May 2012
3 posts
1 tag
IBM Web Experience - Day #1
IBM Web Experience Platform 8.0IBM announced their Web Experience Platform version 8.0 a couple of weeks ago. The key features are grouped into social, mobile, content, analytics and integration. This is the former “customer experience suite” and incorporates WebSphere Portal, IBM Web Content Manager and a number of other products/features.Following Larry Bowden’s keynote Gene...
1 tag
Two Weeks of Fame
Researchers at UC Berkeley, Google and eBay have studied the news from 1895 to 2010 and discovered that the average median time somebody is famous is just two weeks… and that it hasn’t changed at all since 1940.
Somebody once said that today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping. This study proves it.
April 2012
1 post
Hacking at Super Happy Block Party #shbp →
Yesterday was a lot of fun as we formed an ad hoc team and designed and built Analyzz.me in about 8 hours. Check it out!
March 2012
1 post
SoftTech VC by the Numbers...
Some great stats on SoftTech VC by stephpalmeri:
To coincide with the close of our third fund at SoftTech VC, our portfolio company Visual.ly turned our raw data into this awesome infographic. See for yourself…
by visually via
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December 2011
1 post
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“Use the holidays as an opportunity to energize your brand by winning new...”
– Jessica Lee, Ephox
November 2011
1 post
2 tags
What job title should I use in Silicon Valley?
I recently spoke to a group of entrepreneurs from the UK who were doing a tour of Silicon Valley. In the evening I attended a similar get together of entrepreneurs from Portugal. This is the first of a few common questions I jotted down. It seems trivial, but isn’t: “What job title should I use?”
In the UK and Australia it is common to call the leader of a company the managing...
September 2011
1 post
3 tags
Marketing Lessons from a Bad Panel
Ouch. I am at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston and the panel on content management systems (CMS) got lynched by the audience via the #ims11 twitter stream. Comments included “the panel is boring”, “If the Tweet stream was like the Gong Show, we’d be on to the next session by now.” and “the cms panel killing themselves on stage.” They missed the mark with a fuzzy, technology-centric...
July 2011
1 post
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7 Content Marketing Tips from the San Francisco...
I am currently in the final few days before running my first ever marathon, the San Francisco Marathon on July 31st. Here are some content marketing tips I have learned by being ‘engaged’ in this great event.
#1 Be Clear
The San Francisco Marathon site’s design is nice and clean. Big visual banners call the site visitor to action and a lot of thought has gone into the site architecture.A...
March 2009
1 post
Newspapers reduced to Twitter-sized articles
Is this a trend of the future? The Australian publishes an article online with a whole 85 characters. I think republishing their ENTIRE article might constitute a breach of fair use … but seriously where is journalism going?
GOOGLE chief executive Eric Schmidt says the US economic situation is “pretty dire”.
With the economy so “dire” will all newspaper articles be...
December 2008
2 posts
1 tag
Quick and Easy Surveys
Let me start by saying that at Ephox we have never really used ‘employee surveys’. Whether it be to figure out buying decaffeinated or full strength coffee, gauge employee satisfaction or do 360 degree reviews we have relied on good old-fashioned communication: phone, email or a face-to-face chat.
The closest we have come is a self appraisal form that we use for annual reviews. The...
Digg was Elanced
Interesting tidbit…
We have used Elance from time to time on projects although not much in the past few years. Like all remote work and outsourcing we have mixed success.
Apparently Kevin Rose used Elance to find and pay a freelancer to help build the first version Digg. I guess his project worked out just fine!
A tip from the projects that we were successful on is to make sure you...
October 2008
1 post
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The stateless micro-multinational
Last week’s Economist had an article praising the stateless multinational. The article’s perspective on the new breed of global company was worth noting.
The conventional wisdom is that a global business is a bad thing as it pursues a race to the bottom for lower taxes and costs. Clearly a rational business does this but the Economist points out the alternative is no better:
The real...
September 2008
1 post
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Recessions are the Brick Walls We Need to Climb...
This weekend we were busily packing up our house for an impending move to London. I am moving over for 12 months to help grow Ephox in Europe.
At first glance this may seem like a stupid thing to do given that Britain is facing its worst slump in 60 years. Why on earth is this a good time invest time and money in developing the market there?
The main reason was that brick walls present a...
