Posts Tagged ‘ Technology ’

TechCrunch Disrupt – Insights and Advice

TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011(http://disrupt.techcrunch.com) punctuated Michael Arrington’s career heading up TechCrunch. The final Disrupt for Arrington was held in San Francisco attracting over 2,500 leading technology innovators and investors and over 150 new startups. Despite the controversy and media maelstrom over shadowing the event, there was something else going on. Start-up entrepreneurs were unveiling new technologies and businesses.

Openera SmartCloud

Richard & Peter

Openera’s Founder & CEO, Peter Lalonde was there, showcasing SmartCloud in Disrupt’s Startup Alley, a startup launch platform, where over 200 companies exhibited their product or service.

Here are just a few of his perspectives and thoughts on Disrupt, the Startup Alley experience, and advice he’d give to other startups thinking of attending the next Disrupt conference:

What was the highlight for you at Disrupt?

For me it was getting real and honest feedback on SmartCloud. The opportunity to have other founders, investors, press and potential partners get excited about the promise of SmartCloud was outstanding. I was really impressed by a few startups that rose above the noise of so many similar themed ones.

What type of feedback did you get from Investors/attendees?

It was mostly good feedback. A lot of people said things like

“I’ve been waiting for something like this!” “oh my God, you’ve solved my biggest frustration.” or some variation of “wow, this is actually really useful! You’ve solved a real problem.”

It wasn’t all good feedback though. Some people just didn’t see the value. They don’t mind keeping all their content in their inbox. There were also concerns around security, which we expected, but our answer didn’t always satisfy people in hyper sensitive businesses. We’ll write a blog post about our view and approach to security.

Of all the other startups you saw in Startup Alley, were there any that you got excited about, and why? 

Yes! Definitely. Bitcasa was the standout, most disruptive company there. The fact that they didn’t win offended me! LOL. Their CEO, Tony Gauda, is dynamic, brilliant and quick witted. Their approach of offering infinite local/cloud storage for $10/month is groundbreaking on a technical level, pricing level and user experience level. They are exactly in-line with the SmartCloud philosophy of not changing user behaviour.

The other stand-out startup that also adopts the SmartCloud philosophy is Everpix. They have an elegant solution for solving the fragmented photo library problem. Like many people, I have photos scattered all over the web; MobileMe, Flickr, Facebook, Picassa and across several local drives and email!  Everpix will consolidate and even auto-curate your photos (hide bad pics) and organize them into ‘moments’ allowing you to easily collect from, and share photo moments with friends.

GoInstant is a fellow Canadian Start-up that has, what seems to me, the easiest shared browsing / screen sharing solution possible. No plug-ins, no logins, no hassle, immediate group browsing. Ideal for groups that want to test web-based products (like SmartCloud) – it even works on mobile browsers.

Special mentions to Sonar (a social networking app that brings your LinkedIn contacts (and others) into a location aware context) and CodeGuard (time machine + version control for your website and a cool logo!) as well as sponsors, UrtheCast (launching HD cameras into space to provide (and make available) essentially a new hi-res image of the planet every month.Tesla because Tesla is awesome and Elon Musk is a visionary and inspiring. SugarSync, because they might make a good partner, and EventBrite, because they disrupted local & social event ticketing and has made life easier for many people.

Tell us a little bit about the experience of being in Startup Alley. 

You give the pitch so often, you sometimes forget that what you are saying may have quite an impact on someone. If I could have done anything differently, I would have spent more time reaching out to people ahead of time. There were very few members of the press interacting with the Startups in Startup ally. They were mostly distracted by Arringtongate! I would have thought that, at a minimum, TechCruch would have sent someone to talk to each startup.

What advice/recommendations would you give to other Startups who are considering attending the next Disrupt?

