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Posts Tagged ‘something-which’

The OpenTablet 7 from OpenPeak looks like a pretty decent little piece of hardware. I don’t see any specs in the release, but it’s based on Intel’s Moorestown platform, has a 7″ screen, and probably is respectable in the areas of RAM and so on

Original post: 
OpenTablet 7: sure it looks nice, but all Flash? I don’t know about that

In terms of new hot startups, Square is among the hottest. And for good reason. If it takes off, it has the potential to transform the way vendors and consumers handle transactions. (There’s a reason it was worth $40 million before launch.) Not surprisingly, the talent is also flowing to them.

Square has just hired Bob Lee, a software engineer at Google. And not just any engineer, Lee led the core library development for Android — yes, Google’s mobile platform that is exploding with growth and excitement right now. And yet, Lee is leaving after 5 years at Google for something he clearly feels is even more exciting, Square.

Square’s Buzz Andersen tweeted the news today, and confirmed that Lee is on board fulltime with Square now. Lee, who is apparently known as “Crazy Bob,” will be heading up development of Square’s Android app, we hear. Currently, Square only works on the iPhone and iPod touch. Getting to the other mobile platforms will be vital for the company’s success. And of these platforms, Android is clearly the first priority.

How Square will interact with Android devices isn’t yet clear since the system requires a hardware component as well. On the iPhone and iPod touch, a little square (hence, the name) plugs into the headphone jack — something which the iPhone OS 3.0 allows for.

Update: Lee has just tweeted about the news as well.

Update 2: Square co-founder Jack Dorsey also says that there are two other hires that Square will be announcing soon.

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Two days ago, I wrote a speculative piece wondering if Apple hadn’t leaked some of the information about its forthcoming tablet device to the Wall Street Journal itself. I based this on a number of curiosities in the post, the timing of it, as well as the history between the secretive company as the publication. Today, The Mac Observer suspects the same thing happened. Only they have a much better reason to believe: The author used to be in charge of doing just that for Apple.

John Martellaro, now a senior editor at The Mac Observer, was formerly a Senior Marketing Manager at Apple. As he writes in his post:

Often Apple has a need to let information out, unofficially. The company has been doing that for years, and it helps preserve Apple’s consistent, official reputation for never talking about unreleased products. I know, because when I was a Senior Marketing Manager at Apple, I was instructed to do some controlled leaks.

Lest you be suspicious of Martellaro’s claim, he did indeed hold that role at Apple (here’s some Apple developer documentation tied to him in 2001), and it’s hard to imagine he would have any reason to make up such a thing. In fact, it’s been widely believed for a long while that Apple does this from time to time.

And Martellaro goes into more details. Apparently, senior execs used to come to his team and say they need to get information out there. They were never allowed to email it to anyone, it always had to be on the phone or in person, so there was no paper trail.

He also notes that stock manipulation never factors in (one would hope not), though I suppose one could argue that if Apple did in fact leak the Jobs’ liver transplant information to the WSJ on a Friday night a few months ago, it was a form of manipulation, because they were making sure the stock wouldn’t tank on the news.

Martellaro sums up his post: “That’s how Apple does controlled leaks, and the WSJ article from yesterday was a classic example.“ So there you go.

[photo: flickr/photo denbow]

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This guest post is written by Matt Bell, VP of Sales and Business Development for Azaleos. Azaleos is a company focused on putting the things in the cloud that make the most sense for large enterprise; application management. Matt offers appealing insight because he has grown sales for companies during both of the last two economic meltdowns. This post expands on Vivek Wadhwa’s post It’s All About Selling for Survival earlier this month.

Technology blogs are full of advice for startups: where to start a company, how to raise capital, what kind of culture to build, whom to hire. But we hardly ever talk about what makes strategic decisions meaningful: sales.

A company with strong sales can build a great culture, hire anyone and take the time to figure out its strategy. Without sales, nothing else matters.

There are a thousand books on how to sell everything from used cars to aluminum siding. But most never talk about the unique problem faced by startups: getting one crazy customer to spend money on a company that has a 50-50 shot at going out of business by year end.

I have run sales organizations that couldn’t sell diddly, and others that grew to $20 million. What I learned from both experiences is that even when the product works and plenty of people could use it, you can still fail if you don’t get ferocious about finding your first customers.

1. Be mutantly flexible: The biggest advantage you have when competing with giants is just giving customers exactly what they want. Promise the moon then break down your CEO’s door to make sure your customer gets it. Engineers can complain all they want after the fact, but most actually prefer rallying for a paying customer. Large competitors have to stick to rigid guidelines, satisfy dozens of constituencies in the install-base and within their own organization, and optimize for the masses. A startup’s essential promise isn’t to be like Hertz, which gets everything exactly right, but to be like Avis: we try harder.

2. Juice the comp plan: if you want capable, blood-thirsty reps, build a comp plan short on guarantees and big on incentives. High base salaries are for IBM’s order-takers, not true hunters. You know you’ve got it right when the rest of the management team is worried about a success-disaster: if we make our numbers, won’t all the sales reps all get rich? That’s a good problem to have. Verdiem’s Jim Flatley taught me this at Plumtree: he fought to get early reps 15% of every sale, but after we made our numbers for the first time ever, nobody wanted to pay them less. Even after the bubble burst and every other technology company took a blood-bath, Jim kept delivering results.

3. Value speed in everything you do: performance isn’t just a characteristic of a technology; it’s a characteristic of your entire organization, beginning with how quickly you respond to an inquiry or follow up on a presentation. If your argument is that your competitors are big, slow dinosaurs makes them look that way at every opportunity: whenever a prospect makes a request to you and your competitors, be the one who answers first.

4. Plant landmines: go first in customer presentations so you can set the terms of the debate. Prepare a list of questions for customers to ask your customers. Customers won’t trust whatever claims you make about yourself, and they don’t like it when you attack competitors directly, but if you let them dig into competitors’ weaknesses for themselves, it works. When selling a $3-million deal to Boeing, I included the questions to ask our competitors in a hand-out. Who knows what happened to that hand-out, but we came from far behind to win.

5. Move in after the first date: your first customers are your best sales people, so after the deal closes, you as a sales-person have to move in with that customer — not move on. Every customer who took a crazy risk on your little company has to be completely vindicated in that decision, enough so that he convinces the next customer to ignore the obvious risk of doing business with you. Most customers understand that their career depends on your ability to convince new customers to make the same decision they did, and so they are usually eager to help you out. References can also limit the scope of a startup’s greatest sales enemy: proofs-of-concept. If references establish that the product generally works, you can focus the PoC on very specific concerns. At Azaleos, we have a customer who likes to brag that his team went out for drinks during a go-live rather than watching nervously from a server room.

6. Stand tall: Even if you have no right, work from the premise the customer needs you as much as you need the customer. If you don’t have confidence in your solution, who will? Half of what a sales person brings to a start up is a little swagger. As long as you aren’t obnoxious, customers like to buy from confident companies, and their procurement officers are trained to smell weakness. Riding up the elevator toward a negotiation with one of the world’s largest banks, I decided to raise our walk-away price by $1 million. Everyone argued for a lower number to avoid jeopardizing the deal, but the higher number actually increased our chances. We got the deal for 30% above our walk-away price.

7. Partner up: No one gets fired for hiring IBM, so get IBM on your side. Find out which potential partners have a vested interest in your success and sell to them before you sell to the customer. In any deal with a customer employing more than 5,000 employees, you need to find a partner the customer trusts or lower your forecast probability by 50%. Finding a partner isn’t so hard. A victory for you is almost always a victory for a larger company: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, SAP, IBM. When trying to get in the door for an enterprise deal with a major transportation company, I spent nearly a month trying to convince ‘em that a startup could handle a multi-million dollar project. Rightfully so, the customer said no way, until I reached out to Microsoft. Together, we got the deal.

8. Involve everyone: get as many of your executives, founders, engineers, product managers, and customer-service folks involved in the sales process as possible. You get better perspectives on the deal – a customer will level with an engineer in a way he might not with you – and it makes your company seem bigger to the customer. The customer develops relationships with people throughout your startup, and realizes there’s more at stake than a greedy sales-person’s commission. Focus on how much your whole startup cares about the individual customer; make your small size work for you by developing intimacy between your startup and the customer. This tactic works with large or small customers. I recommend having the CEO or another member of the executive staff make a personal phone call during the final decision process to pledge their commitment to the customer’s success.

