Certainly, some of us make half-hearted attempts to accomplish a few of our life and business goals. But how many people do you know who put everything on the line to pursue their deepest, most life-changing dreams? What are the rest of us doing, and what are we waiting for?

Choices and Challenges

Of course, circumstances get in the way. There are challenges, setbacks and detours. But each of us has a choice. Although it won’t be easy to navigate back to the right path, if we say that we can’t find our way around obstacles, we’re making a choice to leave things as they are.

Last night, I was reading about Roald Dahl, author of such hopeful and imaginative books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That might be my absolute favorite story about an underdog who overcomes obstacles while continuing to believe in something, even when all is stacked against him.

It turns out Roald Dahl was a lot like his character Charlie. Dahl’s personal life was filled with hardship and tragedy. In spite of all the challenges he faced, he remained positive and achieved great things. As it says on his website, “The series of misfortunes and tragedies Dahl… suffer[ed did not] made him more bitter. Loss and physical adversity seemed to stimulate his enormous energies to positive action. He fought misfortune as if it was a dragon to be slain.”

Time to Dream Big

I hope that 2011 will be a year of great progress toward achieving our deeply-buried dreams, and a year of doing things that require us to step out of our comfort zones and test our abilities, even if they lead to failure or, even more frightening, success.

I challenge you, as we round out these last few days of 2010: dust off those gutsy dreams and ambitions you’ve kept to yourself until now. Dare to put yourself out there; do something big this coming year. It doesn’t need to look big to anyone else, but you’ll know it is, because it will require you to go out on a limb and do things in an entirely different way.

For 2011, live the way you truly want to live, and achieve what you’ve only ever dreamed you could achieve.

What big, audacious goals do you have for 2011?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Neal

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Apache Software Foundation’s President on Open Source and the Cloud (From OStatic) I take no issue with anything said here; Apache projects are the foundation of many web and cloud efforts. But, especially re: NoSQL, I wouldn’t discount the non-Apache products.

CSC Wins Cloud Services Contract for California (From CSC) More important story: Google got the City of Los Angeles, but Microsoft got the State of California. CSC played middleman in both deals.

IDC Prediction: SaaS Revenue Growth 6X Faster Than All Software (From CloudAve) And SaaS providers likely spend less money to achieve that revenue, as the resources required to deliver and sell SaaS are minimal compared with on-premise software. It’s a good racket to be in.

Azul Starts Peddling Zing Java Stack (From The Register) Azul sits a layer below application frameworks like Spring and acts as a seriously scalable Java runtime environment. Azul sells an 864-core appliance, but Zing is its cheaper, software-only offering.

VMware Targets Developers with Code2Cloud App Lifecycle Tools (From MarketWire) VMware’s CIO-pleasing virtualization products get all the attention, but SpringSource’s developer-centric approach could end up being equally as important. The cloud has been a bottom-up success thus far.

For more cloud-related news analysis and research, visit GigaOM Pro.

The highlight of the new features probably is Cloud Connect, which lets users search for data within their various Google Apps at the same time they’re searching standard locations such as file systems or the web.  In terms of convenience, that capability seems tough to beat; I can’t count the number of times I’ve searched through email, the web and a CMS all to find someone’s name or a piece of information I knew I’d seen somewhere. If Google expands this feature even further, into third-party cloud services, it will be an even bigger deal. Every survey under the sun shows businesses more cloud services by the day, and anything that helps tie them all together will be a big hit.

Other features are worth noting too, particularly Dynamic Navigation and Active-Active Mirroring. According to Google, the former “allows users to drill down into search results based on search modifiers for their queries,” and the latter lets users spread search traffic over multiple Google Search Appliances to increase reliability. This is a strategy pulled from the database world, where active-active architectures ensure that consistency and reliability by having two database instances live and sharing the same information.

Although Google Search Appliance is not the company’s flagship enterprise service, it’s notable that the release coincides with Ray Ozzie’s departure from Microsoft. Google and Microsoft compete across pretty much all things cloud, and, as Om points out, Ozzie is generally considered the innovative brain behind Microsoft’s cloud efforts. The two happenings are hardly of the same importance level, of course, but losing Ozzie while Google continues to show it might have some enterprise chops, after all, still is not a good thing.

Image courtesy of Google.

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In the past week alone: IBM bought Netezza; Cloudera partnered first with Teradata, then with EMC Greenplum; NetApp and ParAccel announced a partnership; Aster Data Systems announced another $30 million in funding; and Oracle rolled out its latest and greatest Exadata system. Add to this EMC’s purchase of Greenplum in July and SAP’s purchase of Sybase in May, and you see a market in perpetual motion.

From my perspective, remaining acquisition targets are Aster Data, ParAccel, Teradata and Vertica, but they might have precious little say in who comes courting. It’s a little easier to predict who might be doing the shopping: Dell and HP are the obvious candidates, as they need data stories to tell, lest they risk letting IBM and Oracle run away with the market for vertically integrated systems. Less likely buyers might be Oracle, which is always looking to expand its database empire; Microsoft, which remains a database leader despite being focused elsewhere right now; and Cisco, which could use some key software  enterprise software assets to stave off competition for its newly launched server business.

Of course, data warehousing is just a fraction of the burgeoning Big Data market, albeit the most-proven segment in terms of customer adoption and knowledge. Hadoop is gaining popularity for storing and analyzing unstructured data — and is increasingly integrated with existing data warehousing and BI tools — so commercial Hadoop startups could get hot. I think partner-friendly Cloudera will be the first to get bought, but Datameer could be a target because of its spreadsheet-based, Hadoop-powered analytics solution.

