sorted by: recent | see : popular

Content Tagged with startups + technology

Ask any IT professional what they dread most, and they’ll likely tell you that it’s change. Specifically, the act of putting a new application into production: There’s simply no way to know what will happen.

Companies spend a tremendous amount of time and money in staging environments, trying to see whether or not their new code will work. Only the largest banks and utilities have the resources to completely replicate the production systems, and none can truly simulate the real world.

Jonah Paransky, VP of marketing for testing-sandbox startup StackSafe, says that roughly 43 percent of IT problems can be traced back to lack of pre-production testing. “Over half of the changes we see in our research never end up being tested against the end-to-end IT service.” StackSafe tackles the problem by copying an entire application into a virtual appliance, letting IT change it, and testing the result.

Virtualization is an important enabler for pre-production testing. IT has longed for a sandbox in which to let new applications play, but doing so in the physical world has been too costly. Increasingly, however, IT doesn’t have a choice: Best practice frameworks like the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) include processes for testing, and certain industries, such as power utilities, require that IT changes are tested and logged.

Server consolidation and disaster recovery firm Platespin also provides tools for sucking physical machines into the virtual world, but Paransky insists that StackSafe’s focus is different: In addition to creating a virtual clone of a production application, it offers a suite of testing tools to quickly see whether the clone is broken.

Easier pre-production testing couldn’t come at a better time. Because virtualization makes it trivial to create a new machine, IT administrators face a flood of newly minted virtual servers they have to manage. “Now that it’s almost no work to deploy new servers, the first thing that happens to new virtualized environments is an incredible growth in server sprawl,” said Paransky.

Sandboxing approaches like StackSafe have an important limitation, however. In order to insulate the real world from the servers being tested, the sandbox is completely cut off from surrounding systems. Otherwise, testing the sandboxed servers would have real-world consequences, like buying a ticket or selling shares. “Even if you could virtualize much of a production environment,” said Paransky, “there may be components, like SOA, that can never be pulled into that virtualized environment.”

Consequently, pre-production testing on the distributed Internet becomes increasingly difficult — you can’t put a copy of the Internet into your sandbox in order to test it. Which is a challenge firms like StackSafe still have to tackle if they’re going to improve the reliability of tomorrow’s applications outside of the traditional enterprise data center.

Earlier this week Om wrote about Dropbox, which he liked so much that we at GigaOM are trying it out for our file-sharing and backup needs. Also this week, FolderShare, another remote file access program, launched its first version since being acquired by Microsoft two-and-half years ago. So I decided to try them out, too.

After playing around with both, I’m torn. The essential differences between the two stem from the fact that Dropbox is all about sending your data to the cloud and accessing it there, whereas FolderShare links two computers that are already online. So for remote access of your files, FolderShare is the clear winner, while Dropbox takes the cake for backup and collaborative work.

I used both programs to link my MacBook with my ancient Toshiba laptop, which runs Windows XP. I’m using Firefox as my browser, and it was nice to see that Microsoft’s FolderShare program respected that and didn’t seek to open in Explorer instead. Both took just a few minutes to install and were easy to get running. Dropbox didn’t install cleanly into the applications portion of my Mac’s hard drive, but I moved it over.

With the install over, it was time to play. I created a shared folder in Dropbox and had the option of either saving files into my Dropbox located on the desktop or going to the Dropbox web site and uploading them. This feature would be nice if I were working on some else’s computer and didn’t want to install the Dropbox client. Could you use this to upload proprietary corporate data even if it was protected from transfer to a USB drive?

To access a shared folder, you send out invites. With Dropbox currently in private beta, it’s a nice way to spread your Dropbox love to friends who might appreciate the site. Another fun things about Dropbox is that you can share your photos with non-Dropbox members via a URL, but that will show all the photos in your Dropbox photo file, so be careful who sees it.

Frankly, because I don’t collaborate with anyone using offline files like Word or Excel, and work from the same laptop all the time, I’m not sure how useful I find Dropbox. FolderShare, on the other hand, is appealing to me in the way it lets me access the random files I have stored on my personal laptop, such as contact data from Outlook and notes taken on my personal PC. I can also use it to grab photos and music fairly easily, although I do wish I could see thumbnails for my images in the display. That would require too much information to be stored on the Microsoft servers, though.

Another caveat is that for FolderShare to work, both computers have to be online. So hibernating computers need to be awakened from their slumber. Bottom line, you could use FolderShare for easy access to your files on various computers and Dropbox for backup and collaborative work. As a word of caution, both services were running pretty slowly while I was playing around with them.

