I occasionally hear things from people about how “spam is on the decline.” This always entertains me because immediately after receiving an email like this, I get a 200 message comment spam attack on my blog and three IM windows pop up in Trillian with random people I don’t know saying “Hi” with a link to what I’m sure is something truly evil.
Yesterday, Postini announced that instant messaging attacks had increased by 500% in May. They are dealing with large enough numbers and a diverse enough sample size for the numbers to be statistically significant. Here are some interesting ones for you.
Instant Messaging
If you like stats, Postini has consolidated ones across their entire system. IM (what I think of as “Spim”) is clearly on the rise.
Spam in the blogosphere has continued to accelerate unabated. Why – oh why – do people think that I want a comment that says something like “I haven’t been up to much today. I’ve just been letting everything happen without me. Basically nothing seems worth bothering with. I’ve just been hanging out doing nothing. I just don’t have anything to say right now. More or less nothing happening.” on my blog with an associated link? At least my filters are working on the porn ones now.
NewsGator announced today that it has partnered with GMO Internet Group to provide a localized, hosted version of NewsGator Enterprise in the Japanese market. I’ve been impressed with GMO – they’ve also partnered with FeedBurner on the Japanese version of FeedBurner.
Geographic expansion, especially for young fast growing companies, especially in Asia, is tough. After spending time in Europe last month, I heard the same thing over and over from the VCs and entrepreneurs that I spoke with – namely “the biggest weakness of US companies is they come over here thinking that everything works the same way, but it doesn’t.” This wasn’t just aimed at “US is different than Europe” – it was a bigger statement – namely even thought there is an EU, each country is different. I’ve heard this for a decade, seen the downside of this many times, and believe it continues to be a very true statement.
Now – this conversation is nothing new in the world of VC-backed companies. I’ve been through the “let’s expand to Europe and Asia immediately” cycle, capitulated in the delightful 2001 – 2003 time frame (Europe / Asia – where are they again?), and now am faced with “The World Is Flat – we’ve got to go to Europe and Asia.” While I don’t resist the “we’ve got to go to Europe and Asia”, I’ve learned from my experiences (good and bad) that the “how” is what is important. In the case of NewsGator, a big part of the how is with partners, including VNU in Europe and GMO in Japan.
This announcement also has another little nugget – the product that GMO and NewsGator will be releasing together in the Japanese market is a hosted version of the NewsGator Enterprise product. Geographic partners usually know their market entry strategies best – it’s important to listen to them.
NewsGator announced today Spencer Stuart, one of the oldest Executive Search firms in the world, has deployed NewsGator’s Enterprise Server product. Todd Berkowitz has a nice explanation of how Spencer Stuart is using RSS in the enterprise, including leveraging NewsGator’s API.
Fortunately, as Jack Bauer tries to find his way around China next season, he’ll have Telcontar’s maps to help him. And no – I really don’t think they are going to kill him – “he’s much too valuable.”
Today Salesforce.com had a set of major announcements around their AppExchange platform, including the release of the AppExchange OEM Edition. One of my portfolio companies – Rally Software – participated in this with the launch of their Rally Agile Product Manager product as one of the first four AppExchange OEM partners. Rally Agile Product Manager helps enable Agile Software Development via Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. If you are a Salesforce.com customer, it’s live on the Salesforce.com site.
The is the second time this year that a company that I’ve been involved in has worked closely with Salesforce.com. In April, Salesforce.com acquired Sendia, a company I was on the board of, and simultaneously announced their AppExchange Mobile service. While the Sendia deal was only a modest positive outcome for us, it was a perfect fit with Salesforce.com’s business and we decided to sell the company early in its life rather than continue to build the business.
In both cases, Salesforce.com had a clear strategy, articulated it to the companies involved, and then deliberately executed on the strategy. Each time, I was excited by the prospects but cautious because of all of the challenges I’ve historically experienced working with public software companies executing on the strategies they articulate. In both cases, Salesforce.com did an outstanding job of setting expectations and then executing on them – impressing me as a company that both has a clear strategy and the organizational will to follow through with it.
Many of my portfolio companies have been long time Salesforce.com customers – it’s gratifying to see several of them have successful partnerships with Salesforce.com also.
One of my oldest (as in “known for the longest time”) friends – Dave Jilk – recently started a new company called eCortex with his business partner, CU Boulder Professor Randall O’Reilly. I – along with several other friends and The University of Colorado (through their Proof-of-Concept Investment program) – participated in the angel financing.
I’ve known Dave since my second day at MIT. I was a lost and lonely freshman during the madness known as MIT Rush (MIT used to have fraternity rush the first week of school – this has since been modified for a variety of reasons – some good, some not-so-good) when Dave walked up to me and said something like “hey, want a beer?” (this was probably one of the “good” reasons since I was 17.) This started a 20+ year friendship that includes starting a successful company together (Feld Technologies), marriages and divorces, moves (we both ended up in Boulder), an unsuccessful entrepreneurial adventure (Wideforce Systems), several salvage operations (planetU, Xaffire) and lots of time spent exploring and learning new things. Dave was always one of the most intellectually capable people in the room (a 4.9/5.0 in Course 6 at MIT means something – I think the B was in psychology) and – while the startup company thing suited him well, he was never in love with the thing he was working to create.