9. Hire slow, fire fast: you’ll hire some folks who don’t work out. If you wait to fire them, you’ll run out of money, demoralize your top performers, and lose credibility. Three months after hiring a rep I asked him “how long are you going to be comfortable not selling anything”? His answer, “Don’t worry Matt, I can go several quarters without selling anything before I’d start looking for a new job.” We let him got the next day.

10. Focus the sales pitch: technology start ups are mostly driven by engineers in the early days. On hiring you, they’ll expect you to start cold-calling the whole phonebook. And the truth is, you have to love cold-calling. After all these years, I still love it. But just like Dutch in Predator before the final battle, you have to be able to answer only one question about your target before you start: where they are. A sales force needs to know what kind of companies to call on and the title of the person to call within those companies. Then he needs a pitch that a ten year-old could understand.

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Many bloggers take December 31 each year to do a recap of their year in blogging. Google is no exception.

The multi-billion dollar company has a post today patting itself on the back for a solid five years worth of blogging. More notably, they talk about how the amount they’re blogging has increased significantly over the years. In 2009, Google had 423 posts on the Google Blog, which is just one of dozens of blogs they run. That represents a 15 percent increase over 2008. They also note that just about 14.5 million people stopped by the blog this year, which is a 21 percent increase over the previous year. Make no mistake: Google is taking its blogging very seriously.

So what were Google’s most read posts this year? By far, their post about Chrome OS was read the most. Over 2.5 million people read it, and it contributed over 12 percent of their total unique page views. In second was the post about Google Wave. And in third was one about Google Voice. All of this makes sense as these are arguably Google’s three most potentially disruptive products. And these stats are also pretty much inline with what we saw at TechCrunch this year in terms popularity among posts about Google. (Though Nexus One is quickly catching up.)

Google also takes the time to note how committed they are to using Twitter. Since starting to tweet in February, Google has sent over 1,000 messages (almost all of which are self-promoting, like any good Twitter user). And while their account isn’t quite as popular as Lady Gaga’s (something which they bemoan), they do have about 2 million followers of their main account now. Oh, and they’ve set up some 75 other Twitter accounts for their various properties (they actually have a directory) — something which we poked fun at in July. Even CEO Eric Schmidt finally joined up.

But perhaps the most interesting stat that Google shares is that Twitter was the biggest non-Google referrer to its blog in 2009. Google notes that this is “a clear sign of its rapid growth in popularity.” That’s a nice big wet kiss to a company it was supposedly in talks about acquiring earlier this year.

Something else I’ve noticed about Google’s 2009 in blogging is that they’re actually getting better at it. It used to be that we would summarize company blog posts (which, naturally, I’m doing here) because they were awful at getting their point across. Or, as a colleague of mine who shall remain unnamed put it, “thanks for five years of cheesy headlines, meandering and grandiose ledes, and self-serving misinformation about openness.” But this year, it seems that Google (and a number of other companies) are getting better at using these in-house blog posts to announce things. And I’m all for that. Not having to re-explain something that’s already out there frees us up to do better posts as well, such as deeper analysis about what the companies are announcing.

That said, the point about Google’s self-serving posts remains an issue as we saw very recently. But not to worry, we’ll still be here to call BS on those posts when we see them.

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A few weeks ago there was a lot of excitement surrounding the launch of Google Maps Navigation. Unfortunately, it only worked with Android 2.0 and up, which means only the newest devices right now, like the Droid. But today Google has given an early holiday present to its other Android users: Maps Navigation to anyone running at least Android 1.6 (Donut).

Yes, that means anyone with an Android device can now use this awesome new feature. This even includes users with the original Android phone, the G1. But apparently not all of the features found in Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 will work in the 1.6 version. The one example Google gives is that you can’t use the “navigate to” voice command.

This new version of Maps Navigation also includes a new feature included called “Layers” which allows you to put various information such as Wikipedia articles on top of your map as an overaly.

The update is available in the Android Market today, obviously for free. Sadly, the service is still U.S.-only, and Google warns that it’s still in beta, something which we’ve come to ignore the meaning of thanks to Google’s own Gmail.

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I feel real sorry for the folks that pre-ordered the fantastic Viliv X70 from Dynamism. Those customers should have gotten an email today explaining that the UMPC has been delayed by about two weeks

Read the original here:
Viliv X70 preorders delayed, should ship out on August 11

By now you either are addicted to Spymaster, or absolutely can’t stand it. The viral Twitter-based game in which you do spy-like things such as “assassinate” your followers is a great time-waster. But it’s also drawn some criticism as being “spammy.” That isn’t stopping the team from pushing the game forward — first, by finally opening it up to everyone today, and second with an upcoming iPhone app.