You might want to read my other post on Disrupt for more insight. If you are a B2B start-up expect a good percentage of the attendees to not care about what you are doing. This may change, but social, mobile and games seem to be the startups that get all the attention. If you decide to be a part of startup ally you may want to push to be exhibiting on day 1. Our experience was that Day 1 was far more busy for startup ally. Don’t wear a costume! Even if it does get you attention, press, leads is it worth it? Most importantly, talk to other startups. Find ones you like and promote the hell out of them. The good ones are often not the ones in the battlefield. Get to know their pitch, value proposition, send people you talk to their way too to check them out. Finally, it’s all about the follow-up. What are you going to do after Disrupt?

2011
09/19
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Openera
TAGS




1 comment

Email is not content management!

According to an infographic CCLoop published, sourcing information from Mashable, “The Social Break-Up” by ExactTarget, and Neilsen Research (to name a few) an estimated 2.8 Million emails are sent every second. That’s 90 Trillion emails each year, and email usage continues to grow in both Consumer and Business markets.


Infographic by: ccLoop

It also cites “Attachment Chaos” as first of the Top Four Email Annoyances, and I bet your inbox contains more content than it should. I bet there are files, reports, presentations and other critical documents that aren’t being formally managed (even if you are required to do so). I bet you don’t save attachments as they come in, and spend … no – WASTE your valuable time searching for attachments when you need them.

I say this with confidence, because last month Openera issued a poll asking “How do you Manage your Attachments?”. While it came as no surprise to us, almost 65% of those polled indicated they search for attachments later when they need them.

There is a lot of noise in your inbox, which can result in lost attachments, missed opportunities and other headaches. To be on top of your game, you need to properly manage all of your documents and be able to access them on the spot. So why is it we keep using our inbox as a content management system?

Are we too lazy to save attachments as they come in? Maybe. It’s more probable that we’re too busy to be spending too much time worrying about saving stuff where it’s supposed to go, when we think we can just look for it later when we need it.

Sure, there are a number of ways you can “manage” your content in your inbox(es): Creating and managing multiple folders, setting up custom search filters, or  being incredibly diligent in saving each and every attachment as you see it. No matter how you slice it though, each is very manual and time consuming.

Isn’t technology supposed to make your life easier? When it comes to your inbox, or inboxes, don’t you wish your stuff could just go where you want it to?

Exactly.

We know how frustrating it can be to keep track of all of your attachments across multiple inboxes. We also know how annoying (and unnecessary) it is when someone says “we have a solution for that – but you have to completely change the way you work in order to use it”. This is why SmartCloud automatically tags and saves your important attachments precisely where you want them to go … without changing the way you work.

How are YOU managing your email attachments today? Leave us a comment, let us know what tactics or services you’re using to keep your inbox clean, and attachments organized.

And of course, you can Go Here to learn more about SmartCloud

2011
09/12
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Content Management
TAGS




3 comments

Cross Cloud Confusion

Too many choices. Stuff being stored everywhere but no where, rogue silos, mobile added another layer of choice, complexity and confusion. Too many channels and too much is on. Always on. Every vendor I work with has their own cloud project management, billing, e-sign, file storage, sharing and team collaboration space. Some have mobile access, some don’t. Some have highly secure logins (for no reason) that require me to remember yet another username and password. (side note: I used to use one of those password keeper services, but I forgot my password for that service.) I was constantly bowing to the will of technology. I had to change the way I worked. No more.

No Change Necessary

SmartCloud Openera adds value to the most popular cloud services on the planet. The best part about SmartCloud? You don’t have to change the way you work. We make Dropbox better by saving all your email attachments to Dropbox, which means you don’t have to change, at all. We make Box an even better solution for businesses by magically pulling important contracts and files out of users inboxes and into their Box accounts where collaboration can happen. We inject critical business intelligence into Salesforce.com by siphoning all proposals, contracts and agreements out of reps email and into Salesforce, where it can kick-off workflows or be acted on by the team. Or maybe you just want to use SmartCloud to automatically save any photos people send you to your Flickr or Google Photo account.

If it’s in your inbox, it can be in the cloud – without any confusion.

2011
06/29
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Cloud
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