Mereja

Author: Om Malik

  • Poll: Is Google’s Exit From China a Smart Move?


    Google, today took a big step and decided to opt out of China. Whether it was its inability to cope with competition from Baidu or its moral outrage at the recent hacker attacks on its infrastructure, the company is the first Western company to say no to China.

    The search giant’s blog says visitors to Google.cn are “being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.” According to some estimates, Google is going to lose about $600 million in revenue this year alone from its China move. Take our poll and share your opinion on Google’s decision.

    Related from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

    Is Google’s China Problem a Groundswell of the Closed Internet?

    Image by Flickr user googlisti.

  • Skype Co-Founder Niklas Zennström Talks About His New Venture Fund

    It took Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis over a year to raise funds for their Internet telephony service. They were turned down by one VC after another, mostly because no one in Europe wanted to risk betting on two entrepreneurs with a crazy idea. Most sought the comfort of investing in the late stage companies.

    “It became obvious to us that if we became successful, one of our next ventures would be to start an entrepreneur-friendly venture fund,” Zennström recalled in a conversation this morning  with me. Zennström and Friis did just that when they started Atomico in 2006 and raised their first fund, Atomico Ventures I two years ago and have just closed a new $165 million fund (Atomico Ventures II) that is going to invest in seed to early stage companies in Europe. They had previously raised an undisclosed amount of money (a lot less than rumored $450 million I had reported in 2008) from which they have invested in start-ups such as Seesmic, Viagogo and Mydeco.

    The duo had aimed for a maximum cap of $266 million for their second fund, but the economic downturn made it difficult for the London-based firm to hit that target. Zennström is happy that they were actually able to close a fund during such a rough economic times.But Atomico is going after a great niche.

    The firm is pitching itself as fund for the founders by the founders — something sorely needed in stodgy Europe. When I was in Paris for Le Web 2009, one of the most common refrains was the lack of venture capitalists with a risk tolerance akin to their American counterparts.  Many entrepreneurs lamented that most of the established firms were looking to invest in less riskier investments.

    “We are going to be investing in anything from guys with an idea and a PowerPoint to early stage prototypes,” said Zennström. Niklas says the fund is looking to make investments that are in the single million dollar range, and will invest in 20-to-35 companies over the life of the fund. Atomico has already invested in seven companies from its second fund. These include startups such as online music service provider Rdio and Tariq Karim’s Jollicloud, a maker of netbook operating systems.

    So what else will Atomico invest in? Niklas says the firm is definitely not interested in capital intensive companies such as enterprise software and semiconductor start-ups. Instead, the two want to focus on companies making consumer Internet service and web apps aimed at small & medium sized businesses. But in the end, Zennström said, the idea is not to get married to investing in any theme or getting too fascinated by one thing. Except one — smart entrepreneurs.

  • Foursquare, Gowalla Get the SxSW Bump

    Geo-local services were the center of attention before the recently concluded South by South West, an annual gathering of folks from technology, music and movie worlds. With the pre-event hype dubbing the competition between the various players as geo-wars.

    It is not clear who really won the derby, one thing is for sure — all the hoopla helped Foursquare and Gowalla, the two major competing geo-location services snag tens of thousands of new subscribers following the event. Both companies had released updates to their apps ahead of the SxSW.

    Dennis Crowley, co-founder of New York City-based Foursquare said that during the five days of SxSW, his company signed up approximately 75,000 new subscribers. The company has signed up 100,000 new users over past 10 days he said. The company is now said to have over 600,000 users.

    Foursquare’s competitor, Austin-based Gowalla signed up tens of thousands of new subscribers, co-founder Josh Williams told me via an email. The company is likely to release new stats this coming week. Both Gowalla and Foursquare have benefitted handsomely from the popularity of the iPhone and the App phenomenon.

    For example, nearly 88 percent of Gowalla users come to the service via the iPhone, while Android accounts for 10 percent of its user base. WebOS accounts for 2 percent of GoWalla users. Android and WebOS clients have been available for approximately two weeks.

