Cal Poly Business School Seniors tackle pre-launch planning for new Digital Media Firm

Cal Poly Business 454 Class, Day 1Business School Seniors in the School of Business at California Polytechnic University (San Luis Obispo CA; “Cal Poly”) enrolled in “Business 454″ are tackling the pre-launch planning for a new digital media production firm which will launch in January 2010 as “StartupTrek.TV”

The 36 business school seniors in the Orfalea School of business will gain hands-on experience working in a tech startup company, as it plans a high-profile launch on the web, in advance of developing cable and broadcast television content relationships.

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Central Valley Venture Forum in Fresno this Thursday Sept 24

screen-shot-2009-09-19-at-13117-pm1Startup Trek will be attending and reporting from the Central Valley Venture Forum this Thursday Sept 24. The California State Controller, Mr. John Chiang, will be keynoting the event, along with Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay and candidate for Governor in California.

Steve Bell, Startup Trek’s founder, will be speaking on two panels and acting as a judge in a “startup showdown”.

The full day’s agenda follows:

Program

Thursday, Sept 24, 2009
Veterans Memorial Building, Clovis, California

8:30-9:00

Registration & Networking
9:00-9:20 Welcome & Event Overview

Speaker

Ashley Swearengin, Mayor, City of Fresno

Speaker

Harry Armstrong, Mayor, City of Clovis
Dr. Bill Covino, Provost, California State University, Fresno
Day
Moderator
Dr. Tim Stearns, Executive Director,
Lyles Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship,
California State University, Fresno
TOP

9:20-10:20

Panel Discussion:
Bulletproofing Your Business to Ride Out the Downturn

Come and listen as successful CEO’s, bankers and private equity professionals provide their top 10 things you need to do to ensure your business can survive the economic downturn and thrive going into 2010.

Moderator

Riley Walter, Walter Wilhelm Law Group

Panelists

Perry DeLuca, KeyBanc Capital Markets
Dan Doyle, Central Valley Community Bank
Will Lyles, Lyles Diversified
Ed McNulty, Central Valley Fund

Sponsor

U.S. Bank

10:20-10:30

Break

Sponsor

City of Clovis
TOP

10:30-11:00

Keynote Address:
“Entrepreneurship and Private Capital; Lessons for the Central Valley and CaliforniaMeg Whitman’s Vision for Positive Change in the Golden State
Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO and candidate for California Governor

Introduction

Brad Triebsch, Central Valley Fund

Sponsor

Bank of the Sierra
11:00-12:00 Panel Discussion:
How to Raise Investment Capital

How do Central Valley entrepreneurs raise professional capital? A panel of venture capitalists, angel investors, investment bankers and turnaround specialists will discuss hat they look for when evaluating companies for investment.
Moderator Jose Blanco, Central Valley Fund
Panelists Steve Bell, Keiretsu Forum
David Blumberg, Blumberg Capital
Joe Hudson, One Earth Capital
Brian Kerester, Glaucon Capital
Bill Roeser, Paragon Consulting
Keith Spears, Hamilton Lane
Sponsor KeyBanc Capital Markets

12:00-1:00

Lunch and Networking with Keynote Speaker:
“Can California be Fixed?”
John Chiang, California State Controller
Introduction Brad Triebsch, Central Valley Fund

Sponsor

Central Valley Fund

1:15-2:00

Panel Discussion:
The Central Valley Economy
The Central Valley economy has taken many shots recently
with the mortgage meltdown and studies contending we are the “Appalachia of the West”. Come hear an expert panel discuss what they see as the challenges and opportunities for the Central Valley economy for the next 24 months.

Moderator

Ed McNulty, Central Valley Fund

Panelists

Lon Hatamiya, Economist/Former Secretary of Commerce/ Navigant Consulting
Tony Oliveira, Economist/CalPERS Finance Committee Chair
Sponsor Hamilton Lane
TOP

2:00-2:15

Break

Sponsor

HansonBridgett

2:15-3:45

Valley Entrepreneur Showcase
See the Valley’s best and brightest entrepreneurs present
to investors for the chance to earn “Best in Show” and an
opportunity to present to the Keiretsu Forum in the San
Francisco Bay Area.

Moderator

Michael Summers, Lyles Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Panelists

Steve Bell, Keiretsu Forum
Jose Blanco, Central Valley Fund
David Blumberg, Blumberg Capital
Douglas Bosley, GreenbergTraurig
Perry DeLuca, KeyBanc Capital Markets
Joe Hudson, One Earth Capital
Brian Kerester, Glaucon Capital
Ed McNulty, Central Valley Fund
Bill Roeser, Paragon Consulting
Keith Spears, Hamilton Lane

Presenting
Companies

Intelligent Farm Machinery (IFM)
Soil Topography Information (STI)
Emediance
Clickco
SeniorCare Organizational Systems (SOS)
TOP
4:00-5:00 Wine and Cheese Reception
Sponsor E. & J.Gallo Winery

Twitter-Gate update: a hand-delivered appeal for tech support to Evan Williams

Twitter_HijackingAs we’ve detailed in a previous post, on July 21 2009, StartupTrek’s Twitter account was hijacked.  Someone — likely someone within a third-party Twitter service provider — seized control of our account and changed the email address, leaving us unable to use Twitter’s automated “password reset”.  We need actual “human” tech support to fix this and recover our account, which is our brand name on Twitter – and our follower base.

We’ve tried over a dozen methods since the hijacking, to recover our brand name on Twitter.  Including speaking with some of the VC’s who fund the company and set on it’s board; FedEx’ing a plea to co-founder Biz Stone, calling the company, emailing tech support, posting and querying 3rd-part Twitter support sites like Aardvark (and others), blogging about it, physically visiting the company in San Francisco, and more.  In each and every case, Twitter has made absolutely no response.  Their tech support email address support@twitter.com appears to be unstaffed; calls are not returned, letters are not answered, etc.

As noted in this blog post, “Twitter Support Paradox“:

“Twitter may change the way companies think about the way they support their customers, but when it comes to Twitter themselves, not only do they not use their own platform to give quick and personal answers, but they are far far behind from what the service could really offer.”

After a couple of months of this, a Professor at a leading California University suggested that perhaps the way to get this fixed, is to file a class action suit on behalf on all of the other (likely tens of thousands) of Twitter users who have been hijacked.  Sure, Twitter is free, and has an iron-clad terms of service TOS. But it’s not really free, because Twitter is driven by the energy, enthusiasm, and work of loyal early-adopter/users like… myself.  And no TOS is perfect.   So our friend John Goodrich of Wilson-Sonsini-Goodrich fame introduced us to the most successful class action lawyer in Silicon Valley, Joe Cotchett.  After a discussion, we fax’d Joe 15 pages of background information.  Joe’s firm politely demured for unknown reasons, but he suggested that our case has merit and encouraged us to take up the case with another firm, so we are seeking class action representation at the current time.

Startup Trek has no real beef with Twitter, and hey – they’re busy!  We greatly prefer a simple, friendly solution and now… (drum roll!) we have found a solid, reliable way to physically reach Twitter’s most senior management team member (adult supervision?).  A professional colleague and friend, has a son who is an iPhone+Web entrepreneur.  His son is also a personal friend of Evan Williams, Twitter’s CEO.  He has graciously offered to deliver my letter (previously FedEx’d to Biz Stone) to Evan.  So we are waiting with baited breath for a response!

It has been suggested (see comment on the prior blog post) that we simple start over using a new login (just in case, we have signed up for the account Twitter.com/StartupTrekTV).  But that would set us back six to nine months or more, to rebuild our follower base to ~750 followers; and we would lose our “brand name” StartupTrek to… a thief.   All of this over a routine tech support issue that Twitter could fix in 10 minutes.

Do you have a better idea how we can recover our Twitter account?

Maybe we will need to start directing and producing videos like this one?

Startup Trek seeks class action legal remedy to get Twitter’s attention

Twitter_HijackingIn this lengthy post we will describe how Startup Trek has exhausted all options in attempting to reach technical support and/or management at Twitter, leading to the current point where we have begun to work with a law firm to become the claimant in a class action suit against the social networking firm.

Background

As we described in a previous post, our brand name “StartupTrek” (Twitter.com/StartupTrek) was hijacked back on July 20th.  We have exhausted all means of attempting to reach Twitter for help, but they have steadfastly refused to respond to help us out in recovering our account.  We even attempted to enlist the help of their venture capital backers at IVP, but after an initial friendly offer to assist, that was rescinded.

Our current complaint about Twitter is not motivated by any personal animosity towards them.  Quite the contrary; in fact we were early adopters (Tweeting since March 2008) and have told many friends (actually, anyone that will listen) over the past six months, that “Twitter is likely the most important tech startup company since Google arrived a little over ten years ago, and potentially since Microsoft arrived in 1982″.  So we are definitely fans of what Twitter is doing; a leading adopter; Twitter advocates.  Perhaps unfortunately, we’ve come to depend upon Twitter’s service in building out Startup Trek.

What Happened

Our Twitter account was created early in March of 2008.  During the first year we Tweeted lightly; not fully appreciate the power of this new form of one-to-many, full-duplex human communication until around Jan 2009. For the past four months we’ve invested a lot of our team’s business time and energy into “branding” StartupTrek on Twitter, and made a total of 442 carefully written “Tweets” about the startups we interview and analyze.  It had become the source of a good percentage of our traffic as our new blog approaches launch.

At the peak of our efforts, on June 20 2009 we had 710 followers interested in our Tweets, often “clicking through” to articles on the StartupTrek blog.  In order to learn how to create a more “viral” follower base we began to investigate 3rd-party marketing services which specialize in Twitter.

On July 21st 2009, control of Startup Trek’s Twitter account (homepage located online at http://Twitter.com/StartupTrek) was “hijacked” away from us by a malicious 3rd-party service.  We believe that over the past 3-4 weeks, it is very likely that this has happened to thousands, probably tens of thousands of other business users of Twitter.  Just like in the website version of a hijacking, the malicious “owner” of these accounts stands to accrue financial gain by gaining control of the account; and the real owner is the victim.

The Financial Impact and Scale of a Twitter Account Hijacking

The financial, material, web traffic (ad revenue), and goodwill damages which occur to a serious “Tweeter” when they are hijacked, are the online equivalent of identity theft.  Great damage ensues.  In our case, our hard-earned follower base collapsed from the 700’s to today’s 575; representing two or three months of hard work.  The damage to our  brand name, reputation, and the loss of advertising revenues on my website are substantial.

Twitter’s response has been: sorry, your problem.

Why would Twitter fail to work with their users to fix this?

Twitter is very likely aware of this major flaw in how their website works, and probably has a major revamp of their access method in design; but it must be a low priority.  In the meantime, they seem to be pursuing a strategy of “hear no evil, see no evil”.  In other words, they just write off (ignore) effected users like StartupTrek.   It is a practical solution, allowing them to focus on the bigger issues they are contending with, and slow-rolling a fix versus treating it like the crisis that it is.  They probably fix it for only users with more than a certain number of followers, and write off the rest of the accounts.  Brutal, but efficient for them.

Given that Twitter has a multi-Billion dollar valuation and recently took on an additional $35M round in a VC “deal stuffing feeding frenzy”, you would think they would have the resources to fix this problem.  In fact, we know of a simple fix:  add a second password to each account, for use with 3rd-party applications.  Should take them about two engineer days to code it, two more to beta test it and maybe one to roll it out.  So I can only attribute the continued existence of this problem to some larger motivation; perhaps they just don’t want to admit there is a problem; or they are busy with other matters.

Twitter support doesn’t exist, for this problem – in fact, it hides!

For the past 28 days, we have invested a great deal of time in trying to reach someone at Twitter to get this problem resolved, with absolutely no success.  Twitter does not respond to technical support requests on this issue, from what we have experienced; and I’ve come to realize they have probably figured out they are at risk for legal exposure (liability) on this.  They appear to only issue (repeatedly) a set of recommendations for resetting your password, which don’t work – for reasons I’ll detail later.

After your Twitter account is stolen and you contact them for support, they send their password reset email to “the email address which you originally registered with”.  But it appears that malicious Twitter account hackers have figured out how to change THAT particular address to another address, because we do not receive Twitter.com’s password reset emails.  So my account remains in the control of some other user.

Whenever we send a technical support request to Twitter (from another account), we get their automated response suggesting things to try, principally the password reset email.  They also ask a series of questions to establish my identity as authentic.  The email states that failing the automated password reset, someone from Twitter will contact us; but they never do.  In fact, Twitter appears to be “hiding from” the presumably very large base of users who have this particular problem, who it appears they do not have a solution for.  Twitter has failed to provide a mechanism to resolve this problem, and also they fail to provide technical support.

Since Twitter appears not to provide technical support, I located the top (highest traffic level) 3rd-party Twitter support service, and attempted to find an answer there.  I never received a response, and I discovered that many other hijacked users are also getting no help there.

Trying every imaginable remedy

I decided to contact Twitter the old fashioned way, by locating their (hard to find) telephone number in San Francisco.  They do not answer their telephone, but you can leave a voicemail..  However, Twitter does not return calls after polite messages are left.

