The funding came from Andreesen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins and True Ventures (see disclosure), and will be used to build out the company and the team. For now, Collison is the only employee and the CEO. While Collison says that Apcera is still in somewhat stealth mode, so he doesn’t want to discuss the product — or the idea for his product — he did share his thoughts on the future of PaaS.

“I founded Apcera really as a continuation of my work on cloud platforms,” he said. “I asked myself what the next-generation systems would look like and what does that mean not only for the devops side and developers, but also the other side that are concerned about visibility and controls.”

The idea being that it’s easy to build applications on existing platforms, but it’s hard to track compliance with regulatory or financial mandates. And it may not even be something as lofty as HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxely, but might instead be trying to understand how business units are accessing and releasing information through their applications. Some companies such as Cloudability offer certain levels of visibility into PaaS or infrastructure as a service purchases, but Collison says those are added after the fact. He implies that Apcera’s product will handle visibility and compliance “from the inside out.”

For now, he’s working on all the partnerships and the engineering work that will have to go into building a product aimed at offering visibility in any of the existing IaaS or PaaS providers out there, from Amazon Web Services to OpenStack. “The system will be designed to where the market is going, so OpenStack is going to be a force to be dealt with,” Collison said.

His goal is to work not just work with IaaS or PaaS providers but also with existing software-defined networking companies, security firms and others that will also have to play a role in tracking and delivering packets from a database to an app, and then perhaps to users (or even more apps as an API call). This willingness to interoperate is at the core of the VMware Cloud Foundry platform, which allows users to span any infrastructure. As I wrote back when Cloud Foundry launched:

…this move is yet another continuation of VMware’s willingness to throw its businesses under the bus as the world of cloud computing evolves. VMware recognizes that openness is the key for delivering cloud services and that interoperability will matter to more and more companies, especially those forming today.

Collison said, “A lot of information and knowledge was born from my work on Cloud Foundry.”

There have been numerous efforts to bring some kind of audit trail, compliance and visibility for enterprises deploying in the cloud. If Collison can pull off a way to make that persnickety compliance open and interoperable across platforms, he’ll be doing something big. We’ll ask him for an update at our Structure 2012 conference, where Collison will be speaking in June.

Disclosure: True Ventures 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.

Image of Collison courtesy of Wired.

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That’s changing. Tello is rolling out a set of tools to allow businesses to get granular data about customer ratings and to respond to those customers in real time. Tello for Business allows business owners and location managers to be notified when customers rate their employees, and it also provides a way for them to open a dialogue with customers through a messaging tool within the app. That gives them the potential to get in touch with disgruntled customers before they even leave the store.

Tello for Business is a Web-based app that not only provides the messaging function but also lets companies view detailed dashboards with customer feedback that can be sorted based on location or even based on employee. The business side of the application runs on a freemium model, with businesses able to use it without paying for it for up to three locations. But if they want to use the messaging function or see analytics for four or more locations, they must pay $99 per month for each.

While Tello for Business could open up a whole new revenue stream, it is also a good way of driving customer acquisition for the ratings app. The startup is betting on businesses using the tool to promote use of the mobile app and drive customer feedback in their retail locations.

Along with the new product, Tello is also announcing it has raised a $2.7 million round of financing led by True Ventures (see disclosure) and Bullpen Capital. Other investors in the company include 500 Startups, Felicis Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Founder Collective, Lowercase Capital, Mark Goines, Naval Ravikant, Russ Siegelman, Shervin Pishevar, SV Angel, Tim Donmoyer and Transmedia Capital.

Disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The product appears somewhat elegant in its simplicity. Typically, systems management, even for cloud-based resources, requires IT administrators to interact with applications and dashboards. Many will provide alerts by sending e-mails when a noteworthy event takes place or a particular threshold is reached. Nodeable lets users keep those existing applications — which often are necessary to actually manage complex cloud infrastructure — but modernizes alerts and other interactions into a real-time stream with simple messages.

As the screenshot shows, messages from infrastructure components include suggested actions that administrators can perform simply by pushing the button if the solution to a problem is that simple.

From the press release announcing the funding and the company’s launch:

‘The Nodeable platform uses big data analytics to unlock intelligence about your cloud-based infrastructure, and makes that information easy to understand and apply through a new user interface that looks and feels just like your favorite social networking site,’ said Dave Rosenberg, co-founder and CEO of Nodeable. ‘We are offering the first post-cloud service for managing all the disparate information that pre-cloud tools can’t handle to give users the data they need to make real-time decisions.’

Disclosure: Nodeable 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, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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And just like that, five years have gone by. These have been the startup equivalent of street fighting years. I’ve shared the lessons I’ve learned on occasion, but when I look back over these past five years, I always think of people. I never think of the stories I did, the news I broke, the analysis, the interviews, the money, the fundraising, the offices. I just think of the awesome people who have worked to make my dream come true.

I didn’t want to write a five-year blog post. I didn’t want to do a stat-based round-up, though it would have been pretty cool. So when I brought my dilemma to Chris Albrecht — a dear friend, confidante and our creative chief — he suggested that perhaps we should do a video. And so we did. We have a lot of people, so not everyone is in this video, but they are all part of who we are. They are GigaOM!

One regret — Chris is not on camera, but he is in the video – he shot it, edited it and conceptualized it. And like everyone else in the team, Chris did everything to make me look good.

In the end, this video is about us and also about you, our readers, our community. You give us strength to do what we do, every day, every hour and with every single post. We succeed sometimes, we fail often, but we try. Thank you for lavishing us with your attention, for without you, we are no more than “yet another dumb website.”

Well, this is what happens when you break news about your competitors getting acquired by AOL. They get back at you by revealing news that you raised additional venture dollars while you are fast asleep. I was planning to write about the fact that we received a fresh $2.5 million injection from True Ventures (see disclosure below) and Alloy Ventures on Monday. Oh, well! By now you must be wondering what the new money is for. No, it is not for acquiring smaller blogs. Instead, it’s about the future.

Let me explain: Our traditional businesses — ad-supported blogs and our events (which include Structure and upcoming NewTeeVee Live) are humming along nicely. We have five events and over 4 million monthly unique visitors across GigaOM. Even through the 2008 recession, we grew our business, and in 2010 — just as in 2009 — we are going to double our revenues.

Paid Content, Yeah We Got That

We are much more than just a collection of blogs. Over a year ago, we launched our research service, GigaOM Pro. We started this paid subscription service at a time when most of the big media companies were merely toying with the idea. When we started Pro, it was clear to me that we didn’t want to compete with existing research firms. They do an admirable job, and frankly, as a disruptor, we needed to do something different.

But unlike some of the larger media companies, we didn’t want to charge for our existing offerings, aka our blogs. That just doesn’t make sense. From that, GigaOM Pro was born. We didn’t know how successful it was going to be. Fast-forward to today, and the growth and success of GigaOM Pro has surprised us. We have over 10,000 subscribers on the platform and are growing fast. The biggest success of GigaOM Pro has been with the large corporate customers. From Silicon Valley giants to the fast-growing upstarts, many are turning to GigaOM Pro.

Welcome Skip Hilton, Leader of GigaOM Pro

A year after we launched the service, an authority none other than Gideon Gartner (yup, you read that right) gave GigaOM Pro his blessing. So now comes the hard part: sustaining and keeping the momentum of the GigaOM Pro side of the business.

In order to do that, we are fortunate to bring on Skip Hilton, who joins us from Focus Research. His job will be to press the gas on GigaOM Pro. A graduate of Stanford Business School, Skip has oodles of experience. He has worked for JRG Software, Octel, Nuance, and Price Waterhouse in his long and storied career. I am super-excited to bring him on board.

The Technology Within

But there’s more! We’ve been building out our technology team and adding developers to helps us build the next-generation technology platforms to allow us to take content to any and every device that consumers might be using.

Most folks think of us as a blog network, but we have quietly built-up a large, custom laundry list of technology assets that could exist as standalone tools. For instance, we’ve built a dashboard that gives us near-real time view of what’s happening on our network. It allows us to constantly monitor our revenues, page views and site performance

We’ve developed a virtual content router that allows us to not only take content from our sites and make it ready for any screen: iPhone, Android phones and iPads. If Steve Jobs wants to throw another device at us, we’re ready for that too.