The iPhone app, which we’ve obtained some mock-ups of, should be out “in the next few weeks,” co-founder Eston Bond tells us. Those familiar with the game should feel right at home based on these pictures. The “Strategy” and “Tactics” menu options along the bottom are just ways to better organize features, we’re told. The creators are also working fast to get a bunch of new features in the game. The iPhone version will be available for free.

The rapid growth of Spymaster on Twitter — it was a top trending topic for several days after it launched — has already spawned a series of similar viral games. As many have been quick to point out, this is similar to what happened early in the life of Facebook’s Platform as well. But Spymaster was able to do this based on an invite-only system (something which also caused some controversy), now with it open to the public and going mobile, we could be in for a second wave of Spymaster fury.

Just as with the aforementioned Facebook Platform, Twitter is going to sooner or later own up to the fact that it is now a platform and must take measures to allay concerns that viral applications will take over the network. Plenty of people have told me that they don’t want to see Spymaster messages in their tweet stream, but would rather not unfollow people who they still consider to be friends. If there was just a way to filter out those message — and yes, some third party Twitter apps have a way, but this needs to be built into Twitter eventually — then everyone can continue to go about their business.

I realize filters may slightly muck-up the “keep it simple” mentality, but Twitter is getting too big, we need it. Games like Spymaster that are fun for some but a burden for others shouldn’t suffer because Twitter has never been good at the whole “new feature” thing.

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Today, during its WWDC keynote address, Apple has unveiled the new iPhone 3GS, the successor to the iPhone 3G that was unveiled one year ago. The new iPhone is giving people a lot of what they’ve been asking for in the past — and some stuff that Apple undoubtedly hopes will make buyers forget all about the Palm Pre.

First of all, the new iPhone is significantly faster than the current model. That’s what the “S” really stands for, “Speed.” Not only has the RAM been doubled, but the processor has gotten a speed boost — something which we talked about at length recently. Most applications will run at least 2 times faster, according to Apple.

The other improvements in this new iPhone are what were expected. It will have a nicer 3 megapixel camera, that can finally do auto-focus. I’ve been testing out a similar camera on the Google Ion phone for a few weeks now, and it’s not even funny how much better it is than the current iPhone’s. And yes, as rumored, this iPhone will offer the ability to shoot video — something which Apple prevented on the iPhone 3G, although it was possible with unapproved apps.

Another new feature is voice control. Not only can now make calls simply by talking to the phone but you can also control the playback on the iPhone with your voice. If you say “play a song by the Killers,” it will work. You can also ask the phone, “what is playing now?” And it will say it. And you can also say “play more songs like this,” and iTunes Genius will activate. This looks awesome.

One of the most important improvements to this new iPhone however is that the battery life has improved. Apple claims that the iPhone 3GS will get 9 hours of web surfing now when on WiFi — that’s up from 6 hours on the current iPhone. 3G talk time will be the same 5 hours now though.

The iPhone 3GS will come in two sizes, each with two colors: White or Black. The low-end 16 GB version will run you $199. The high-end 32 GB version will be $299. While the price points are the same as last year, the storage sizes have doubled.

One thing that everyone seemed to agree on following its launch this weekend, is that the Palm Pre had an experience that was overall faster than the iPhone’s. With this new processor, more RAM and faster download speeds, that is likely to shift in favor of the iPhone once again.

I still think the iPhone 3GS name is rather silly, and could be downright confusing for those who think people are talking about the iPhone 3G in plural. But whatever, it’s faster, slightly prettier and with a better battery, so I’m happy.

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No, we didn’t get a Palm Pre to check out before its launch today — something which is a bit fishy and contributed to a big heap of drama earlier today. But it does seem like a ton of people both on the web and in real-life are very excited about the device. And they should be, having just read others’ reviews and talking to friends who have used it, it seems like it will easily be at least the number two coolest phone out there.

So for those of us who didn’t get one today, here’s the video that plays upon starting up your new Pre. It’s pretty damn awesome — much better than the iPhone’s startup screen — which I’ve been seeing a lot of lately. This one actually reminds me a bit of the cool Apple TV startup video.

[via PopWuping]

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