    Crowley told me that nearly 66 percent of his new sign-ups over the past ten days were using the iPhone. Blackberry accounted for nearly 16 percent of the total new sign-ups and Android accounted for about 10 percent of the total. Other platforms including the mobile web, third party apps, Palm and Nokia were about 7.5 percent of the total sign-ups.

    In an unscientific shoot-out of 11 location-based services, LBS Zone, a blog devoted to location based services, ranked Gowalla as the most accurate while Foursquare came in at the 9th spot. As I said, this is not an accurate test, but still I thought it would be good to share the results with you.

    Related:

    Related research from GigaOM Pro:

  • No Kidding! Telx, a Data Center Operator, Files for a $100M IPO

    LOGO.jpegThe Telx Group, a New York City-based data center operator, has filed for an initial public offering that could see it raise as much as $100 million from the public markets. The last major data center operator to go public was RackSpace, and that was back in 2009. With the demand for data centers and Internet services on an upswing, Telx’s attempt to go public is very timely.

    The company is well known for owning being a primary lease holder at 60 Hudson Street, an iconic wired carrier hotel in Manhattan where more than 250 networks converge. Owned by private equity firm GI Partners, its other assets include The Planet and EV1 Servers.

    Telx has 15 data centers with about half a million square feet of data center space. The company had revenues of $98.3 million in 2009 and net losses of $9.9 million. Telx, which also provides global interconnection and co-location services, has about $130 million in debt. The IPO is being underwritten by Goldman Sachs & Co. and Deutsche Bank Securities. Telx has applied to trade on the Nasdaq market under the ticker TELX.

    telxdatacenters.jpg

  • Geo-madness Now Playing on Your Dashboard

    BMW-Mail-address-entry-screen-Large.png Given how bad most people are at driving, I have to wonder why car companies keep giving us tools of distraction — ways to make phone calls when driving, to watch DVDs when driving, etc. Add to that list sharing your geo-location when driving. After adding real-time news headlines to the dashboard of its cars, BMW has added social networking features which can be accessed via the iDrive feature. You can even email your location and destination. Putting aside my snark hat, this feature could actually be useful as it can tell your friends and family where, exactly, you are — though at a cost of $199 a year.

    Here’s how it works:

    And now watch some stupid human car tricks.


    Drivetm

    Uploaded by luvnews. – News videos from around the world.

    Photo courtesy of The Diesel Driver.

  • Gift Card Exchange Plastic Jungle Gets $7.4M

    itunes_giftcard.jpg Plastic Jungle, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that runs a gift card exchange, says it has raised $7.4 million in a round led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from previous investors Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital and Bay Partners. The company raised $6 million in 2009.

    Plastic Jungle is one of the many companies trying to solve the problems around the gift card economy, as I highlighted in my post about CardPool, a San Francisco-based, very early-stage startup. According to some estimates, nearly $5 billion worth of cards go unclaimed every year. It allows consumers to get cash for unwanted gift cards for up to 92 percent of the unused balance and buy gift cards at up to a 30 percent discount.

    In the 2009-2010 holiday season, Plastic Jungle saw 450 percent year-over-year revenue growth. The company gets 118,000 monthly visitors to its web site and is growing at about 60 percent per month.

  • Google Calendar Has a Smart Rescheduler — It’s Grrrrrrreat!

    I’m one of those people who has a tough time trying to schedule meetings. What’s worse is that times change, mostly because of the ever-shifting deadlines that come with blogging. That’s one of the main reasons my calendar constantly descends into chaos. I turned to professional help, but if you are both like me and are a Google Calendar user, scheduling help could now be as simple as turning on a feature inside Google Calendar.

    The new gadget, available in Google Calendar Labs, is called Smart Rescheduler. And it is dead simple. Once turned on, you can select an event and click “Find a new time” and the machine does the rest, offering up multiple options for folks to chose from.