Believe it or not, we have one of the most complex WordPress.com deployments, and have made modifications to their service, which we could package up and sell as a standalone offering.

But We Are Content Guys

No, we aren’t a technology company. We are simply a company that uses technology to help us with what we do best: content. In this age of whiz-boom-bang news blurbs and re-blogging, we strive to bring our readers context-driven and timely analysis day in and day out. It is not an easy job, and when we falter, many of you personally remind me within seconds (I’m looking at you, Mark Hernandez and Ronald), and we are better for it. For that, we work incredibly hard; each one of our writers understands the need for context.

New York New York

In order to keeping our content top notch, we keep bringing top-notch people. The latest to join us is Ryan Kim, who, until recently, was a reporter for San Francisco Chronicle. He’s joined us to be our New York correspondent, and has moved to the Big Apple to cover what’s turning out to be an incredible technology renaissance in my spiritual hometown. Needless to say, we have plans for New York.

To sum it up, we’re a big company that’s over four years old, and we’re trying new ideas and new things. As we in the technology industry know, inventing the future takes time, and, yes, money.

Disclosure: Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a partner at True Ventures.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Tambako the Jaguar

For as long as I can remember, he’s been warning that users of new social web technologies need to be in control of their own destiny. He sounded the alarm about Feedburner and how it was hijacking an open standard, RSS, and inserting itself between content creators and consumers. And he’s long cited the need for open social communication platforms, often voicing his displeasure with newer services such as Twitter.

People have ignored Winer at their own peril, as two events over the last week have made clear. First was the shutdown drama around a little-known URL-shortening service called Tr.im. While it’s since been resurrected, the incident showed me how by championing these URL-shortening services, we’re essentially putting the entire link economy in the hands of companies that are skating on thin ice during the peak of summer.

Second was FriendFeed becoming a Mark Zuckerberg Production thanks to a $50 million buyout by Facebook. The likelihood of Zuckerberg & Co. shutting down the upstart social aggregation service has brought into the spotlight the misalignment between the needs of online communities and the companies that provide them.

The cynical me believes that it’s foolish for any of us to expect that Web 2.0 companies be in the business of providing services for charity. They are, after all, for-profit entities and when opportunity arises, everyone looks out for themselves. That’s just the way of the world. But somewhere between my cynicism and people’s Utopian desires lies a happy place. It’s called the blog.

Blogging: The Evolution

Late last year, following the Bombay terrorist attacks, I wrote about Twitter’s growing influence as a source of breaking news and how, in order to make sense of it all, we need more context. The best place to provide that context is now in blogs. To be sure, most people view Twitter as a microblogging service, but I’ve always seen it as micromessaging service — and the more I used it, the more I realized what a disjointed conversation it can produce.

As Twitter has become increasingly ingrained in our everyday lives, its value as as source of information tidbits has become clear. Think of it like that plate of chips and salsa you get before the entree arrives: tasty — spicy, even — but not entirely satisfying. Meanwhile, blogging has become the main course — the source of context. And the evolution into that role has injected new life into the blogosphere.

Earlier this week, while at dinner with Matt Mullenweg (Disclosure: Matt, a close friend of mine, started Automattic, whose WordPress platform powers our network. Both Automattic and the GigaOM Network are backed by True Ventures, where I am also a venture partner.), we talked about how many amazing blog posts we’ve read in just the past month alone, such as:

• Anil Dash’s post about the Pushbutton web.
• John Gruber’s piece about the censoring of the iPhone app, Ninja Words, by Apple.
• Danah Boyd’s post about Twitter and teens.
• John Borthwick’s essay about the real-time web and new distribution networks.
• Robert Scoble’s post about the shortcomings of the Twitter platform.

And these are just the ones that I hastily jotted down on the back of the dinner receipt. Now it would be easy for “blogging” to be satisfied with this information-sharing role. But that won’t be enough. Blogs need to evolve even further.

