Boris Asides

A product that can be used on a workgroup scale initially, but expand to meet enterprise demands, and have a natural price escalation with it.  Huddle does this well.  You need broad enough appeal and value, as it will be hard to decouple your pricing entirely from the number of people using it.   Make sure that the attribute that triggers steps up the price ladder is (a) a rational thing to charge more for, and (b) something that has a very high upper bound.  Don’t charge per GB if big companies won’t use a 1000x the storage of small ones.

This is a great post to read for anyone selling SaaS into enterprise (or investing in it). I'm picking out this section on scalable pricing attributes because I see problems in these areas all the time.

Storage especially is something that I keep banging my head against: I really do want bring my own storage (and, as it turns out, it was Huddle that I was complaining about back then).

Looking at Huddle again (the platform that is the seed for this article), it looks like a really capable tool.

The non profit / lower end plans are excellent, and the included web conferencing (video and phone) seem like killer combos. Yes, I think I *am* going to be shopping for some intranet tools…

I imagine what Rackspace gets out of this is, that if successful, they will at least have some sort of leverage with Amazon. Amazon is a machine. Amazon executes to perfection and they release new features at a relentless pace with no signs of slowing down. They don't leave much of a door open for others to get into the game. With a real open cloud alternative it might allow a lot of people to play in the cloud space that would have been squeezed out before.

What Amazon can't match is the open cloud's capability of simultaneous supporting applications that can run seamlessly in a private cloud hosted in a corporate datacenter, in local development and test clouds, and in a full featured public cloud.

OpenStack is the first development in the cloud space that hints at a future where there actually are more than half a dozen big platform / cloud providers (aka Hosting Apocalypse).

What does Rackspace get out of it? Well, they don't get obliterated and/or don't have to try and be a VAR on top of someone else's stack. This open source approach allows them a chance at controlling their own destiny.

What are other large hosting / data center providers doing? Nothing much - riding out the end of shared hosting and getting sold to by VMWare, from what I can see.

I had wondered about Eucalyptus: they are going down an Amazon clone path, whereas OpenStack specifically decided to break from that. As well (likely because of VC funding), Eucalyptus is not being a good open source shepherd. Translation: they're screwed.

So far, these cloud platforms are all similar in terms of being virtualization environments, based on machine images. I'm over virtualization: I don't want to manage/update/secure *machines* of any kind, even if they are virtualized.

The next step is true service platforms - like Google App Engine, Joyent's SmartPlatform.

These platforms need a) smart developers (education, evangelism) and b) libraries & services (a Unix pipe like toolchain of smaller parts that let you snap together more complex services without having to scale each individual part). Killer apps, perhaps.

I do believe, however, that a Gnomedex-style model could be applied to any industry, any topic – not just relegated to surfacing general trends in technology. I’d loved to have produced a Gnomedex focused on YouTube, one related to the world of gaming, one specifically for fellow Apple enthusiasts, one for Microsoft Windows fanatics, one for fellow gadget freaks, another for “how to make money online,” and… the list would go on-and-on.

In a few days, weeks, months, years… everyone will forget. That is, until they attend another event and realize just how far we went to spoil them silly.

Chris is laying Gnomedex to bed… for now. I think it's one of the best conferences around, and I learned a lot from it (and made a ton of connections along the way).

Thanks for being the very best conference host I've ever seen, Chris. Take a break, get refreshed, and continue to kick ass.

What's perfectly clear though is that I have a lot of work to do to keep up with the innovation going on in this hugely powerful community. Which is actually nothing new, but reading a blog post about these technologies doesn't make my jaw drop the way that it does when I'm in the room watching Drupal advance.

David is talking about some of the dandelion seed like explosion of innovation that's happening around configuration management and deployment processes in Drupal.

Community innovation, it's a powerful thing.

So what have we accomplished? We can now override the value of the items per page in the blog view without overriding the feature. Furthermore, we can also export a new feature that encapsulates this change. Since the configuration is held in a variable, we can use strongarm to export that variable into a feature of its own. For example, we can have a feature called siteb_blog that has a dependency on tha_blog and a variable to override the items_per_page.

Write up and instructions on how to make configurable settings on top of a default feature, which means that a) you do't have to hack the base feature and b) you have a dependency system that means better re-use while still having the flexibility of settings.

Great walk through of how the folks at Funny Monkey deconstructed a site to turn it into several types of Features so that it could be easily plugged together and managed as an install profile.

In reading through this write up, it's clear that more automation and more help is needed in the gap between Features and install profiles and what that means for re-use. The goal of having the functionality be used as building blocks is awesome.

Contrary to the hopes of some, Drupal Commons should not be mistaken for a user-focused social network. Instead, Commons is aimed at large companies, and it is a great choice for that audience. I also foresee Drupal Commons being particularly useful for in-house developers with less Drupal experience and for small- and medium-sized companies looking to use Drupal as a springboard for building better relationships with their users.

A very thorough write up of how Acquia Drupal Commons came to be.

It very much is targeting Jive and Telligent, with similar thought processes behind it, which I think is a shame. I don't find these types of enterprise social networks very interesting, and would like to see more evolution in the space.

Obviously, there is a customer base still clamouring for these type of solutions, and I'm sure with the open source advantages and library of other modules, we'll see some adoption by large companies.

I am installing more and more Open Atrium sites for smaller organizations, and love it as a Basecamp clone. It is definitely not designed for larger organizations where a more semi-porous approach is needed, although it could certainly evolve in this direction (e.g. evolve the UI to support larger number of users).

The company ran landing page splits every two or three days (they initially used Unbounce to generate the pages) and measured them carefully with KISSmetrics. They also used SnapABug for live chat on their site. Between the metrics and the direct customer questions, SlideShare had what Sinha calls “minor learnings and then major shifts.”

This is a long case study of SlideShare's pivot to start offering premium features

It's funny that it's called "going freemium" -- focusing on the free rather than the premium. Feels like Hootsuite did the same thing.

I thought I'd snip this small part that mentions getting started with local Vancouver boys Unbounce. Congrats!

In a perfect world where Sun hadn’t gotten weird, maybe ZFS would have saved us by now at the workstation level like it has many a sysadmin in the server farms. But something happened with legal types and Apple bugged out of ZFS and now we’re stuck waiting to see if something better comes out of the Infinite Loop. Then, Sun got bought by Oracle which is even weirder, as Google is finding out. It’s probably a good thing Apple got cold feet.

This is a long post that deals mainly with backup / working copy strategies when dealing with terabytes of photo & video data that you should definitely read if you're a photographer / videographer generating multi-TB of data.

Small data solutions like DropBox feel really elegant these days, but these big data problems are generating a lot of pain and feel like they need solving soon - multi-terabyte video data is pretty much here now.

And yes, it does seem like Apple is the company to be most likely to solve this on the desktop.

A while back I wrote a post titled "The Gap Scenario." In it I outlined one (of many) scenarios that I imagined would become pretty commonplace as location based services, search, and social merged into a retail setting.

Today's news (Business Insider) that publisher Daily Candy has created an Android app that sends users articles when they are near "current local happenings" such as designer sales, spas, and concerts got me thinking about this scenario once again.

The app monitors where you might be in the background, then matches content, and one must assume, eventually, offers. It works only in New York for now, but more cities are expected.

The main issue I see with app-based approaches today is that they are an intermediate step.

It is clear that people can't / won't download dozens of apps (an app per website / content source?) in order to get this functionality. So, this is the first wave of experimentation, and the next wave will be of aggregators that bake this functionality into broader based platforms that are available everywhere.