    Cyrus Mistery, Product Manager for Google Calendar told GigaOM that there are over 2 million businesses using Google Apps and many of them are large companies with many executives. “It becomes very hard to schedule meetings,” he said. While it is easy to find the next open spot or as Mistery called it, “a trivial computer science problem”, the harder problems emerge when say a meeting needs to happen before end of the week, without open slots and one person is in a remote location.

    “That’s a search type problem and so we looked at our search algorithms and said yes, we can adapt these,”Mistery said. He pointed out that this can be used by consumers who are trying to schedule say dinner parties.

    Cyrus Mistery, Product Manager for Google Calendar told GigaOM that there are over 2 million businesses using Google Apps and many of them are large companies with many executives. “It becomes very hard to schedule meetings,” he said. While it is easy to find the next open spot or as Mistery called it, “a trivial computer science problem”, the harder problems emerge when say a meeting needs to happen before end of the week, without open slots and one person is in a remote location.
    David Marmaros, creator of the gadget, writes on the Gmail Blog:

    [W]e decided to apply some of Google’s search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times. […] You’ll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated […]

    I just tried it out, rescheduled a meeting, and yes: it works as advertised. For once, I am not going to complain about a Google product. 🙂

    Additional reporting by Liz Gannes.

  • Now Serving Ads Inside Google Maps

    Marrying location with marketing messages has always been viewed as the holy grail of local advertising. Google has started taking steps towards this future, starting today in Australia.Google is using Australia and New Zealand as test markets for this new technology that was actually developed in Google’s Australian offices.

    Google is now showing ads on Google Maps in Australia. You can see logos for local banks, ATM machines, pharmacists and music stores on the map. These logos show up over the locations of these establishments on the map.

    According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Google shows ads when you zoom in on the map. In addition, Google is making sure that despite being “branding” ads, the messages are contextual and provide relevance based on the search keywords.

    This is a clever idea, as it makes ads more relevant and thus increases the chances that people will actually click through. It’s more than likely that folks will see these ads on smaller smartphone screens. Put up too many ads and the whole user experience becomes messy. That’s why ‘am glad to see Google’s not overrunning the maps with logos.

    I actually wouldn’t mind seeing these ads, for they’re useful and might fulfill my on-the-go needs. What about you? Would you be OK seeing these kind of ads?

    Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):


    Are Sponsored Apps the Key for Traditional Media in Mobile?

  • Video: FCC Chief Answers Questions About the National Broadband Plan

    FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has spoken to a YouTube team about the National Broadband Plan and tried to respond to questions from Internet users across the country. The answers were, to put it politely, nuanced at best. Regular reader Brent Glass is in the video asking questions about WISPs.

    Both Stacey and I are wading through the 400-odd pages of documents and will be offering our impressions after we’re done. Up until that point, you can watch this video. And if you need to learn more, check out these posts to get a better understanding of the National Broadband Plan.

    In addition, you can follow our coverage of FCC.

  • Video: How the iPhone Helped Make Game Startup Unity a Winner

    It goes without saying that timing is everything. You can be like Friendster and show up too soon to the social networking party and then blow it. Or you can be like the iPod and make a splash despite being a late entrant to the MP3 player market. Unity Technologies, a 3-D gaming platform, has seen this movie from all sides. After struggling for nearly six years, the company’s gaming platform took off when Apple released iPhone and iPod touch.

    With a platform that lets developers build lightweight, online 3-D games — perfectly suited for the iPhone OS-based devices — Unity became a disruptor in the games business virtually overnight. And it’s been on a bit of a roll over the past year, with a client roster that includes big names like Electronic Arts, the Cartoon Network and Disney. Mobile developers love the company, which secured a $5.5 million Series A round led by Sequoia in October of 2009. But it wasn’t always salad days for the company, which was originally based in Copenhagen, Denmark and is now headquartered in the Bay Area, as is made clear in my chat with Unity CEO David Helgason.