Why? Because the nature of content sharing (call it publishing) and content consumption is changing.

Blogging needs to be social. There are many reasons for this, but the most important one — in my mind — is the changing nature of content. “We will all be streaming life moments as more and more bandwidth is available both at home and on the go,” I wrote two years ago. It’s already happening. Today most of us walk around with newfangled smartphones that are nothing short of multitasking computers, essentially content creation points. And they’re networked, which means creating and sharing content is becoming absurdly simple to do. With the increased number of content creation points –- phones, camera, Flip video cameras, Twitter -– we are publishing more and more content.

Most of this content is disjointed, like random atoms. In the past, I (and others) have referred to this as the atomization of content. These atoms need to be brought together in order to make sense. But while many have argued that self-hosted Facebook- or FriendFeed-styled services could fill this role, I disagree. As I’ve said in the past, “We have two choices in order to consolidate these — either opt for all-purpose services such as Facebook (as tens of millions have done) or use our blogs as the aggregation point or hub for all these various services.”

The Next Step

Millions of Facebook users will have no reason to use any other service for the foreseeable future. And even when they decide to leave, they’ll realize they can’t, for they’ll have stored their photos and videos into the service, which has no visible way of exporting such data. It’s the ultimate lock-in: control consumers’ data and you control everything.

For others — whom I would loosely define as “power users” — today’s blogging software and services are the best option for becoming a repository of our digital creations, because they are more open, more extensible and at the end of the day, give us more control. Chris Messina, a technology evangelist, has been promoting this vision for nearly two and a half years, including starting a project dedicated to it called DiSo.

What Facebook and FriendFeed have shown is that people want to consume and publish content in a more dynamic fashion — more in real time, so to speak.

At the risk of repeating myself, I will quote from a previous post. “As a society, we are entering an increasingly narcissistic phase, enabled by web technologies…The evolution of blogging platforms needs to match these societal and demographic changes.” What I meant was that blogging platforms need to evolve from the hierarchical content-management systems of today to more fluid, free-flowing, more socially relevant and real-time lifestreaming systems.

Two services — Posterous and Tumblr — are taking a shot at this. WordPress, with its P2 theme, has showed that it’s thinking along these lines as well; we tried it out with the GigaOM Daily plugin. But these are not enough. There needs to be more real-time collaboration built into these systems. They need to become socially relevant. They need to take into account that today, consumption and creation happen not just on traditional computing systems like a laptop, but also on highly mobile devices. Imagine the volume of information we’re going to create and consume when we have broadband speeds on our on-the-go devices.

The next generation of blogging systems needs to account for the fact that information — and most importantly, conversations — flow via email, Twitter, instant messages and other formats. In order to do that, the innards of blogging systems need to be rethought. Perhaps the older, relational database models will need to be replaced by more nimble data stores. We may see XMPP become the layer that facilitates collaboration and real-time communications. But these are complex topics for my more esteemed colleagues to tackle, the ones who are builders and creators. I am merely a thinker, who is firm in his belief that this real-time social collaboration is a powerful force, and blogging, if it wants to move further forward, needs to embrace it.

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All of these companies are moving their businesses online — and while the revenue might not be there yet, cutbacks to online video budgets could leave the companies stranded in the last century. So are they letting go of online video staffers or not?

NBCU: Probably. The layoffs are reportedly taking place across all units.

Adobe: No. “The layoffs are intended to help Adobe better focus on its growing online video and Internet-software business,” the WSJ quoted CEO Shantanu Narayen as saying.

Viacom: No. Sources say the layoffs hit their MTV Networks division the hardest, but not the digital groups.

AT&T: Doubtful. The telco has plenty of other troubled businesses. From the WSJ: “AT&T said it would also continue to hire in areas that are seeing faster growth, such as wireless and its nascent TV service.”

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We have just raised $4.5 million, led by new investor Alloy Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm with over $1 billion under management. True Ventures, our primary investors thus far, also participated in the round. The round was blessed by our angel investors, Rakesh Mathur, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman as well. As part of the funding, Alloy Ventures general partner Ammar Hanafi will join the Giga Omni Media board.

