Author Archives: Steve Guengerich

About Steve Guengerich

Steve is managing director of BroadBrush Ventures and a member of the founding management team of Appconomy, Inc. Steve is an award-winning writer, with his ninth book "Think Lobal > Act Glocal" available on Amazon.com at http://bit.ly/awKABU. In addition to the mobileTech Tuesday, Steve writes "The BroadBrush Update" at http://www.Guengerich.com on tech innovation and society.

Software on Sailboats: serious selling can be fun too!

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I sometimes think of my friend Glyn Meek as a modern day “Thomas Edison of technology” mainly because he is always working on least 3-4 inventions at once.  It could be posters made of hundreds of micro-satellite photos, it might be a new search technology (like Llesiant, that we wrote about earlier this year), it might be the processes for scaling up for a dramatic event like the World Congress of IT when it was held in Austin, for which he served as the president… I could go on.

Or, when he tires of the tech part in need of a refresh, you might find him at Driveway Austin in his custom Cobra or sailing, the latter from which he got the inspiration for one of his latest ventures, named Software on Sailboats.  As he told me the story earlier this year, when he and friends were sailing a few years ago, they got the inspiration for a product as they lamented the dearth of a sales tool built for the real sales person.

Giving credit to their locus of inspiration (and no doubt a partial result of too much sun and drink after a long day on the water), Software on Sailboats was born.  Glyn and a partner, using their experience from large (like Dell) and venture-backed (like Triactive) enterprises, focused on the salesperson they knew:  someone who is on the move, uses their phone as their mission critical IT, and needs a sales tool that is a real aid in getting their work done – not an administrative time sucker.

They “slapped together” a demo, put it up on CNet’s Download.com in 2001, not knowing exactly what to expect, and over the course of a few years, largely left unattended, got over 40,000 downloads – an amazing number, given the bazillion other contact/sales management tools available for free or fee, from salesforce.com on down.

Well, it got to a point where they finally couldn’t ignore the fact that the software was something that people wanted, but were demanding more than the beta v1.0 release provided.  So, with the catalyst of new, more powerful phones and WindowsMobile – and with the backdrop of a tough economy where everyone is looking for ways to reduce op/ex – they decided to roll up their sleeves and get serious about producing a suite of professional desktop and mobile products this past winter.

In true bootstrapping fashion, the team produced everything, including the “day in the life” video – Glyn’s the 3rd gent wandering the fine Central Texas countryside – and demo tutorials, showing how to use the system.  As a many time salesforce.com user myself, I really love the approach Glyn and his team have taken focusing on the needs of the salesperson – from the technology, making it easy and intuitive, to the price point, cheap!

First, Windows devices; next, perhaps, iPhones and Androids.  But, take a look, see what you think of the free downloads; and, as always, send us your own story of a fresh, “under the radar” technology product or service in Austin.  Cheers!

Making your (web 2.0) life a little easier

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freshtech-fridayFreshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich

Sure, it is the new companies with funding that make the headlines in old media.  But, among the many great things about Austin is the amazing group of talented people you run across all of the time.  Frequently, in addition to their “day jobs,” they are also doing fascinating work to fix the minor annoyances many of us face every day in our digital lives.

I stumbled across one of these amazing people just down the hall a few weeks ago, nGenera’s own Terry Heath.  We already knew Terry was a great engineer, but what was neat was learning about just a couple of his side dabbles.

Take, for instance, Big Tweet (or bgtwt).   You know how twitter has that annoying 140 character limitation that can really stop you dead in your tracks?  Sure, for the twitter purists, the limitation is an absolutist perfection, like the divine right of kings, back in its day.

However, why put up with it when you don’t have to?  And that is the beauty of Big Tweet.  It lets you send that larger message on twitter, when you really have something to say that’s over 140 characters.  And, you don’t have to go backwards from your web 2.0 world to do it.

But what about something even more useful, for you in my hardcore IT readership?   Well, Terry’s got another pretty cool service called Locked Envelope.

Locked Envelope lets you send secure messages over the internet, without having to deal with encryption yourself.  Say you need to send someone your bank account number and personal  ID number, for completing a wire transfer or some other such thing.  Well, you want to make darn sure that a bad guy doesn’t get hold of it while the bits are zipping across the cloud.

Locked envelope gives you some peace of mind.  No, it’s not a replacement for a full-form e-mail application.  But, it is a handy service for those situations where you want the extra assurance. 

What other side applications, secret services, and other helpful little web apps have you run across?  Please tell us about your favorites.  Until next time!

This Is Not About Twitter

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Freshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich

Whether you use Twitter or not, it continues to gain business and consumer users at a rate that can’t be ignored. Austin, of course, deserves a wee bit of credit for helping Twitter take off, when it became the hit of SXSW Interactive 2007, winning the web award that year along with many an influential user.

Fast forward nearly two years, and twitter is everywhere:

And, these are dos and don’ts for businesses and working professionals – from X’ers to Boomers – with an eye towards helping them to understand the phenomenon and how to get their feet wet. It is this last example that is the segue for what we really want to talk about, which is not twitter.