    Helgason recounts how the company made it through some some of the darker days during its eight-year history. Some highlights from our talk include:

    • The co-founders would live off bread that was supposed to be thrown out from the cafe in which Helgason worked.
    • Since the company had no money, the three co-founders could focus on development and customer support, building a loyal fanbase.
    • When Apple included Unity at a developers conference, the company didn’t have the infrastructure to support the publicity, so that opportunity was wasted.

    Perhaps the best (or grimmest, depending on your point of view) advice Helgason has for entrepreneurs is that when you find your idea, devote your whole life to it, almost like a religious movement.

    Thumbnail image courtesy of Unity

  • NorthScale, a Memcached-focused Startup, Launches

    NorthScale, a Mountain View, Calif-based startup co-founded by leaders of memcached open source projects, launched today after spending a year hiding in the shadows. The company, which has raised $5 million in venture funding from Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners, is part of a growing number of startups hoping to cash in on the data deluge facing everyone from small-time publishers to web giants.

    nortscale1.gif According to IDC, in 2012, “the amount of digital information produced in the year should equal nearly 2,500 exabytes (equivalent to 2,500 billion gigabytes), or 5 times that produced in 2008″ driven primarily by the Internet.

    Today’s web is a lot different from the web of 10 years ago. More users, more connections and more time spent online are some of the hallmarks of today’s popular web-based services such as Digg, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga. As a result, these services generate mountains of data. The more information there is, the harder it becomes to make sense of it. And the problem is only exacerbated by the use of relational databases, generally viewed by many as yesterday’s technology.

    northscale1.gif

    Relational databases came to market in an era when the data was more structured. Today, the web applications are much more dynamic. The ever-falling prices computing hardware prices have made it easy to throw more hardware at the problems, but even those solutions can go so far, unless married to a new class of software. As Stacey outlined earlier this week, Internet companies have started looking at different technologies such as Cassandra and CouchDB to get a better grip on their data. One such technology is called memcached.

    Memcached is used by thousands of web sites, including Wikipedia, Twitter and Flickr. It is a “high-performance, distributed memory object caching system and it is a way to speed up dynamics web applications by alleviating the database load.” NorthScale is based on that technology, explained James Phillips, NorthScale co-Founder and chief strategy officer in a conversation. NorthScale is launching with two products — NorthScale Memcached Server and the Membase Server. The company has snagged Farmville maker Zynga as a paying customer. NHN, a South Korean portal, is also a customer of various different NorthScale products. From the company’s press release:

    NorthScale Memcached Server is an enhanced distribution of memcached, created and supported by the leading contributors to the memcached open source project. A distributed, in-memory caching technology, memcached is used alongside relational database technology – caching frequently used data, thereby reducing the number of database queries an application must perform. By augmenting versus replacing relational database technology, memcached is easy to adopt and offers immediate cost, performance and scalability benefits.

    NorthScale Membase Server is a high-performance, distributed key-value database…While memcached reduces the number of reads an application must do from the database, data is still ultimately stored in the relational database. Using NorthScale Membase Server an organization can identify and gradually “drain” data from a relational system to Membase, enjoying the simple, fast and infinite properties of memcached across both reads and writes, while slashing data management costs.

    What NorthScale is doing is offering companies a smooth transition away from their installed relational databases to Membase, NorthScale’s own data store and perhaps its core IP. There is no doubt that NorthScale is coming to the market at the right time. There is a lot of interest in data stores and alternative technologies such as Cassandra and Memcached. These technologies are viewed as the wave of the future. It also helps that the company has most of the major memcached open source experts on its rooster. The problem for NorthScale is that it’s in a fiercely contested marketplace. Just off the top of my head, I can come up with two immediate rivals, Gear6 and Schooner. With deep roots in the open source world the bigger challenge for the company will be convincing people to pay for its products.