What happens when you combine the concept of personal shopping, luxury goods such as Kotur and Etro at deep discounts with the web and SMS alerts? You get Ideeli, a web service from an eponomously named start-up based in New York City that has just raised $3.8 million dollars from Boston-based VC firm, Kodiak Ventures and some angel investors. The company that soft launched in May 2007 will announce it’s most recent round of funding on Monday.

“Ideeli is an invitation only shopping community,” says Paul Hurley, founder and chief executive officer of the company. “Think of it as an advertorial that combines mobile, e-commerce and community.” By keeping the service invitation only, Hurley says, Ideeli is an attractive option for designer labels who want to maintain exclusivity but want to tap the web for its commerce potential. “We have built this from a brand owner’s perspective.” Oscar De La Renta and Baccarat have already signed on as partners. Why not? The service has a precedent, and is inspired by super-successful French site, vente-privee.com.

The website offers luxury goods such as clutches and bags from high end designers at discounts of between 50-to-90 percent. Ideeli sends out the members an email every week letting them know what products are going to go on sale in the coming week.

Then, every day a single such product (or brand) goes on sale, and the date and time of the sale is kept a secret. The members of Ideeli are sent an SMS alert or an email when the products go on sale. In addition, the company also offers weekly giveaways, typically one exclusive item. In order to become a member of Ideeli, one needs to invited by a current member.

There are two tiers of service - the basic service called Second Row. The premium option that costs $7.95 a month is called First Row and entitles you to get SMS alerts and a one-hour head start over others as far as sales are concerned. The First-come first-serve nature of the service is one of the reasons Hurley believes people will sign-up for the premium SMS alert option. So far, they have seen about 10% conversion among their beta testers. (Warning: ideeli doesn’t work with T-Mobile for now.)

The company plans to expand into other verticals sometime in the future, but for now they are focusing on the Cosmopolitan-set. When I showed the service to some of my lady friends, they approved the selections on offer, though were quick to point out that some of the stuff wasn’t that au currant. Would they bid? Of course .

What’s my prognosis on Ideeli? If they manage to get the viral growth they are hoping for, they will have suitors in big fashion-oriented publishing houses: CondeNast, Hearst, Hatchette and even Time Warner.

To try out, click here.

Dash Navigation, the Mountain View, Calif., company that has developed a network-connected global positioning system (GPS) device, is finally making it available for pre-order. The Dash Express will set you back a whopping $600 dollars plus related services of between $10 and $13 a month, depending on the service play you choose. And although it is by no means the most expensive GPS system out there, it is indeed a device that reflects the true spirit of Web 2.0.

Dash, which has raised close to $42 million in VC funding from the likes of Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, is one of those startups that initially seemed to be more sizzle than substance. But a demo of their most updated device and the web service that goes along with it made me reevaluate my skepticism. Let me explain.

For nearly two years, one web company after another has offered an API (application programming interface) as a means to access the data locked up inside their vault. Zilo, Flicker, eBay, Yelp, Yahoo and Google Maps — the list goes on and on. And yet we have not seen anyone come up with a way to combine these disparate data streams together and build a service that helps our everyday life. Sure, we’ve seen some clever mashups, but most of them are locked up inside our browser. Close the lid of your computer and everything is left behind.

Dash, however, has come up with a way to take Web 2.0 to go. The device can pull information from a panoply of sources: gas station listings, restaurant listings, recommendations from Yelp, real estate information from Zillow.com, and so on. Say you’re driving and you see a house for sale — you can enter the address and get the list price from the Zillow.com database. Feel like eating sushi? Enter “sushi” and the device pulls down the nearest sushi restaurant information, including reviews from Yelp or some such service.

Your subscription also gives you access to MyDash, a special web site that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds of your choice. If you’re a New York Yankees fan, for instance, and need to find a Yankees-friendly saloon in, say, San Francisco, you can look on one of the mapping services such as Platial and find yourself a map mashup that lists such bars. Subscribe to that RSS feed, and you will always have pinstripe heaven close by. Another feature I like is called Send2Car, which allows you to highlight an address from any Internet browser or Microsoft Outlook and send it directly to your car. Oh and it also offers real-time traffic updates and navigation.

I didn’t necessarily want to do a review of Dash, but it’s allowed me to point out something that is being forgotten in the mad scramble that is Web 2.0: The Internet is not just about the browser, but rather it is about data and how one can use it to build clever products. I think Dash, much like Amazon’s Kindle and RCA’s Small Wonder video camera, is part of a movement that is breaking Web 2.0’s browser shackles.