Several years ago, Dave started taking some Cognitive Science classes at CU Boulder and hooked up with Randall O’Reilly. I remember seeing him light up one of the first times we talked about the research he was exploring and thought to myself – “this is it – he’s found what he wants to work on.” Last summer when he was visiting me in Alaska we talked about this idea a lot and I continued to encourage him to just go for it.
He did. Dave and Randy have started a new software company called eCortex to commercialize the visual object recognition technology that Randy and his team have been working on at CU Boulder. The technology is essentially a neural network model of the human visual system, including numerous biologically realistic characteristics, which allows it to see things much like we see them. Applications include surveillance (security cameras as well as luggage scanning), satellite photo analysis, military target identification, online image or video search, optical character recognition, and manufacturing. In one test, this system was trained on a sampling of 100 different objects, and successfully recognized the objects 96% of the time, even when shifted in the image, scaled down to as small as one-tenth the size, and rotated within a small range.
Now – there have been many attempts to create object recognition systems. While I don’t understand any of the science that Dave and Randy are working on, I do understand that much of what exists is basic pattern recognition algorithms rather than the magic of neural network simulations. I sat in a conference room recently and watched as Randy walked me through some examples using PDP++ (a neural network simulation system written in C++) explaining how eCortex is approaching the problem differently.
A few weeks later I sat in the same conference room and listened as a visiting VC told me that he’d heard there are no real computer science people in Boulder. I choked down my chai and mentioned a number of examples, including these two dudes working on this neural network thingy.
I’ve got a couple of companies that are refreshing their products at least once a month. The two most active right now are NewsGator and FeedBurner with multiple releases per month. NewsGator just did another big release with major and minor things.
The major stuff includes the release of NetNewsWire 2.1. NewsGator acquired NetNewsWire’s creator – Ranchero Software – in October 2005 – this is the first major release since the acquisition. In addition to a number of new features, it includes universal binary support for Intel-based Macs (e.g. “very fast”) and full synchronization with the NewsGator family of products. If you are a Mac user and want to try out the best RSS reader on the Mac, try a free trial of NetNewsWire. Congrats Brent – beautiful job.
The minor stuff includes lots of little revs on NewsGator Online Service, a case study for Spencer Stuart on the use of NewsGator Enterprise Server, screen shots for the NewsGator Enterprise Server product, a podcast interview with me, and a platform push of some super secret cool stuff that will be released in the next 30 days. Yup – minor stuff – but indicative of a regular release rhythm that is now hitting its stride.
Finally, in the major category, USATODAY.com launched the beta of My USA Today. This is the latest NewsGator Private Label client to go live. I think the guys at USA Today and NewsGator have done a stunning job on this – it’s still beta so likely to be slow and occasionally hiccupy as they get the kinks out now, but it’s an interesting approach to integrating RSS content into a major media property (e.g. for USA Today readers, not for power RSS users.)
Now – if I could only get on a normal sleep cycle. Amy is purring away in the other room while I’m wide awake at 4:52 am Paris time doing email and posting to my blog. This always happens to me about the third or fourth day I’m in Europe – blech.
NewsGator has been having good success with their NewsGator Enterprise Server product, a server-based product that lives behind a corporate firewall and integrates with Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, and Active Directory to deliver RSS feeds directly to a Microsoft Outlook desktop via the Exchange server. While installing desktop software is one approach to delivering RSS to the desktop in an enterprise, it’s not a particularly graceful one if you get up above say – 100 users. NewsGator Enterprise server includes all the stuff you’d expect from a product that is integrated with Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, and Active Directory, but also includes a Web-based interface to the same data, and plenty of other functionality.
The other day, NewsGator announced a reseller partnership with ePartners, one of the largest Microsoft Business Solutions consultancies in the US. Now – this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that follows my portfolio, as I’m an investor in both NewsGator and ePartners – but it’s exciting (at least to me) as it’s (a) the start of a new partner program that NewsGator has rolled out aimed at Microsoft Partners and (b) nice validation from ePartners, as the team there did deep analysis on the NewsGator Enterprise Server product and determined that they would offer NewsGator Enterprise Server as part of ePartners Web-based Portal, Customer Relationship Management, and Business Intelligence solution as well as use it internally.
Also – today ePartners announced its Digital Dashboard Solutions, a business intelligence desktop tool that can incorporate NewsGator Enterprise Server. It’s satisfying to see the implementation of the products in the enterprise coming together and being deployed and adopted.
I haven’t been promoting my portfolio companies much on my blog lately, but I’ve had a few companies go nonlinear on me in the last quarter (think rapidly upward sloping exponential growth curve) and I felt like brogging about one of them this morning.
StillSecure has recently closed several major deals, including one with Extreme Networks that was announced today.
Extreme just partnered with StillSecure to create Extreme’s new Sentriant Access Guard product – an agent-less end-point security product that is tightly integrated with Extreme’s core products. Sentriant Access Guard is based on StillSecure’s Safe Access product, which was recently awarded the Best Endpoint Security Solution by SC Magazine.
As an investor, I’ve had great success with partnerships between established companies and the young startup companies that I’ve invested in. StillSecure’s partnership with Extreme is StillSecure’s third deal like this in recent months – joining relationships with IdentiPHI and Senforce.
