Digital Provocateur: My Latest Forbes Posts

Here is a summary of my latest Forbes.com Posts. You an read my "Digital Provocateur" column here.

13 Steps For Raising a Fortune in Start-up Funding

With news this morning that Box has raised an astounding $125 million in venture funding, it seems that there’s never been a better time to raise capital for a start-up.  Although for many aspiring entrepreneurs, the journey still remains a mystery. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Krish Ramakrishnan, the Co-Founder and Chief [...]

Top Technology Job Trends of 2012 Include Social Media, HTML5, jQuery, Hadoop and PaaS

From an absolute percentage point of view, unsurprisingly Social Media is the clear winner with more than 1.5% of all job postings containing the term. More surprising is the second spot going again to jQuery with close to 1% of all searches. I also compared a few of the buzzwords du jour, “Big Data” and “” The winner is Big [...]

Netflix Releases Free Infrastructure Failure Testing Software “Chaos Monkey” To Public

has announced that it has released its “Chaos Monkey“ infrastructure testing software under a free Open Source license. The software known as Chaos Monkey, is a service which runs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, it identifies groups of systems and randomly terminates one of the systems in an automated effort to discover failure points within a cloud infrastructure. [...]

Software Defined Everything: Oracle to Acquire Xsigo

Another morning and another announcement that yet another so called “Software defined Networking” (SDN) company will be acquired. This time it’s ’s turn, announcing the acquisition of Xsigo. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.  did note that the two companies will continue to operate independently and it is “business as usual.” , -based Xsigo will mark ’s sixth acquisition this year, [...]

When Twitter Goes Down, So Does the Social Web

I’ve just been on the train for the last half hour or so heading to my office in downtown Toronto. As I got on the train, the unthinkable happened, my twitter client stopped responding. In horror, I repeatedly hit the refresh icon with no success. Not even a fail whale for support.  I immediately felt a sense of [...]

The Hacking Business Model

Last week I had the opportunity to catch-up with Michael “Monty” Widenius, founder and original developer of MySQL. During our lengthy discussion, we covered a number of topics including the early history of MySQL and its ultimate sale to Sun in 2008 for $1 billion. Monty’s latest startup, MariaDB, aims to pick up where MySQL [...]

Free Versus Open: Does Open Source Software Matter In The Cloud Era?

There is an increasingly common refrain I keep hearing from startups. These young companies, with their generally un-original software products, claim that its solution is just like  except open source. Don’t get me wrong. I like open source as much as the next guy but, from a value proposition standpoint, just being “open source” [...]

Stupid as a Service: @NeedADebitCard Retweets Public Photos of Debit Cards

In the realm of bad ideas, there are bad ideas, then there are truly idiotic ones. A new twitter profile (@NeedADebitCard) keeps track of arguably one of the worst, reposting pictures of debit cards people have purposefully posted on twitter. Dean Putney over at BoingBoing shares his insights saying, “Some of them are lightly blurred– such as the one above which [...]

Cloud Computing Forecast: Cloudy With A Chance of Fail

Amazon’s Cloud service is having a bad a couple weeks. For the second time in as many weeks Amazon’s East Coast cloud crashed during a severe storm that left 1.3 million in the D.C. area without power. The outage brought down numerous high profile web sites hosted on Amazon including , Instagram, Pinterest, and Heroku. [...]

Google Announces Cloud Infrastructure Service: Google Compute Engine

has entered the busy ‘ as a service’ (IaaS) arena today with its new Google Compute Engine service. The cloud service, which describes as in a ‘Limited Preview Release,’ allows users to  run large-scale computing workloads on Linux virtual machines hosted on ‘s infrastructure. The IaaS service is very similar to Amazon’s EC2 service which it launched [...]

Tune into “The SMB recipe for success in the cloud” Google+ Hangout and be entered to win a Dell Vostro 3550 laptop!

A quick note to let everyone know I'll be hosting a Google+ Hangout with Dell on June 7th from noon to 1:00PM CDT.

The focus of the event will be on businesses moving into “the cloud.” But what does that really mean? As the cloud has become more ubiquitous, its meaning and value to small and medium businesses often seems more unclear. 