How can you make twitter meet the security, integrity, and privacy needs of a modern, regulated, current (or aspiring) Global 2000 enterprise or similar-sized civic and academic institution? It’s a vexing problem, but at least one company in Austin has a gameplan. We spoke recently with the principals of Socialware and we liked what we heard and saw.

In a nutshell, they have built a solution that solves the middleware problem shown in the figure above, between those unruly social media apps and the enterprise application and database infrastructure. For indeed, this isn’t just a twitter problem – this a problem for how to reconcile enterprise demands for a whole new and rapidly growing category of social media applications. The solution, as it turns out, is diplomacy, i.e., sitting in the middle between two or more parties and mediating their interactions.

Hence the name Socialware – a clever play off of middleware, which was a huge step in evolving distributed application deployment in the 1990s and earlier this decade. No doubt the company principals would love for their solution to be a similar “next big thing” and to gain even a reasonable level of success that the middleware leaders, like BEA, realized.

However, first things first, the company is still in bootstrap and semi-stealth mode, aggressively building product and performing initial pilots with a very small group of large customers. You can get a little more of an inkling about the philosophy of the company on their blog. We had a look at the beta product recently and we like what we see. Our opinion is, just like certain rapidly expanding tech markets for consumers – like iPhone apps, which Austin developers have dived into – there is a big opportunity for enterprise solutions for exploiting the innovation in social media and other enterprise 2.0 apps.

And, hey, there are worse things than being acquired by Oracle for $8.5 billion.

Make 'Em Pay

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Freshtech FridayFreshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich

In his new book “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World,” Don Tapscott talks about a new generation “bathed in bits.” The research in the book identifies eight “net gen” norms that Don goes on to examine and extend into discussions about the coming transformation of institutions and society. Like any great major transformation, seeds of this change were planted years before.

It was nearly a decade ago that Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, famously said “There is no privacy..get over it.” Fast forward to a headline article this week in the NY Times – “Banks Mine Data and Woo Troubled Borrowers” – which speaks to the vast array of personalized information available for sale.

That NY Times article got me to thinking about the subject of this week’s FreshTech Friday post. What if there was a way for people to monetize the data about themselves? Rather than accept that others control the buying and selling of our data, what if the individual was able to get in on the action? Here’s some random thoughts to string together:

-ever since Seth Godin published the bible on permission marketing, the net generation largely accepts that the best we can do is barter our private data for little online trinkets, more or less valuable at a moment in time. Why not get cold hard cash?

-ever since David Pullman rocked the investment world (literally) with Bowie bonds, there’s clearly a proven market for an individual’s capacity to produce value over their lifetime (way beyond what the insurance industry’s actuarial tables would indicate). Why let rockstars have all of the fun?

-and ever since Facebook started morphing towards the social operating system and Google revealed that Personalized Search was their friendly way to let you know that – yes indeed – everything that you had ever searched for was filed away somewhere to be mined by you or them (or maybe…?), there is a vast new, highly personalized set of data that each of us creates and incrementally refines – for free! – every time we use these services.

Any marketer worth their salt knows that the name-of-the-game in mastering profitability of initial customer acquisition and retention is understanding lifetime value. And the more they know about you – your profile, your activities, and your relationships – the more they can personalize offers and the products or services that go with them.

What if there was a new kind of social network service, where you could receive a fee for your participation in the network? Sure, you’d have to agree to be audited, as well as truthfully and accurately complete a comprehensive profile (including things like your detailed health records, down to your genetic makeup, like that available from 23andme, along with a commitment to use the paid network as your primary (exclusive) social platform. But, why not if, in effect, all of that same “private” information about you is available already for a fee?

It’s the ultimate form of personal information arbitrage – and you’d be the direct beneficiary. So, rather than all of these clever new gps-powered services for the iPhone being the ones to charge advertisers for the ability to have their restaurants or coffee shops presented to you because of the free twitter stream that you generate while you are on the move, why can’t you be the one to receive the royalty for letting the advertiser know that you are going to be in the area and, by the way, happen to be awfully fond of lattes in the afternoon?

Come discuss.

Biff had it right; too bad he was a jerk

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Freshtech FridayFreshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich

Remember the “Back to the Future” series from 1980s? In the second movie of the three-part series chronicling the perils of time travel and big hair, the main “bad guy” Biff Henderson, has a flash of insight. A future Biff manages to send an almanac of sports scores to his younger self, courtesy of Marty McFly’s time-warping Delorean sports car.

In business, that’s what it is all about – getting that flash of insight. Being able to judge, with greater certainty, what will happen next. Moving just a few steps faster than the next guy to the right answer. In many respects, this is what nGenera Corporation is all about. Given that I’m an nGenera “insider,” I thought I’d start off the re-launch of my AustinStartup blog contributions with my little endeavor.

