In case you think that noodles are not serious business here you might be interested in this fancy new Ramen Radar application (Windows only, cursed beast) that tracks ramen shops based on peoples reports.
Just when the trains and crowds of Tokyo start to make you nuts, something like this comes along and renews my faith in humanity.
As part of some business model research I am doing for a friend, I tried to figure out what model is the most appealing if you have a green field (untapped market opportunity) and you were going to start something from scratch. As an open-source software guy first and a software-as-a-service guy second, I really wanted open source to be the right way to go. And I believe it is for infrastructure software, but not for packaged applications. I still can't figure out how Web 2.0 companies translate into dollars though maybe it's as simple as advertising? … Read more
I am in Tokyo this week as we launch MuleSource in Japan. Pics and posts to come as I recover from the 11-hour flight. Somehow I managed to forget my watch, so I am not convinced that the flight was only 11 hours. It felt like multiple lifetimes.
At our Wii-off last week several people asked me if they should start considering expansion into global markets and specifically Japan. The answer is if your company is doing less than $10 million in revenue, probably not. The reason we're going for it is because there is a big push of … Read more
It was just over a year ago that Facebook opened up member restrictions to move from college kids to the rest of the world. This was clearly a good strategy as Facebook now has an astronomical valuation and a huge userbase. The question is what was/is the impact on the core audience (college kids) that made the site what it is today?
There are a number of sites that have sprung up like College Tonight and ConnectU, but none of them seem to be as captivating as Facebook itself. As TechCrunch's Mark Hendrickson writes:
Let's say you … Read moreAs Tom Krazit reports on the One More Thing blog Google is getting ready to unveil its Android phone software.
Google acquired Android in August of 2005 (most reports say it cost far less than $100m) and now two years later seems to have created what will become the dominant force in the handset operating system arena. Why? Because it's an open platform, which is exactly what consumers want and the carriers hate. Plus now that it's Google, the carriers will have no choice to all get in line once one of them (it looks like VZW first) … Read more
My post on whether BEA Systems is screwed hasn't even been up for a full day, and the company decided to one-up me with this press release, marking a 180-degree turn from everything they have been pushing for the last two years.
The company had been talking about Aqualogic as an SOA (service-oriented architecture) story, and now it's pitching it as a blog-wiki mashup: "New Web 2.0 service solutions from enterprise infrastructure software firm BEA, along with enterprise social-computing products, are designed to accelerate the next generation of user participation."
BEA is clearly trying to push outside its bread and butter, but the message doesn't make much sense in relation to how the company is positioning the rest of their products.
BEA's statement goes on to suggest that the company could also be powering buzzword-compliant Web 2.0 initiatives: "BEA's enterprise social-computing products are designed to deliver the next wave of knowledge worker productivity--vital for increased business efficiency, growth and innovation."… Read more
I am on a breakfast panel on November 14 down in Mountain View at the Orrick offices down in Menlo Park. Being that I get back from Japan the day before with the requisite jetlag I should be in rare form.
Here are just a few of the exciting topics: What does "commercial open source" mean and how is it different from "open source"? What benefits can I expect from releasing my product as open source? What are the costs? Does my choice of open source license matter? What do VCs think of the open source … Read moreRemember back when Metallica isolated the majority of their fan base with their over-the-top stance against Napster (for the moment let's leave the stupidity of the music business and the fact that it only has itself to blame for people pirating songs out of this) and what it did to the band and the fans that supported them for all those years? That's how I am starting to think of Novell.
Metallica went from being loved by millions to being whiny about Napster, taking the focus of the band off the music and onto the ugly business of … Read more
This is pretty annoying but it seems that I have to "claim" this blog. Apologies.
Once again Microsoft continues to muddy its SOA (service-oriented architecture) strategy with a push into model-driven development (MDD). While on the surface it may appear that this is meaningful, in fact all Microsoft is doing is dumbing down the already mediocre tools and "prescriptions" that currently suggest an obvious misunderstanding of the fundamental (primarily vendor-enforced) components of SOA, which usually include items like business process management, enterprise service bus, registry and governance.
Instead, Microsoft has a set of things that are not in line with any other vendor or standards group: "a bundle of BizTalk Server 2006 … Read more
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