Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: collaboration (Page 1 of 4)

Defrag 2010: A Chat With Atlassian

November 19, 2010 / / 2 Comments

On day two of the Defrag conference, I wanted to stop by the booth of Atlassian, a Gold Sponsor of Defrag. I was anxious to learn more about what I was hearing is a pretty freaking amazing company. Atlassian-logo You have to love the story: a couple of 22-year-old university dropouts in Sydney decide to start a company together, because they see problems with the state of enterprise software — it's expensive, difficult to configure, and requires huge investments in consulting to implement and years to deploy. So, they launch Atlassian in 2002, ship their first product, JIRA, and become profitable that first year. Fast forward to today: Atlassian has more than 20,000 customers and some 250 employees, on three continents. A few months ago, the company raised its first outside funding, to fuel even more growth: a $60-million investment from Accel Partners. You just don't hear too many stories of such rapid software startup success as this, certainly not coming out of Australia. (My own home country, I'm proud to say!) The company does so much to give back to the community, too, which is touched on in my interview, linked below. Atlassian-products Atlassian is really a different kind of software company, one that's rewritten the rules of enterprise software development and sales. Its bug tracking, collaboration and software development tools allow companies to work smarter and faster — and these tools are especially attractive for startups and small teams. Altassian offers a special package of six of its products, generally for up to 10 users each, for just $10. It's called the Starter program. But, get this: at Defrag 2010, I picked up on an even better offer for cash-strapped startups: how's free? Yes, lucky readers, it's the Free Starter program, which gets you fully functional licenses to all six products, including 12 months of support and updates. The promo code is ATLDEFR10 (and note the offer expires April 1, 2011). Now, let's get right to my interview so you can hear more about this amazing new breed of sofware company: Atlassian….

• Download or listen to my interview with Matt Hodges, a Product Marketing Manager for Atlassian who is now based in San Francisco… (MP3)

(UPDATE: For more on what Atlassian is doing to give back, I meant to inlude this link to a post on one of their blogs: Freemium is Dead…Long Live Causium.)

 

My Live Blog: Defrag 2010

November 16, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Defrag-StageSign I'm in Denver for my fourth consecutive Defrag conference, which is every one since it started in 2007.  This time, it's actually in Broomfield, CO, a suburb, at a nice place called the OMNI Interlocken Resort. I'm starting the live blog on Tuesday evening, as we're gathering in the hotel lobby to go to some sponsored dinners. (I'm headed to Boulder with Gist.)  The conference fires up in the morning, when my live-blogging will begin in earnest.  Check out the agenda.  In the meantime, I have my twitter stream appearing in the live blog, and that of the conference organizer (@defrag), Eric Norlin.  I also have it set up so that any tweets with the hashtag #defragcon will appear in the live blog window, at least for now. (I'll probably shut that off starting in the morning, or it would get to be too much.)  [UPDATE: Decided on the morning of day one to leave it all in! Makes for a more interesting live-blog, and archiving the whole conversation, in proper chronologial order, is pretty cool for anyone who may want to refer back. There were so many *great* Twitter exchanges going on during the event!  I know I made a whole bunch of new Twitter friends… 🙂 ]

I'm looking forward to a great conference!  When the event is completed, I'll archive this live-blog, which switches it around to proper chronological order. And the link for this blog post will remain pemanent for the live-blog archive. That's the big advantage for me to document a conference with this live-blogging tool, compared to just tweeting the event. (Have you tried going back to get an archive of your tweetstream for a certain day or event?  Good luck.) Plus the fact that I can do posts longer than 140 characters. Hope you like it!

Gluecon 2010: A Chat With OxygenCloud

May 29, 2010 / / 0 Comments


OxygenCloud-logo OxygenCloud wants to solve corporate end-users' file management problems with cloud storage. To date, the latter has been used mostly by developers creating applications, not by corporate IT to address end-user file management. Thus, the company says cloud storage lacks easy end-user access, security, and the IT admin tools needed for corporate deployment.

But OxygenCloud is out to change that, by way of a company file network that brings all storage clouds the company uses — public and private — to the desktop of the corporate end-user. 
OxygenCloud-diagram From an intuitive desktop interface, users can access any file, in any cloud, as if it were in local storage.  These files can be shared with anyone, including external users, within an encrypted and secure environment. 

A spinout of LeapFile, OxygenCloud describes itself as a "cloud storage broker."  Its customers can store and secure their files using any cloud provider.  Its service combines these multiple public and private
OxygenCloud-Peter+Alex clouds into a single synthetic cloud, allowing users to balance their cost and performance requirements. Here's my interview with Peter Chang, CEO, shown at left in the photo, with Alex Teu, director of business development.

• Download or listen to Graeme's interview with OxygenCloud (MP3)"


I’m Live-Blogging the Defrag ’09 Conference

November 11, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Defrag-logo+dates Here I am for my third consecutive year covering the Defrag conference in Denver. What an awesome event!  The cream of the crop in tech — big thinkers, and lots of the Internet's movers-and-shakers and upcoming leaders. As I've done at two previous conferences this year, I'll be live-blogging the proceedings right here. I use a tool called Scribble Live, which I really like because I'm not limited to 140 characters per post, as I am when I live-tweet an event. Yet I can still attach photos if I wish to any given post (or even an audio or video file). Plus I can have my Twitter stream appear in real-time within the Scribble Live window as well — so it's the best of all worlds. Please follow along and let me know on Twitter how I'm doing. I'll start with the opening session Wednesday morning, and blog all the way through the final session late Thursday afternoon, when three of the original Cluetrain Manifesto guys will be on stage for the first time in 10 years.

Defrag08: The Definitive Twitter Firehose

November 5, 2008 / / 4 Comments

Well, it's over. Another great Defrag conference — the second annual, to be exact.  And what a great event it was, in downtown Denver on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Defrag08-sign
Aha moments running rampant… Here's my entire Twitter coverage, in convenient "last first" arrangement for your reading pleasure… :-)  That is, if you start by scrolling back to my last Defrag08 tweet on Tuesday 11/4 about 4:30 pm, when I left for the airport.  My coverage totaled some 200 tweets, but I lost count.

Another way to see the ENTIRE FREAKING FIREHOSE is to simply type "Defrag08" in the search box at search.twitter.com.  That will show everyone's tweets that had the hashtag "#defrag08" contained within the already-oh-so-short 140 character tweet length.

And a ton of tweets it was! One speaker did an informal survey of the approximately 300 in attendance, and found upwards of 60% were Twittering the event! That has to be a high point for the larger tech gatherings like this that I regularly attend. (I wonder how many were live-blogging it?  I didn't hear of a single person! Surely a few were. But then blogging is so 2004.)

Yet another feed was one set up by EventVue especially for Defrag. This is a community site that has conference producers sign up with them, allowing their attendees to each create a profile, then interact with other attendees — even in the days before the event begins, as well as during and after. A few months ago, they added a Twitter feature. The nice thing about EventVue's aggregated Defrag feed — which captured the tweets of everyone at the event who was Twittering (as long as they had set up a profile on EventVue) — is that each Twitterer's profile photo showed up next to their tweets, so you could really associate the name to the face. (Note one thing on both of these feeds: post-Defrag tweets started showing up today. Also, I see that EventVue, via the feed link above, isn't allowing me to scroll back very far, to all the tweets during the actual event, Monday and Tuesday. I suspect they may also shut off new entries to this feed soon, or take it down altogether.  However, they previously also created the "@Defrag08" account at Twitter, where you can see all the event's tweets, going all the way back.)

It was amazing the worldwide conversation that all of us Defrag tweeps managed to get going during this very jam-packed event! Here are a couple of screen shots of replies I was getting to my Twitter account.  My favorite?  The one from "johnsonLAB" in Berlin at 1:00 am…  🙂

TweetReplies-toGT-1 















TweetReplies-toGT-2


















UPDATE:  Oh, I almost forgot — photos!  Here's my Flickr set (tagged "Defrag08"), which includes many of the slides I found interesting.

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