The bottom line is that data of all types is piling up; customers want to not only manage it, but to derive as much insight as possible from it. Vendors like IBM and Oracle have known this for years; now the rest of the IT space is catching on. If you’re into watching markets evolve and making predictions as to who’ll end up where, this is a great space to follow.

Read the full post, including my thoughts on who might buy whom, here.

Photo courtesy of Flicker user aresauburn.

Sync is a “Pro” feature, so it isn’t available to users with free accounts. Pro accounts start at $29 for 10GB per year. In addition to Sync, Pro users also get backup, “time travel” and file versioning functionality.

Here’ a short demo video showing how Wuala Sync works:

Wuala differentiates itself from other cloud backup solutions as files stored in Wuala get encrypted directly on the user’s computer before they are stored online. This means that no-one, not even LaCie’s employees, can view or access the user’s private data. Wuala users can also increase the amount of storage they get by trading some of their local storage with the service.

If you’re a Wuala user, let us know what you think of Wuala Sync in the comments.
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• Lifehacker: “On Google Wave and “Failed” Experiments”
• Seth Godin: “Train your customers”
• A List Apart: “No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas”
• Harvard Business Review: “Higher Education Is Overrated; Skills Aren’t”
• TheAppleBlog: “Jailbreakme.com: Jailbreaking Made Absolutely Painless”

What are you reading this weekend?

Services such as Yahoo’s Upcoming and Meetup and Facebook’s Events, coupled with a decentralized and grassroots meetup and “unconference” culture have led to an explosion of event invitations in our various inboxes. That first generation of tools is looking a little creaky to today’s event planners, so here’s a roundup of the current generation of “eventware.”

The current generation of eventware all offer a mix of registration, ticketing, mailing list, analytics, payment and promotion features, but each is pretty distinct in its niche:

• Amiando. launched in 2006, Amiando powers some of the European tech industry’s larger, more formal conferences, including Thinking Digital and Le Web. Though private events can be listed for free, public events incur an excessive €1 + 6 percent of the ticket price for each ticket sold. However, the service includes some unique features, including comprehensive Facebook integration and the ability to run an entire conference site from within the app.
• Eventbrite. I can’t think of a week that goes by without receiving multiple invitations to Eventbrite-powered event (including GigaOM’s own conferences). It’s a great solution, with a very vocal and engaged development team constantly providing new features, though the interface can sometimes be a sprawling mess and it’s easy to forget how a previously completed task was completed. Eventbrite’s real power lies in the ability to quickly list and promote an event without too much effort.
• Expectnation. Heavily utilized by O’Reilly Media’s conference team, what’s unique about this service is the ability to manage session proposals, calls-for-participation and manage a conference’s schedule and structure, as well as the sales and ticketing processes. It’s a pretty comprehensive solution, though the absence of pricing information suggests it’s a very premium choice.
• OpenConferenceWare. Perhaps the most interesting development is the open-source OpenConferenceWare project where the creator’s motives were to offer a free and open app to empower others in creating events. It was most prominently utilized in 2009′s Open Source Bridge conference. Like Expectnation, OpenConferenceWare provides features to manage submissions and schedules, but also enables delegates to personalize custom schedules for their attendance (just like SCHED*, reviewed here). Unfortunately, as an installable app, setup requires some knowledge of Ruby and web hosts.

Amiando, Eventbrite and Expectnation are fully formed and comprehensive suites for event planners; albeit expensive. However, I’m intrigued by OpenConferenceWare’s philosophy; with the groundswell in this software category, could OpenConferenceWare evolve into the WordPress of its segment?

If OpenConferenceWare was as easy to customize and install as WordPress, we could see a sophisticated and proven free alternative to the big commercial solutions as well as a vibrant ecosphere of plugin and theme developers. Even a hosted, freemium service — like WordPress.com (please see disclosure at the bottom) — could outmaneuver larger competitors.

Which event planning and ticketing solutions do you use?

Disclosure: WordPress.com is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Photo by Flickr user LornaJane.net, licensed under CC-BY-ND 2.0

Bearhug consists of four main modules:

Pulse: This module gives your customers and your team real-time status information about your product or service. You can create “pulse updates” and sync them to your company Twitter account to keep everyone updated on issues, downtime, anything that affects their immediate satisfaction. Customers can subscribe to the updates via SMS — for quick notifications if time is of the essence — or via email or Twitter.

Answers: This module is where your consumer community can ask a question and then get an answer from both other members of the community who use your product or service and from your company. Using this module, you can moderate the questions and pick the community answer that best responds to the issue. You can also craft a company response. People can then access the best of both worlds in terms of information. This section builds a robust and interactive live FAQ for your customers.

First Rate: Customers post reviews — both good and bad — all over the web. Customers can post their reviews through this module and you can respond to feedback immediately, provide advice, moderate, publish and syndicate the reviews you want to feature.

Overheard: This module is Bearhug’s listening post. At presstime, it could pull in Twitter mentions of your company, product or service with more services pending including Yelp, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Through Overheard, you can immediately reply to mentions of your company or product on the web.

The Bearhug Dashboard gives you a global view and statistics of the activity about your company. You can also access metrics such as your company’s average response time, average rating and customer satisfaction. When you set up Bearhug, you can change the header text, language and messaging to display not only your branding but your brand personality. You can have Bearhug for each product you offer and turn modules on and off depending on your needs.

There’s also a sidebar widget to place a Bearhug support button on your web site.

Bearhug helps you embrace the organic feedback your customers are providing all over the web, while also bringing some management and metrics to the mix.

Bearhug’s currently in closed beta. Use this code to try it: webworkerdaily

What are you doing to reach out to and manage your customer community?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise