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Why designers make awesome entrepreneurs [video]

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:07:21 +0000

You can tell what drives the folks behind the Designer Fund by simply walking into their office space — it feels like a cross between a hotel lobby and a zen garden (complete with tatami mats), and it was designed that way to make its designer community feel comfortable and inspired. And if you haven’t guessed it by now, the Designer Fund is exactly what you’d expect it to be: an angel fund that supports designer-focused founders and entrepreneurs.

This week the fund, led by co-Directors Enrique Allen and Ben Blumenfeld, announced that it’s opened up its designer-in-residence program — called Bridge — for the next session of designers. The Bridge program connects designers with design-oriented startups in San Francisco, like Path, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, and Flipboard, and the Designer Fund is now looking for applicants for its Fall program.

For the occasion, we sat down with Allen and Blumenfeld and picked their brains on why they think designer entrepreneurs have unique skills and why they don’t want to fund the next-generation of skinny jeans.

We’ll be focusing on how design is changing the technology industry at our annual RoadMap event in November in San Francisco (tickets will go on sale later this summer and you can learn about RoadMap here).

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How to build your own conference call number in the cloud

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:40:55 +0000

I hate conference calls. Actually I hate dialing into them. It’s a tedious painful process that is iffy to automate. But, thanks to Twilio, Dropbox, my colleague Kevin Tofel and Maciej Skierkowski from Factor.io I can now make the whole experience easier. And you can too.

Skierkowski had created this hack after his own frustration with conference calls, and he blogged about it after I begged him to tell me how he made a simple, one-number conference call line. His blog post made it seem so easy I decided to see if I could do it. After all, I already use Dropbox and I easily could sign up for a Twilio account.

A couple caveats here. This line has no password associated with it. So, presumably once someone has the number, they could dial it at any random point in time to potentially listen in on your calls. You do herar a tone when someone joins the line, though. This also costs money, although how much depends on your use. There are other pre-fabricated options such as Speek, HipDial and others that have different features worth exploring.

The gist of this hack is that you sign up for a Twilio number and then post some code in a Dropbox file. You then associate that code with your Twilio number, and voila, you have a conference call line.

It wasn’t quite as easy as Skierkowski wrote (go check it out for the details), but with Kevin helping me, it took me about 20 minutes to sign up for Twilio, follow Skierkowski’s instructions and create my own private conference number. The toughest part was actually creating an .xml file to drop in Dropbox simply because converting the files from Text Edit and Google Docs formats added all this junk that messed with the program.

So Kevin installed Drive Notepad in Chrome to create the file, we saved Skierkowski’s code, and the whole thing worked. I changed the message to the oddly formal, “Welcome to the Stacey conference number” since the text-to-speech engine read the word “Stacey’s” as “Stacey S”, but that’s about it.

It was fun. It was easy. And now I have a conference call line that I can dial with one touch from my phone whenever a calendar invite opens on my handset. Plus, there’s a whole bunch of stuff I’ve been wanting to try on Twilio, and now that door is open to me.

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Mailbox launches iPad app and says Android is in the works

Eliza Kern — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

If you were an avid user of the popular email app Mailbox and were worried by the company’s acquisition by Dropbox, never fear. Mailbox isn’t slowing down or turning away from email, as evidenced by Thursday’s launch of the new Mailbox for iPad app and word that an app for Android is in the works.

Mailbox for iPad is the first new product from the company since its Dropbox acquisition, which Om’s sources put above $50 million and potentially closer to $100 million. No matter the exact price tag, it was a significiant deal for the small company, and CEO Gentry Underwood said the transition to working within Dropbox has been remarkably smooth.

The new iPad app will look pretty similar to the existing iPhone app, with a few minor changes to account for the larger screen. Underwood said designing for the iPad is actually a significant challenge, since if you look at it one way it’s an overzized mobile phone, and another way it’s a small computer. Figuring out how to accomodate for the size of the keyboard (or wireless external keyboards), as well as not overcrowding the screen, is tricky.

“We’re trying to create an experience that’s as consistent as possible, that doesn’t misuse all that extra space,” he said, noting that it would be easy to see the larger size of the tablet and cram it with features. “And sometimes it’s like a luxury-sized mobile device and sometimes it’s a desktop replacement.”

Seemingly as soon as Mailbox launched, users were clamoring to download the app, which limited signups and put most people on a reservation list. The full app finally launched to everyone and Mailbox removed the signup list last month. At that point, it was delivering more than 100 million messages a day, and while Underwood said they are reluctant to continue releasing numbers, he said the growth remains strong, and that 40 percent of users hit inbox zero every week.

Mailbox for iPhone and iPad are available in the Apple iTunes store, and a full review of the iPhone app can be found on the GigaOM Pro blog.

Underwood said the company is working on an Android app (the iPad app was in the works before the acquisition), but he wouldn’t say when Android would launch. The company decided to go with iPad first since it was an often-requested feature, and because much of the code was the same for iPad, even if it presented new design challenges, whereas Android would be something of the opposite.

“There’s always this constant tension between, ‘This is great,’ and ‘Oh, there’s so much more we want to do.’”

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Exclusive: LogMeIn launches AppGuru to help IT wrangle consumer apps

Barb Darrow — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:00:52 +0000

LogMeIn, the company behind user-friendly web conferencing, screen sharing service and a Dropbox alternative, is about to add identity and application management capabilities to its menu.

On Tuesday, the Boston-based company is launching a preview of AppGuru which aims to help IT deal with the burgeoning bring-your-own-application (BYOA) craze which forces admins to deal with cloud-delivered personal applications that employees use at work but may not be officially sanctioned.

AppGuru promises a central console for managing multiple apps; an easy way to create, import or move users which works with Active Directory if it’s installed; and tools for managing licenses. It also vows to provide an easy way to set policy management and granular controls as needed. That’s a mighty tall order.

Michael Simon, CEO of LogMeI

Michael Simon, CEO of the Boston-based company, said LogMeIn gets invaluable perspective from both the consumer and the IT side of the BYOA divide.

“We don’t just have heavily used applications — with 55 million users — but we get visibility from consumer and IT perspectives,” Simon said.

AppGuru will manage LogMeIn’s web conferencing and collaboration application; Joinme screen sharing and Cubby, a Dropbox alternative for businesses, as well as Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, he said.

Simon said small and medium sized businesses are the company’s sweet spot but it has some very large enterprise accounts as well. Last quarter, for example, it announced a seven-figure deal with Hewlett-Packard, for LogMeIn Rescue, the company’s’ remote support offering.

Simon did not disclose pricing but said AppGuru should be commercially available this fall.

LogMeIn may have the chops to attack both the consumer and admin side of the equation, but it also faces formidable competition on the file-sync-and-share side of its business. Dropbox, the consumer champ, is gearing up Dropbox for Business while Google and Microsoft are pushing their respective application and storage tandems; and other competitors include Accellion, Egnyte and OwnCloud. They all claim to combine Dropbox-like simplicity with enterprise management perks.

That’s probably why LogMeIn is adding enterprise perks that go beyond file storage and sync. The IT issues that arise from BYOD and BYOA will be a hot topic at GigaOM’s Structure Europe event in September.

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Exclusive: Dropbox seeks partners to convert free users to paying customers

Barb Darrow — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:15:40 +0000

Dropbox wants to convert more of the millions of users of its free file-sync-and-share service into paying customers — and it’s banking that select IT consultants and managed service providers (MSPs) will help it do so.

Kevin Egan, VP of sales for Dropbox.

The San Francisco company says it has more than 100 million users overall. More to the point, it claims a presence in more than 2 million businesses, including 95 percent of the Fortune 500. But like other vendors that led with a free version of its service to win mindshare, it won’t disclose how many pay for the Dropbox for Business version. Dropbox execs say its name recognition among consumers — many of whom brought it to work — is a draw for these resellers that can provide services around Dropbox for Business.

Pent-up demand?

“We’ve seen a lot of inbound requests from MSPs and IT consultants who want to bring Dropbox to customers and at this point we feel Dropbox for Business is ready,” Kevin Egan, VP of sales for Dropbox said in an interview.

Dropbox for Business, once known as Dropbox for Teams, adds IT-friendly features including Active Directory integration, single sign-on and an admin console for managing corporate users — and pricing starts at $795 per year for 5 users.

Neither Egan or Adam Nelson, the Dropbox executive in charge of the partner push, would share details about the number of partners Dropbox seeks or what sort of incentives they can expect. Nelson said the goal is to select MSP, IT consultant and VAR partners to work collaboratively with the company’s own sales team. “We view partners as an extension of our sales force, evangelists who go out and fulfill demand externally and create a great customer experience,” he said.

Of course, that’s the pitch most tech vendors make, but the reality is that inside sales teams and third-party partners often end up competing for sales and for the incentives they bring. The rationale here seems to be that there is so much demand for Dropbox and related services, that there will be enough work for everyone.

A couple of partners familiar with Dropbox’s plans — both of whom requested anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak about them — said the company has a shot.

One MSP said he gets “a ton” of requests for Dropbox and he sees huge opportunity moving small and medium businesses over to the service instead of updating aging file servers. In return he will get recurring revenue from a service that requires little or no end-user training and will be easy to support.

An IT consultant said Dropbox inside sales can provide a list of employees in any given account that are already on the free Dropbox version. He can then use that data to convince IT it’s time to go to the paid version that will give admins more control. [Update: According to a spokesman, Dropbox will not provide partners a list of names but would offer information about the number of employees using Dropbox on a given domain.]

‘Dropbox of the Enterprise’ wannabes on the rise

Dropbox has huge name recognition and a devoted consumer base, no question.

But this is a hotly contested space. Microsoft hopes to parlay its Office-and-Windows-and-SkyDrive play here while Google does the same with Google Apps and Google Drive. At the same time, Box has staked its claim as an IT-sanctioned cloud storage and file sharing service and then there’s an array of other players including Accellion, LogMeIn and OwnCloud vying for share.

All of those companies would love to become the “Dropbox for the enterprise.” As Dropbox rolls out more IT-friendly features and a business-focused partner program, it’s clear that it plans to assume that title for itself.

Note: This story was updated at 11:57 a.m. PDT with Dropbox’s clarification of what customer information it will provide partners.

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Survey: How apps can solve photo management

suite48 — Wed, 15 May 2013 06:55:09 +0000

A recent survey found that 76 percent of respondents store their digital photos on multiple devices using multiple services.That means ample opportunity exists for companies offering solutions that tackle this “dispersed photo problem.” This report analyzes the aforementioned survey’s results, and also measures 18 different vendors against what respondents value most when it comes to photo-organizing solutions.

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SAP renames Visual Intelligence “Lumira” and sticks it in the cloud

David Meyer — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:53:10 +0000

SAP really is pushing hard on this cloud thing. Days after the German business software giant announced plans to put its HANA in-memory database into the cloud, it has done the same with its Visual Intelligence product, now renamed “Lumira” (SAP dearly loves renaming its products, and this time it’s gone for “a more human-friendly yet Google-ready name”).

Lumira Cloud supposedly gives SAP an answer to the recent explosion in the cloud-based, self-service data visualization offerings. The HTML5-built BI service comes with a “monthly” subscription fee (albeit one that can only be ordered in annual chunks) and lets its users publish and share data visualizations with one another for viewing or editing on desktop or mobile devices.

SAP Lumira Cloud appears to be more an Dropbox-ish add-on for the desktop version of Lumira than a cloud-based replacement, but it does also allow the creation of datasets from Excel documents. The service, which integrates with on-premise data and naturally supports HANA, can also be used to share SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio files and SAP Crystal Reports documents.

This release appears to be the culmination of what SAP has been previously referring to as “project Photon” – supposedly the company’s “true departmental self-service BI offering.” The issue here, of course, is the monumental and somewhat confusing nature of the company’s portfolio. After all, doesn’t SAP already do this SME-courting, departmental analytics stuff through its BusinessObjects BI OnDemand product?

Try visiting at least one of the BI OnDemand product pages and you’ll be taken through to the Lumira page. Look at the Lumira Cloud FAQs and you’ll be told that BI OnDemand will continue to run “in parallel” to Lumira Cloud, but also that OnDemand customers can contact their account representative “to discuss the best timing and strategy” for migrating to the new service.

Perhaps this less-than-clear situation presages a simplification of SAP’s portfolio – no doubt more will be revealed at the company’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference this week. If it doesn’t, customers in search of next-generation data visualization tools have many far more straightforward options to check out.

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Dropbox to host first-ever developers conference this summer

Barb Darrow — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:00:20 +0000

Dropbox, the file-sync-store-and-share provider to the masses, will host its inaugural developers conference this summer. The event — called DBX — will take place July 9 at San Francisco’s Fort Mason.

Details other than that are sparse but in a blog post the company said it hopes to draw developers and partners wanting to learn about the “Dropbox Platform” and to meet the engineering and design team behind the Dropbox APIs.

Dropbox now modestly claims “more than 100 million users” and has caused considerable angst among IT heavyweights including Microsoft and IBM, but not necessarily for the same reasons. Microsoft launched SkyDrive — which as of Monday claims 250 million users – in part to catch some of that Dropbox lightning in a bottle.

IBM forbid the use of Dropbox by its employees, citing security concerns. In fact, many IT staffs across the board view Dropbox and other consumer-grade storage services with anxiety. Their worst nightmare is that employees will send and store sensitive corporate data to this public service. Dropbox has become the epitome of shadow IT.

Those concerns sparked an explosion of startups angling to be the “Dropbox of the Enterprise.

Dropbox has been making moves to make its business version more IT friendly. But the vast bulk of the company’s hundred million users are no doubt on the consumer service.

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Mailbox drops waiting list, opens email app to everyone

Eliza Kern — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:21:26 +0000

Mailbox, the popular email app that got so much attention before getting acquired by Dropbox in March, announced Tuesday that it has dropped the waiting list that users previously had to endure before gaining access to the app.

Mailbox is now delivering more than 100 million messages per day, and the app is now ready to handle the traffic of opening the app to everyone, the company said in a release. “We believe we can now confidently handle new users as they sign up, so we’ve pulled down the reservation system.”

Waiting in a virtual line to get access to Mailbox seemed like part of the company’s strategy around gathering attention, so it will be interesting to see if customers are still enamored with Mailbox if anyone can sign up.

The company provides an email client that is focused on different gestures that allow users to manage and sort email. The company has also released a few updates to the app, which is available in the iTunes store. Om Malik’s sources put the pricetag on the Mailbox acquisition north of $50 million and one person put it closer to $100 million.

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Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

stoweboyd — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:14:19 +0000

Social business technologies remain in the foreground of discussions about business transformation, but the events of the first quarter of 2013 raised as many questions as they answered, or more.

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