    That said, it’s still great to see new companies try and tackle what is the most pressing problem facing the tech world: too much data.
    northscale2.gif

  • INQ Launches in India

    At our Mobilize 09 conference, Frank Meehan, CEO of London-based INQ, told me that his company was going to follow on the heels of its successful Facebook phone with more devices, including lower-cost smartphones targeting fast-growing mobile markets such as India. Today, the company launched its social mobile phones in India — and INQ has roped in MS Dhoni, captain of Indian cricket team, as its spokesperson. Aircel, a mobile carrier, will be selling the device to its customers. The INQ Mini 3G and the INQ Chat 3G will be available in India. The INQ Chat 3G is a QWERTY device. The highly competitive Indian mobile market has made it difficult for carriers to bank solely on voice revenues. The INQ devices are being made available at a time when Indian carriers are looking for ways to goose their data revenues.

  • Twitter CEO Ev Williams: Further @Anywhere Details at Chirp Conference

    Earlier this morning during a keynote at SXSW, Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams announced the availability of Twitter’s @Anywhere platform. It is an identity system and is widely viewed as an answer to Facebook Connect. It allows Twitter subscribers to use their Twitter credentials to login to third-party services. The announcement was short on details and left me scratching my head.

    Over Twitter, I asked Evan Williams if he would offer more details. He tweeted back and said that the “details will come (specifically at Chirp).” Chirp is Twitter’s official developer conference slotted for April 14-15 and will be held in San Francisco. It could be a big week for Twitter. AllThingsD speculates that the company might also announce its plans for an ad-platform at the AdAge conference scheduled for April 12-13 in New York. There is clearly a lot of interest in San Francisco-based social messaging company which is valued at around a billion dollars and is viewed as a potential competitor to Facebook.

    On Twitter Blog co-founder Biz Stone wrote:

    We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. …When we’re ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

    Photo courtesy of Lorna Harris via Flickr under Creative Commons

  • Happy Anniversary: 25 Years of Dot-coms

    It was 25 years ago today when the first dot-com was registered — Cambridge, Masssa.-based Symbolics computers. Over the years, dot-coms became symbolic of both the Internet bubble and bust; now they’re simply part of our everyday lives. More than 650,000 dot-com domains are registered every month; current estimates put the total number at over 71 million.

    I remember signing up for my first domain in 1994, a whole nine years after the first dot-com domain was registered. It was quite an antiquated process — it took a whole lot of faxing to get it done. (I’m sure many of today’s young entrepreneurs have no idea what I’m talking about.) Even back then I had a tough time picking up my most wanted domain: Om.com.

    Related on GigaOM Pro: Did we really learn anything from the dot-com crash.

  • Ning’s CEO Shuffle: Gina Bianchini Steps Down

    ningmanagers.jpgAfter five and a half years as the chief executive of Ning, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network platform provider, Gina Bianchini has decided to step down from her position and is being replaced by current chief operating officer and former Netscape and Opsware executive, Jason Rosenthal. Bianchini is becoming an executive in residence (EIR) at Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz.

    “Nothing else is changing — I remain Chairman, the current management team remains exactly the same, and the Ning service continues unchanged,” says Andreessen, chairman and co-founder of Ning. The company says it has 2.3 million user-created Ning Networks and more than 45 million registered users and is adding million new registered users every 12 days and and 5,000 Ning-powered networks every day. The company has raised more than $110 million in funding and is valued at over $500 million.

  • For Apps, iPhone Bigger Than Facebook Platform

    When it comes to apps, the iPhone platform is now bigger than the Facebook platform, according to a report by Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics company. Flurry said today that Apple’s iTunes App Store has over 140,000 applications compared to 60,000 apps available on the Facebook platform.

    “Since the App Store launched in July 2008, 35,000 unique companies have released applications, which translates to 58 new companies launching apps each day,” Furry said in its Smartphone Industry Pulse report for February 2010.

    iphonevsfacebook.pngThat’s quite amazing, considering that Facebook launched its platform more than a year earlier than the iPhone platform and has north of 400 million users. In comparison, the iPhone OS platform has about 70 million devices. And developer momentum for the iPhone platform isn’t going to wane anytime soon.

    Why? To paraphrase Jerry McGuire, Apple is showing developers the money. Thanks to its one-click payment option, it’s easy for app developers to make money -– whether it’s by selling apps or selling virtual goods within apps.

    ipadpushesiphoneapps.pngWith the iPad showing up as a platform extension, more developers are looking to focus their energies on the iPhone platform. “Over six weeks since Apple announced the iPad, Flurry continues to measure a significant increase in iPhone OS new application starts within its system,” the analytics firm said. Much of it is said to be developers looking to adapt their applications for the larger-format device.

    The most interesting part of the Flurry report was the iPhone developer DNA. Its analysis revealed the following categories:

    1. Native iPhone: Companies founded to create applications for iPhone (e.g., PageOnce, ngmoco)
    2. Traditional Media: Companies established on Film, TV, Print and Radio (e.g., Disney, TBS, New York Times)
    3. Mobile: Companies having started on J2ME, BREW, BlackBerry, etc. (e.g., Digital Chocolate, eBuddy)
    4. Retail & CPG: Brick-and-mortar companies or ones that manufacture goods (e.g., The Gap, DKNY, Kraft)
    5. Online: Companies who began on the web including e-Commerce, social networks, online gaming, streaming music, etc. (e.g., Google, eBay, Facebook, Pandora, PopCap, Zynga)
    6. Traditional Gaming: Video game companies from console, portable or PC (e.g., EA, Activision, Namco, etc.).

    iphonedeveloperdna.gifDespite the fact that the App Store is now maturing, reaching its two year anniversary this summer, we are encouraged that native iPhone application developers are still relevant, representing 20% of the heritage pie, the second largest category. This means that the barrier to entry is still low enough for start-ups to enter and innovation to flourish. However, those days may be numbered as “discoverability” has become a significant issue, and now “marketing muscle” is starting to count more in the App Store.

  • iPhones — They Only Come Out At Night

    iPhone users tend to use their devices in the evening and on the weekends, reports Localytics, a Cambridge, MA-based start-up offering mobile analytics services. According to as study conducted by the company, the mobile app usage in the US peaks at around 9 pm EST on week days. Over the weekend, the usage is at its peek during afternoon and nights.

    These findings are not surprising — during regular week days, many of us are busy working and more often than not, use the device to make phone calls or send text messages. The report says that iPhone “app usage on weekends and weekdays is both different in usage patterns and overall scale.”

    The iPhone users typically generate 7% more traffic on the weekend than the average weekday. Saturday traffic ramps quickly from a morning low at 6:00 am to over 90% of peak usage by 11:00 am—and stays near the peak for the rest of the afternoon and evening. By comparison, weekday app usage is more concentrated in the evening with a slow ramp during the working day and a peak at 9:00 pm EST, when East Coast users are at home and West Coast users are commuting home.

    In short, iPhone is still quite a ways off from becoming a “business” phone. The report also concludes that these heavy weeknight and weekend app usage could be interpreted as a sign that consumers may be willing to try more convenient devices than their laptops to entertain themselves, plan a trip, check sports scores and listen to music. No wonder Apple has big hopes for its iPad.

  • TechStars Grades Itself

    TechStars, a seed-stage investment program which has outposts in Boulder, Colo., as well as Boston and Seattle, recently decided to grade itself. So far, the group is not doing too badly. Out of the 39 companies to come out of TechStars, 29 are still active, five were acquired and four failed. Twenty-seven have managed to raised outside funding or bootstrap their way to profitability. So far, TechStar startups have raised about $16.5 million in seed-stage funding from outside investors.

    techstarsoverview.gif

    Late December, Imran Ghory offered a similar analysis for Y Combinator, a start-up school and investment program co-founded byPaul Graham. According to Ghory’s data, over the years, Y Combinator had seen 14 acquisitions, 33 had failed and 82 were still active, of which 24 had raised more outside capital. Reddit (acquired by Conde Nast) was one of the early stars of the Y Combinator program. My two favorite Y Combinator alumni are Dropbox and Xobni.