We are going to use this new investment prudently, to enhance our technology platform and content offerings, add to our current portfolio of publications and expand our Events and Briefings businesses. We are in investing for the long-term — in ourselves.

I got to know Ammar when he was heading up corporate business development at Cisco Systems (read: V-P of the merger & acquisitions business.) As part of my job as a telecom reporter for Red Herring, I would hound him for information, often when there was none to be had. We stayed in touch periodically as our careers progressed before eventually losing touch.

Then earlier this summer, we reconnected through CEO Paul Walborsky. Our conversation quickly turned once again to my quest for clear and accurate information, but this time in relation to how I had made it the core quality around which our online media company was built. Soon we were discussing the possibility of Alloy becoming an investor.

The shift of audiences and ad dollars to online media from more traditional mediums has been significant on many levels, not least of which has been how it’s created opportunities for new models such as ours. What hasn’t changed is a desire on the part of business and technology audiences for in-depth, insightful coverage, which is what we are committed to providing.

Macro trends of our industry aside, the reason Alloy Ventures and True Ventures invested in our company is because there are lots of little things that need to happen before crazy ideas become a living, growing business. Sure we didn’t have an auspicious start to 2008, but we together overcame that little hiccup and my team has achieved a huge amount this year, among them:

• We are now providing content to a number of prominent media sites, including CNNMoney.com, Businessweek.com and NYTimes.com.
• We hosted two sold-out conferences, Structure and Mobilize. (And we are getting ready for NewTeeVee Live for 2008.)
• We acquired jkOntheRun.
• We acquired TheAppleBlog.
• We appointed Paul Walborsky CEO of the company.
• We named Carolyn Pritchard as the managing editor of our network. Our network now has seven sites: GigaOM, WebWorkerDaily, NewTeeVee, OStatic, Earth2Tech, jkOnTheRun and TheAppleBlog.
• We have doubled the number of visitors to our sites. We launched two experiments –- NewTeeVee Station and GigaOM Daily.

As the company grows, I try to reflect on the job done so far and the road ahead. We have come so far on so little, mostly by being frugal and having a realist’s view of the world. The whiplash-inducing bad winds that are plaguing the overall economy will cast a pall on Silicon Valley in general and online media as well. So it’s nice to have the ability to grow even in the face of adversity, whether organically or through acquisitions. Before I go back to work, please join me in welcoming Ammar to our family.

More importantly, dear readers, please accept my extreme gratitude for your support — through good times and bad times, for without you it would not have been possible. Thank you.

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I was introduced to Ethan, Oddpost’s other co-founder, Iain Lamb, and former Oddpost CEO Toni Schneider by Anil Dash. Long story short, but that meeting essentially set off a chain of events that led to me leaving my job, going solo and getting financial backing for GigaOM from True Ventures, where Toni is now a partner.

Today, Toni is also an investor in Ethan’s new startup, BandCamp, which rather than email is focused on music. While Iain isn’t part of this reunion, Shawn Grunberger, also from Oddpost/Yahoo, is.

So what is this four-man startup — which is currently completely virtual — doing? Ethan was coy when I first met him, and he hasn’t changed. The first offering from his new company is ClubWiki, a venue info and booking wiki. He explains why they started it on the company blog. It seems to be getting good reviews from the musical crowd, despite early days.

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Founder Matt Mullenweg has now blogged about the deal: what ‘Act II’ means for Automattic; how his company got here; some of the lessons he learned along the way. You’ll identify with the entrepreneurial tale:

“In 2005 Automattic was small. Through some miracle I had convinced Donncha O Caoimh, Andy Skelton, and Ryan Boren to leave their safe jobs, join a company with almost no money in the bank run by someone with no experience, and whose core idea was to give away and open source all our core IP. There were more questions than answers. Would a hosted version of WordPress move beyond the geek appeal the OS project had? How would the virtual company with no office work? Could we develop a service alongside an OS project without screwing both of them up? Should I raise money? Most importantly, would it scale?…”

Some of the answers to his questions were “hard-learned,” Matt writes. Aren’t they always? Which is why there is wisdom to be taken from Matt’s experience. Read his full post here.

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