We have contacts within a large number of venture funded tech startup companies, but Twitter is an exception.  So we decided to physically go to the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco and attempt to charm my way in, to get some help.  No luck there, either – a complete stonewall.

We wrote a blog post on my blog about this situation, which goes into more detail about my situation and asking other knowledgeable Twitter users for help.  No luck, although it’s getting some good page view traffic.

We also posted a request for help at the new social networking phenomena Aardvark.com; again no luck or help available; a few suggestions but nothing worked.

Even Twitter VC’s at IVP blew off Startup Trek after we tried to persuade them to put us in touch with Twitter (probably once they realized the scale and severity of the issue)

How Twitter’s VC’s handled it

At Tony Perkins’ AlwaysOn “Venture Capital Summit at Stanford” two weeks ago, we met one of the General Partners at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) of Menlo Park.  He had dropped several times in his fireside chat talk that IVP was an early investor in Twitter; and I know one of the partners there.  So I chatted with him after his talk, and he agreed to try and put me in touch with someone at Twitter who might be able to help.  An initial email exchange with he (and another IVP partner, more directly involved with Twitter) seemed promising (alas! finally!!  I said to myself).

Then, a few hours later (presumably after one of them spoke with Twitter management) the IVP General Partners turned the cold shoulder on Startup Trek, saying by email “if you gave out your password to a third-party service we can’t help you”.  I think they know there is liability here, and it’s likely being discussed at the board level.  We also noticed that IVP seems to have put a block on their email server, which rejects any further incoming emails from us.  Thanks a bunch there guys!

The last email I sent IVP (while they were still listening), explained that each week millions of Twitter users are FORCED to give out their Twitter password to 3rd-party service providers who support Twitter users, because Twitter hasn’t provided an alternative.  He responded with no email, just an email block so that I can no longer reach him by email.   I was disappointed, but not surprised considering how purposefully Twitter seems to be avoiding their users, on this particular issue.

The mechanics of a Twitter hijacking

Now let’s review in some me detail how Twitter accounts come to be hijacked.  Like most social networking services and websites, when you open an account you create a user ID and setup a password at Twitter.com.   You then configure a home page (profile) at Twitter.com/USERID.  In my case that page is at Twitter.com/StartupTrek.  Everything is fine for the beginning Twitterer.  But once you become more skillful and serious at using the service to communicate and learn, you begin to realize that there are many aspects that remain un-implemented, or grossly inadequate at the Twitter.com website.

As a result of Twitter being unable to implement features and capabilities fast enough to meet their users’ requirements hundreds (soon to be thousands, if not already) of third-party applications have sprung up around Twitter, from the TweetDeck.com client, to online Twitter directories, Marketing services, and even tech support forums.  The problem is, that Twitter is designed in such a way that in order to USE these services, you MUST provide these third-party services with your Twitter password.   As a practical matter, I would estimate that at least a third of Twitter’s users have been doing this as a necessity over the past six months.

Over the past month we’ve noticed a rash of Twitter stories in the media about users being “Hijacked”, including President Obama and some other high profile Twitter users.  I would imagine those users were able to get some help from Twitter.  But I suspect there are thousands, more likely tens of thousands (possibly more) ordinary business users like ourselves, out of the 40M+ registered Twitter users, who have been hijacked like this.

Where Twitter engineering made a mistaken assumption

Twitter’s mistake is that they have assumed that they can send you a password reset email to “the email address you registered with” to accomplish a password reset, so they have automated-only support on this issue.  However, I believe that malicious users have somehow figured out how to “reset” (replace) that address in accounts they seize… and therein lies the rub.

Summarizing, and calling all class-action attorneys

Once again, we are big fans of the company Twitter and their social networking service.  We’re really disappointed that they have chosen not to address this serious issue for their users, and even more disappointed that they refused to even have contact with their most enthusiastic members of their online community.   Well, at least it’s better than LinkedIn, where proactively hostile, user-unfriendly “non-support” (usually in the form of snarky emails from support, that miss the point) are issued on a routine basis.  So no support can be better than that.  We’re dismayed that these cutting-edge, venture funded companies aren’t just a bit “friendlier”.

Startup Trek believes that a class action lawsuit against Twitter would attract many thousands of other ignored Twitter users like myself, who depend upon their Twitter accounts as a “business brand name” for their livelihoods.  If you would have been seriously effected by this fundamental flaw in the Twitter service, please email or call Steve Bell, steve <at> startuptrek <dot> net (408) 410-3857. We have already submitted a detailed, 14-page description of our situation to a top class action law firm, but have not yet formally committed to selection of the firm that will handle this.  So if you are a veteran class action attorney in a top firm, please contact us – quickly.  We do not intend to dally in pursuing this, as our valuable brand name on Twitter erodes on a daily basis.

In the meantime, we look forward to the day when we can recover our account.  Hopefully, we’ll solve this problem for a lot of other users in the process.

6 Wireless startups spin for 6 minutes, at AlwaysOn 2009

We’ll have video snippets of the highlights from each of these presentations online in this post within 24 hours:

1. Mpowerplayer, Michael Powers, CEO

Provides a socially-enable “Application Store” for major web properties, including Sprint, European Telcos.

2. Promptu, Giuseppe Staffaroni, President & CEO

Slick iPhone application for browsing train and transit schedules by voice command.

3. Mobclix, Vishal Gurbuxani, C0-founder

Mobile application analytics for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia applications. Think Google Analytics for iPhone apps. “Just 15 minutes and 15 lines of code”.  They are used in 4,000 of the 16,000 apps currently listed on the iTunes app store.

4. YouMail, Alex Quilici, CEO

Visual Voicemail, voice to text for mobile devices.  ”There are 40 Billion voicemail boxes out there, and usage is still growing”.

5. WiSpry, Jeff Hilbert, President & COO

WiSpry is a fabless startup, developing MEMS based tunable arrays of digital RF Capacitors and RF capacitor networks.

6. LynxSolutions, Jorge Gonzalez, CEO

UK-based mobile email and hosted application provider

13 Startups spin for 6 minutes in “CEO Showcase” session at AlwaysOn 2009

Darkstrand presents at AlwaysOn 20091. PreVisite – Jeffrey Nortman, COO:

A new, easier, better way to list private homes for sale online.

2. Skymeter – Kamal Hassan, CEO

Provides a specialized GPS road tolling service.

3. Magic Studio Network – Ben Hayman, CEO

An interactive learning network for educational applications.

4. iPeak Networks – Martin Horne, CEO

Hardware play, improving wide-area network performance for video conferencing.

5. AdParlor – Hussein Fazal, President & CEO

Ad Network targeting social media sites.

6. Sysomos – Nick Koudas, CEO & Co-founder

Text-based Social Networking Analytics.  Very slick.

7. Italian World Channel, Enrico Beltramini, CEO

A website with special content featuring Italian culture

8. Darkstrand, Michael Stein, CEO

Operates 3.2Tb capacity, 1,000 route mile network that terminates in 120 US research institutions. Uses Cisco DWDM equipment; layer 1/2 infrastructure.  Seller of bandwidth; but not a telco.  Has raised $20M, now raising another $40M.  Substitute presenter.

9. Data Deposit Box, Jamie Brenzel, CEO

Provides a comprehensive online backup solution for users; founded early 2003.  DDB is a SaaS application; they lease their server capacity.  Received patent for their continuous online backup process; profitable for past 42 months; $7M run rate in 2009; target market is Small and Medium Businesses (SMB’s).  Best Buy Geek Squad partnership in Canada.

10. Liquid Scenarios, Lorenzo Carver, CEO

Provides a sophisticated financial analysis tool (business intelligence) for private equity investors.

11. VMIX, Mike Glickenhsaus, CEO

A SaaS video platform for user-generated content (UGC).  Uses the Akamai edge network as their primary CDN, and Amazon S3 for storage.  $21.5M funding from four VC firms.

12. Service Channel Corporation, , CEO

A SaaS application for managing relationships with disparate groups of small business contractors.  Maintains a large scale database of contractors, and a facility for managing the business relationships with them.  Targeting large enterprises. Profitable enterprise, raised Series B in 2008.

13. Groovy Corporation, Joe Ward CEO

Accelerator for SQL (database) based web applications.

Panel discussion examines Angel versus Venture investing

Angel Investment Panel AlwaysOn 2009This panel was moderated by Sam Angus, Partner at Fenwick and West.  The panelists were:

  • Ron Conway, Founder Angel Investors LP
  • Rob Hayes, Partner, First Round Capital
  • Joyce Chung, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures
  • Aydin Senkut, Founder & President, Felicis Ventures

Conway, sometimes referred to as the Godfather of Silicon Valley because of the propensity for and success of his Angel investing, has made over 500 Angel investments in the past ten years.  He expressed optimism about the current opportunities for investing in startups.  Chung characterized the environment as “a buyer’s market” (for investors).  Senkut sees the older venture capital funds as bogged down in “portfolio management” – working actively to nurture prior investments to exits. Angus questioned whether the venture capital model is broken, with companies needing less capital to get started, and limited opportunities for exit.

Conway went through the math comparing taking a small e.g. $1M Angel round and exiting with a $25-30M IPO, versus taking $5M venture capital, raising the bar on the size of exit required.  Senkut added that taking a $50M exit isn’t necessarily a bad thing for many entrepreneurs, although many vc’s would consider it a failure; the vc $ come in at a higher valuation with much larger expectations for exit.  Conway pointed out that both Google and YouTube started out with $1M Angel rounds.  Senkut, who sometimes invests with Conway as part of a syndicate of Angels, sees most Angel rounds going down with 1 to $5M valuations, VC higher.

Conway, Hayes, and Senkut are investors in Mint, a runaway consumer SaaS success story over the past year, taking on Intuit’s Quicken.   Hayes pointed out that web applications can be “fired up in a huge data center with a credit card over the weekend”, so he expects to see some serious effort beyond that being expended before coming for funding.  The need for “traction” prior to seeking Angel investing was debated, with Conway expressing the sentiment that the relationship with the entrepreneur is more important than demonstrated traction.

In terms of trends for Angel investing, Conway is very keen on real-time data, search, and applications.  He sees this type of data as perhaps 1% of web content today, but 25% in three years.  Chung described Garage as sector agnostic, with a focus on capital efficiency, e.g. it requires less than $5M to demonstrate traction in the market.

Summary of Startup Trek’s AlwaysOn “Summit at Stanford” coverage

Steve reporting from the AlwaysOn 'Summit at Stanford' (lower right, green shirts)As of 4:00PM PDT Wed July 30 (event runs another 1 hour):

Pending: Tony Perkins and senior staffers wish Stanford Summit Audience Audu (photo, article pending)

An interview with John Kish, President & CEO, Pano Logic (in edit)

An interview with Dave Kroetsch, President, Aeryon Labs (in edit)

An interview with Promptu CEO (interview at 4:40PM)

An interview with Liquid Scenarios CEO (interview at 5:00PM)

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford 2009

6 Wireless startups spin for 6 minutes, at AlwaysOn 2009

13 Startups spin for 6 minutes in “CEO Showcase” session at AlwaysOn 2009

Panel discussion examines Angel versus Venture investing

Startup Trek covers the 2009 AlwaysOn Venture Capital “Summit at Stanford”

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford opens with review of M&A, IPO market

Fireside Chat with Bill Campbell, Chairman of Intuit

Bill Gurley, and expert panel pontificate about online video’s future at AlwaysOn 2009

Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm CEO addresses AlwaysOn 2009 conference

Mobile panel at AlwaysOn 2009 examines business models

Rafe Needleman of CNET moderates AlwaysOn Cloud Computing panel

Startup Trek interviews hot mobile application startup uTest

AlwaysOn panel discusses the open source software for SaaS web applications

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford opens with review of M&A, IPO market

Vinod Koshla at AlwaysOn 2009Tony Perkins, CEO of AlwaysOn, and TIm Miller, VP at 451 Group opened the AlwaysOn “Summit at Stanford” this evening with an overview of the current M&A and IPO market, and by reviewing the status of the AO 250 announced at last year’s conference.   We’ve recorded a 10-minute segment from the core of the presentation, which will be uploaded later this evening and posted below for replay.

One of the highlights from the 451 Group, 90 percent of strategic acquirers expect private company valuations to decrease six months ago, whereas now only one third do.

AlwaysOn panel discusses open source software for SaaS web applications

Open Source for SaaS panelA panel of entrepreneurs and intellectual property experts discussed the issue of using open source software for SaaS applications, at the AlwaysOn 2009 Summit at Stanford:

  • Matt Asay, VP Business Development, Alfresco; & Blogger, CNET
  • Ron Yekutiel, CEO, Kaltura
  • Satish Dharmaraj, Partner Redpoint Ventures, and Founder, former CEO Zimbra
  • Tom Erickson, CEO, Acquia
  • Kim Polese, CEO, SpikeSource

The issues discussed ranged from IP liability to quality of open source products.  Matt Asay brought up the question of what is the value proposition to the SaaS provider. Polese broke it down as SaaS being about distribution, and open source being about development resources.

We have a “video highlights” summary available, send us an email if you would like a copy.