August 2008
2 posts
2 tags
Good Buzz, Expensive Healthcare
I stumbled upon the web site for Oregon health insurance company Regence and I was immediately impressed by its clean almost Web 2.0 design. Remember this is a big, boring corporate collecting over $8 billion in premiums per year. Then I noticed their section ‘The Buzz’ and I was even more impressed.
Regence have done an outstanding job with a very plain English description of the...
2 tags
Aussie Dollar Plummets
The Australian dollar is down more than 8% since the beginning of July.
This is excellent news for export-oriented companies such as Ephox who have a lot of expenses in Aussie dollars yet most earnings in US dollars. In fact, our worldwide price list is in US dollars so even when we sell in Australia we sell in US dollars. A weaker US dollar has made our software more affordable to a huge range...
July 2008
2 posts
ECM Acquisitions I Didn't Notice
These two acquisitions happened so quietly during the festive season last year that I didn’t notice until today.
Firstly Australian ECM vendor Harvest Road hit the chopping block on December 21st 2007. They appeared to completely melt down last year and sold their assets to Italian vendor Giunti Labs. Founded in 1841, Guinti has to be one of the oldest content management companies around so...
Top 10 Tips of Digital Entrepreneurs
Brad Howarth spent some time talking to a variety of entrepreneurs, including me, on what it takes to be successful for an article in SmartCompany. The collection of secrets are:
Make every dollar count
Become a global economist
Don’t lose focus
Listen, adapt and change
Cultivate free advice
Learn to sell
Become a name dropper
Keep your team informed
Be wary of consultants and...
June 2008
3 posts
Apple Design Awards
Apple announced the winners of their design awards last week of which their were two notable winners.
The first is Screenflow. It looks like superb screen recording software that I am downloading as we speak.
The second is Aussie start-up Remember The Milk. I use RTM quite a bit and highly recommend it. Their iPhone app is great. Well done!
2 tags
IBM Gets Closer to Web 2.0
A few years ago our marketing director and I were chatting with an IBM marketing executive about search engine optimization. We were amateurs when it comes to SEO but we held court for more than an hour and they took several pages of notes. The one thing we knew about SEO was that inbound links improve your ranking.
I mentioned how Microsoft, IBM’s sworn enemy, appeared to be quite capable...
2 tags
The Power of Checklists
Adrian recently wrote of the checklist our developers use before declaring that a bug fix or enhancement is truly finished.
In discussing the benefits of checklists Adrian pointed to an article from the National Review of Medicine about the crusade of a Dr Peter Pronovost. The cause that the John Hopkins professor has taken on is somewhat simple but devastatingly effective. His thesis is that the...
May 2008
4 posts
2 tags
Ephox is in Europe
Ephox is now in Europe! I have just signed the lease for our new offices near London.
We are moving into the ground floor of Gainsborough House on Thames Street in Windsor.
The location is superb. The building is located right next to a pedestrian-only bridge over the Thames River. The beautiful Eton is just across the bridge and if you look up you can see the imposing Windsor Castle. There...
1 tag
Scaling Web Apps
The approach that Facebook is taking to scale features from 0 to 70M users is quite interesting:
The secret for going from zero to seventy million users overnight is to avoid doing it all in one fell swoop. We chose to simulate the impact of many real users hitting many machines by means of a “dark launch” period in which Facebook pages would make connections to the chat servers, query...
UK Adventure
My May has turned out to be quite interesting. So far this month I have spent exactly 0 days at home. My extended stay in London comes courtesy of the unfortunate luck of having my passport and green card stolen from a car park of offices we were looking to rent. Needless to say we will not be renting these offices.
This all happened in less than 10 minutes. I parked in the secure car park at the...
2 tags
London Tube Map
The famous, traditional London Tube map has only a tenuous link to actual geography. For example, Paddington, Bayswater and Notting Hill Gate are shown running down the map as if they went from north to south. They in fact go from east to west along the top of Hyde Park.
For anyone trying to decipher this sort of thing I have found this nifty Tube Journey Planner that overlays the tube stations...
April 2008
1 post
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Ning raises another $60M
Marc Andreesen and Gina Bianchini’s social networking service, Ning, has raised another $60Mat a rather astonishing pre-money valuation of $500M.