It’s a perfect circle, because many of you may remember my Cleantech Friday posts, which I had to put on hiatus almost exactly a year ago. nGenera at that time was still operating under our semi-stealth mode name, BSG Alliance. And being a fairly new, venture-backed start-up meant that I had very little time to do more than eat-sleep-and-work, like so many of you fellow brethren know.

But we re-launched the company in April of this year, after assembling an all-star cast of people, products, and customers, through acquisition and invitation. And, today, nGenera is busily working with a handfull of others to invent a new kind of product & services company for the global 2000. We call it an on-demand, business innovation platform for the next generation enterprise.

Sure, that’s a mouthful of trendy words that are pretty high up the hype-cycle at the moment. However, just because there is a lot of hype around the concepts like “platform” and “on demand” doesn’t mean they aren’t powerful. The best way to undertand it is to use it. So, I invite you to go to the nGenera website and, if you haven’t yet, “join” with your own account so you can get a little taste of what’s to come.

Make sure when you update your profile to use the Facebook synch. Once you’re legal, what you’ll see is a boatload of stuff. “What’s going on here?” you may ask yourself. What’s going on is you that have just logged into global, collaborative business platform. In the case of a casual, non-affiliated joiner, that means most of what you can see and do is limited to creating and particpating in public/private conversations, hosting and joining events, surveying your fellow members about ideas, etc. In other words, the essential building blocks of collaboration.

nGenera Small LogoWhat you can NOT see and do are work with the special add-on stacks – assembled from nGenera’s research, education, expertise, and applications components – that our customers use to gain greater insight and better serve their own markets. You’ll get little glimpses of these components as you browse around the website: components for simulation, customer interaction, incentives-driven salesforce management, and the like.

So, what’s next for nGenera? Given the economic uncertainty of the times, we’re finding a receptive audience. Anything that can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of current operations and provide greater retention and growth in existing customers, as well as attraction of new ones, has a greater chance of succeeding during such an historic transition time. Let me know your thoughts. I look forward to seeing you in the nGenera community.

Clean Energy and the Austin Roadmap

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Freshtech Friday by Steve Guengerich 

Ok everyone, for prior readers of this blog, you’ll notice a couple of things:

 -        First, that was a really long “week” since the last Cleantech Friday post, where we left you hanging about promising a further peek into the Austin Chamber’s Clean Energy Council (or CEC) 

-        Second, by the slight change in title of this post – “Freshtech Friday” – you can tell that we’ve decided to expand the content beyond the area of cleantech.  We will still write about cleantech, when we run across something we hope is interesting to share.  But, we’ll also be writing about other subject areas catching our fancy, some of which we’ll talk about on February 13 at Austin’s Metropolitan Breakfast Club 

But, to finish out the thread of our last “Cleantech Friday” post, we wanted to share a little of the CEC’s vision for a Austin/Central Texas cleantech roadmap.  The table illustrates some of the major components of the roadmap, as of two months ago.  Now remember: that’s long enough ago that Heliovolt’s announcement that it would build its first plant in Austin has long since come and gone.  

Roadmap Projects and Descriptions

  • Clean Energy Park / Lab Clean Energy Park is in formation and will build a facility including space for researchers from throughout Texas and provide office space, clean rooms, and wet lab space for start-ups (explore possible national lab expansion opportunity)
  • Cleantech EcoDev Zone Examining the feasibility of providing incentives and abatements for cleantech company development in a zone around the airport
  • TXAN/SEMATECH State nanotechnology laboratory located in Austin leveraging existing ATDF and other assets will provide key clean technologies
  • Super Clean Energy Incubator Expanding Clean Energy Incubator’s reach to the super region of research universities and national labs
  • Data Center Energy Efficiency Lab Developing a lab that addresses multiple levels of architecture from building, HVAC, server design, to chip-level electronics for increased energy efficiency in data centers
  • Smart Grid Test Center Building a smart grid test facility that proves emerging and existing technology efficacy on a live power grid
  • CTSI Expanding the Clean Technologies and Sustainable Industries trade organization in Austin to provide a pipeline of innovation from many of the world’s leading research universities and national labs
  • PHEV Fleet Test Center Providing a platform for testing the grid-benefits of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on a live power grid
  • Carbon ROI Project Providing tools for utilities, corporations, and policy makers to make appropriate national decisions on carbon policies 

So, pieces of the roadmap are still being finalized, with new pieces being considered and others perhaps being removed.  But, nonetheless, the draft implies a big vision and sense of pushing the envelope that are necessary to keep Austin at the front of what remains arguably the hottest area of innovation and growth, worldwide.   

By the time the Chamber and its clean energy economic development director, Jose’ Beceiro, get all the way through the calendar to the 2nd Annual Clean Energy Venture Summit (scheduled for October), hopefully the cleantech roadmap will be a part of the agenda of everyone that has a stake in working to make Austin one of the pre-eminent centers for cleantech innovation and industry. 

With that, join me next week (promise ;-) ) for the first edition of “Freshtech Friday.”