    Related: Notes from a conversation with Paul Graham & Found/Read Interview with Paul Graham.

  • Geowars…Really?

    Over the past few days I’ve watched this meme about the so-called “geowars” ahead of SXSW gather steam, both in the blogosphere and on Twitter. And it’s giving me a headache. For some odd reason, people believe that SXSW is going to be a full-blown coming-out party for location-based services that will launch at least one of them into the stratosphere.

    Ever since Twitter made such a big splash in Austin a few years ago, many startups have come to believe that if they can do the same, they will subsequently become an overnight success — a foolish assumption. It took a lot longer than that for Twitter to go from an early-stage curiosity to a mainstream phenomenon.

    Even last year’s debutante, Foursquare, took a whole year to sign up 500,000 users, including myself. Impressive, but not Facebook impressive! Its rival is Gowalla, a liberally funded startup that recently crossed the 100,000 subscriber mark (and released a much-improved and a fantastic upgrade). Others such as Pelago/Whrrl are literally spraying Austin to get the attention of SXSW visitors. Add to this dozens of unknown and/or little known services and you have the “geowars.”

    My problem, of course, is not with the technology per se, but with its implementations. With the exception of Foursquare, most LBS startups have not found a way to even briefly engage me. Many of them are going to meet a fate no different that that of a moth flitting around a flame on a dark summer night. So in case you hadn’t noticed, I am a tad skeptical about this notion of geowars.

    From GigaOM Pro: Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation in 2010.

  • Announcing Structure 2010, Our Internet Infrastructure & Cloud Computing Conference

    SXSWTwo years ago, we launched Structure, our conference devoted to Internet infrastructure and cloud computing. At the time, it was clear as a sunny California day that the Internet was entering a brand-new phase of growth that would see everything from pipes to routers to web services scale up, all thanks to digitization. The emergence of cloud-based services such as Amazon’s EC2 and S3 was the first sign of this big shift.

    Greg Papadopoulos (Sun) and Werner Vogels (Amazon) on stage at Structure 2009

    Since then a lot has changed — and Structure has become a premier event for those of us who are deeply interested in Internet infrastructure and its business implications. And while it’s easy to get fixated on cloud computing, one cannot deny the far-reaching impact of on-demand and utility computing. However, to view cloud computing in isolation is a mistake. We need to think of infrastructure in a more holistic fashion.

    Take big data, for example. One of the biggest changes we’re seeing is that companies are starting to look deeply into the data they’ve spent years collecting in order to figure out ways to leverage it. I have often talked about the coming data deluge and how it influences the demand for pretty much everything.

    Attendees in the audience at Structure 2009 in San Francisco California.

    From the emergence of private and hybrid clouds to the rise of novel server architectures to the importance of security in the cloud — these will be just some of the topics of discussion at our event. We’re also going to be exploring the impact of big data and real-time computing on infrastructure. What, for example, are the needs of the new, web-connected, on-demand enterprise?

    Essentially, the 2010 edition of Structure is going to be about the progress the industry has made so far and how things are expected to evolve in the years to come. The event will be held on June 23 and 24th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco.

    Many of our old friends, such as Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, and Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels will be returning for the event. Other experts will join us for the first time — folks such as IBM’s Erich Clementi, who is spearheading Big Blue’s cloud computing efforts. We will be announcing more additions to the line-up of speakers in coming weeks.

    The event is being expanded to two days so we can explore more topics and address one of our community’s biggest demands: more time to network. I hope you will come and be part of our ongoing conversation. Tickets are on sale now — at a discount. For more details, visit the Structure 2010 web site. See you in June!