Ning has about 230,000 social networks which values each social network at over $2,000 each. I personally have 2 networks which I have setup in the past that have a grand sum of 15 users. I really can’t see them being worth $20 let alone...
February 2008
1 post
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Featured at Web 2.0 Conference
An observant eye caught my face in the crowd photo on the front page of the Web 2.0 conference. I am the one with the backpack in the bottom middle of the crowd.
Who knows, may be next year O’Reilly will invite me to be a speaker and I can have a real head shot? :)
December 2007
1 post
3 tags
Cook's Tour of Palo Alto
We had Suneth and Rob in our Bay Area office this week from Australia. A couple of key things on the “tour” I try and get Aussies visiting the Valley to check out: Park somewhere north of University Ave in Palo Alto. Extra points for spotting parks and buildings from Randi Zuckerberg’s videos such as the very funny “Crackberry”. Walk towards University Ave and head...
October 2007
4 posts
1 tag
Producing a screencast
We recently co-hosted a webinar with Tony White of the Gilbane Group discussing best practices for improving the user adoption rates of web content management systems. To make the content more widely available I wanted us to produce a nice online video of the webinar… something that I thought would be relatively simple but alas was not.
Here are the results of the efforts, documented for...
2 tags
Standalone vs. Add On
I had a meeting with a VC friend of mine this morning. He is a young switched on guy and I value his feedback on our plans. The coffee at Coupa Cafe is always good too :)
His broken record for me this morning is that to really get Ephox to “blow up to the next level” that we really need to get our positioning alongside our partners such as IBM, Vignette and EMC correct.
Essentially...
2 tags
Greencard Lottery - It is Worth Applying
I won the Greencard Lottery (aka the Diversity Visa Lottery) in 2004. So did my wife…. twice!! My cousin won one. A lady I met when getting my greencard in Sydney had her best friend win won the same year she did.
How the hell did that happen? Are we all just lucky???
Not particularly… the US allocates the numbers for the Diversity Visa Lottery to regions. The “Oceania”...
4 tags
Aussies in Content Management
Gartner has recently released their Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Managementfeaturing 17 companies including the usual suspects of IBM, Oracle, EMC and Open Text as well as some smaller niche players.
One thing that struck me is that of the 17 vendors, 2 of them are Australian - Objective and Tower Software. This led me to think about how large the presence of Australians in the content...
August 2007
4 posts
1 tag
Safe havens from uncertainty
Who would have thought you would read this sort of comment from Forbes after recent years:
Tech stocks are rising Friday as investors continue to look for safe havens from uncertainty in the financial sector.
Forbes are commenting on content management vendor Open Text rising 24% in one day after announcing strong results. What a roller coaster tech companies have had in the past 10 years!
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Enterprise Social Software Market
In June this year, Gartner analyst Nikos Drakos updated some market definitions so that the “integrated collaboration” market is now the “collaboration and social software market” and flagged their intention to start producing a magic quadrant.
It is not completely clear to me but Nikos appears to have changed the name of the market again to the “enterprise social...
2 tags
Web Office Defined
From Richard MacManus:
Ultimately a Web Office suite is a combination of productivity, publishing and collaboration features. A Web Office both embraces the functionality of desktop office suites (e.g. Microsoft Office) and extends it by using Web Native features.
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Jive Raises $15M
The market for lightweight enterprise software of the collaboration/social variety is heating up:
Portland, OR-based open-source enterprise collaboration software maker Jive Software has raised $15M in first-round funding led by Sequoia Capital. Several sources speculate that the company’s revenues are over $15M per year, more than double last year’s revenues. The company also says...
July 2007
5 posts
3 tags
Crossing the Pond
Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm examines how to bridge the gap between early adopters and main street buyers. In an interesting spin, Australian technology journalist Brad Howarth asks how much more challenging crossing the chasm is when there is 10,000 miles of ocean between point A and point B? Here are some of my thoughts on the opportunities and challenges for a technology...
2 tags
Enterprise 2.0 – Gorillas vs. Best of Breed
Forrester Research polled 120 CIOs in March about Web 2.0… and there are some interesting stats on what CIOs prefer:
97 percent, said they were familiar with Web 2.0
61 percent of respondents indicated that they would prefer both a suite solution and a large incumbent vendor
Nearly 75 percent said they would be more interested in Web 2.0 technologies if they were offered as a suite
93 percent...