Join me, Dell and Trend Micro to clarify this topic of “the cloud” in a live Google+ Hnagout titled “The SMB Recipe for Success in the Cloud”. I'll be joined by fellow cloud experts Matthew Mikell and Bob Leck of Dell and TJ Alldridge of Trend Micro.
During this one-hour Google+ Hangout, these panelists will be sharing their wisdom and recommendations, helping small and medium businesses determine:

·       What the cloud is and its value to a business

·       The various cloud solutions and approaches available, and how to make the right choice

·       Common concerns about the cloud and how to overcome them

·       What to consider when choosing the right cloud partner.

Registerfor this hangout here. Then, we’ll send you a link to thehangout and a calendar reminder.

Our panelists will answer viewer questions LIVE during the broadcast. Pose your questions to them in any of the following ways: a) post a comment on the +Dell page, b) tweet using the #DellHangout hashtag, or c) post a comment on the Dell YouTube page live comment sidebar. We encourage you to join us! All hangout registrants will automatically be entered to win a Dell™ Vostro™ 3550 laptop. Please see Official Rules below for details.

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The Rise of The Vertical Cloud

While some are happy to debate definitions of cloud computing, I prefer to focus on the characteristics that make successful companies, successful. Lately there seems to have been a shift from the anything for anyone cloud to the industry or vertically focused cloud. Adding to this is today's piece of news from Zynga who announced what they describe as "the beta release of Zynga.com,  a new service enabling third party developers to create and publish games on the Zynga Platform." Yes, that company that brought you farmville is now going to be a cloud service provider enabling a whole new crop of game companies, which I can only assume they will acquire when the time is right.

So why is this news important? It's another great example of a trend in the cloud computing sector of "Vertically focused" cloud products and services. In the early days, there was this mentality of just build it and they would come. Problem was that for most, they never really came. Instead you had a handful of very large players and everyone else fighting over the table scraps. What those who survived learned, is that in order to be successful it isn't about being the best funded or even the best performing, but instead it is about being the most focused on the needs of a particular customer vertical. Those who focus on a particular problem, be it for a particular enterprise sector, application or customer need will have a clear and distinct differentiation in a market dominated by me-too cloud services.

This trend certainly isn't unique to the cloud space, look at Facebook as an example. In an early market they were able to quickly gain a dominate position as a fairly generic social network. As the social market began maturing you started to see the most successful companies becoming more and more laser focused. A great example  is Instagram who according to Mashable now has more than 50 million users and is gaining about 5 million users per week, not to mention it was recently acquired by Facebook for 1 billion dollars. They succeed because of their ability to focus on a vertical. This trend seems to be gaining momentum recently with apps like SocialCam seeing astounding growth by focusing on the vertical niche opportunities over looked by their larger, better funded competition..  TechCrunch reported that SocialCam jumped from 12 million users last week to 20 million users today. Yes, 8 million new users in 1 week. Focus Focus Focus. Where's youtube?

So what does a consumer focused app and a gaming company have to do with Cloud computing? Everything, as our market matures we are beginning to see the same sort of vertical focus for  the most successful new bread of cloud companies entering the scene. No longer is it acceptable to want to be a clone of Amazon or who ever you consider to be the leader in a particular sector. Nor is it wise. Those who focus on the industry sectors neglected by the largest players will see the most success and will be selling themselves for an Instagram or two.
(1 instgram = $1 Billion USD)

The Cloud Backbone – Infrastructure: Digital Nibbles Podcast episode 008

I'm hosting solo this week and our guests are Ben Kepes from Diversity Limited and Reza Malekzadeh from Nimbula. Ben chats about the infrastructure and tech industry in New Zealand and how that ties to the opportunity in emerging markets while Reza tackles a discussion of the open source model and where the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) industry is heading.

You can find Ben on Twitter @BenKepes  

Show Timeline:
0:00: Reuven updates us on his travels in Korea and covers the News of the Week
10:13: Interview with Ben Kepes from Diversity Limited
24:57: Interview with Reza Malekzadeh from Nimbula
35:21: Wrap up

#DigitalNibbles On The Road: Cloud Computing in China with Intel's Billy Cox

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Chatting with Intel's Billy Cox outside Olympic Park in Beijing. We discuss the cloud computing marketing in China.