) – all of my energy is focused on having a market leader pick up a complementary technology or market “asset” that helps accelerate the product or market roadmap.
Look for a lot more of this in 2009.
I’m an investor in Bug Labs (personally, not through our funds). When I first met with Peter Semmelhack, the CEO, on an introduction from Fred Wilson (the lead investor) I immediately got it. After about 15 minutes, I said to Peter something to the effect of “ah – today’s version of the Healthkit.”
Peter’s vision was that in addition to being a completely open source hardware product that allows you to prototype any consumer electronics device (or – more simply – any “electronic gadget”), all the software and design would be “open.”
Bug has just announced that they will be working with IDEO to redesign the user interaction of the product out in the open. This is more than an open source software project – it’s actually a public hardware UI redesign that involves anyone in the Bug community.
I love the notion of the open source hardware movement as it is completely in line with the Ph.D. research I did at MIT under Eric von Hippel. Bug Labs agrees and actually created the BUGvonHippel module to honor Eric!
If you want to participate (or just play along at home) hop on the Bug Blog, Bug Community, and the IDEO blog.
This year at Sundance, Oblong unveiled Tamper. The Tamper application is a gestural interface for cinematic design. It is built on Oblong’s g-speak spatial operating environment and is a fun example of how Oblong’s core technology can be applied to a film editing system.
Tamper is part of the New Frontier on Main exhibit located at 333 Main Street on the lower level. Oblong has set up a channel on YouTube to show some of the various videos that folks at Sundance are making with Tamper.
I love working with these guys – they are mind-bendingly creative.