3 tags
AgentArts Gets Fast
Well the other way around actually. Norwegian enterprise search company FAST has acquired Australian technology company AgentArts.
I remember meeting Andrew Coates and a few of his team members on the Austrade High Tech Tour of Silicon Valley in 2001. At the time, there were just 2 or 3 of them in the US working out of a loft in San Francisco. They had an interesting set up of a webcam and screen...
1 tag
Update on Product Managers
Back in April a few of us at Ephox posted about some changes down under in our R&D team. I held a job interview today where the candidate mentioned she read all of our blogs and asked me how the changes were coming along with veiled concern that the word restructuring elicits from people seeking a happy, stable place to work. To reassure her and any future candidates I definitely think an...
3 tags
Selling to End Users
At Ephox, we often find most of our success when end users get involved in championing our products at their organisation. Of course, being an authoring tool it is rather fortunate that our software is highly focused on end user productivity and what we offer really resonates with them. Whilst not always the case, occasionally IT departments/software architects push back on looking at us because...
June 2007
4 posts
1 tag
RIP Ezesite
On Sunday, August 1st 1999, I remember coding until 3 a.m. the night before Internet World 1999 in Sydney. The next day we unveiled Ezesite and it was the start of a fun ride of launching “Geoz”.
Geoz was quickly renamed Ephox and Ezesite became EditLive! but the following blurb is quite an accurate description of what the product does even today:
Geoz’s Ezesite product was...
3 tags
VC Options as a Start-up
Evan Williams of Twitter lays out a few options for his start-up:
Figure out how to get profitable
Keep funding Twitter myself
Get an alternative source of funding
Get bought
Raise VC
Previously he has said it pays to decide what game you are playing when you are running a startup:
The Big Game
The Little Game
The Fun Game
I am sure in some start-ups these are easy and obvious decisions....
Relay for Life
I was finally trying out Twitter the other week and Jeffrey Walker of Atlassian fame invited me to see his band play at the Relay for Life for Cancer Research nearby where I live. Melinda and I dropped by to enjoy the great weather and music.
Jeff and his band, The Occasionals, supported cancer research by selling t-shirts and entertaining the walkers as they circled around the oval.
I have...
2 tags
A Sense of Quality
It is sometimes hard to describe to someone who isn’t/hasn’t been an engineer about when a particular course is just the right way and another course is simply the wrong way. It is some sort of innate concern for the quality of the solution under the hood that we have when we know what is back there.
Fellow Ephoxian Doug South does a good job of outlining some good business reasons...
May 2007
1 post
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Productivity Tips for Board Packages
There have been some interesting posts on the topic of board meetings over the past few months. Will Herman provides a handy top 10 list of tips for CEOs, Brad Feld has a whole series of posts on board meetings that Chris Wand has taken to the next level recently over at Ask the VC. It goes without saying that board meetings can be a very important part of a business with their monthly drum beat...
April 2007
2 posts
What is worth accomplishing?
Doug links to a discussion of the virtues of application development vs programming that lines up with my reading for today, a chapter by Ray Ozzie in Founders at Work.
A quote from Ray:
I’m an engineer by training and I tend to be one of those people who believes he can accomplish basically anything in software - it’s just a big toolbox. So if you know that you can accomplish...
2 tags
Organizing for Innovation - Why?
Last week I traveled downunder to visit our team in Brisbane. One of my outcomes from the trip, I hope, has been to better align our ‘engineering’ team in a more market-oriented way.
In the first part of a few posts on this subject, why did I feel this was necessary?
Just because we happen to do software engineering as a critical part of our software company, this doesn’t make...
March 2007
2 posts
2 tags
Portals, Content & Collaboration Software Goes...
Today I am at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in Orlando.
I am currently sitting in on a BEA presentation regarding the next generation of enterprise portals. To quote: “popular consumer-based Web technologies will transform enterprise IT.” They are announcing a product called Builder that is a wiki-like product for building situational applications. Kind of...
2 tags
Intranets In Infancy
Sorry I haven’t posted much lately. Much happening!
But for now, here is an interesting set of conclusions from a recent survey on intranet usage by Jane McConnell:
1. The intranet is still in its infancy. It has achieved a first milestone of being a primary information tool. Its benefits as a collaboration platform and productivity tool have not yet been fully achieved. More importantly,...