Samsung: Facebook Has Huge Impact On Device Sales, Electronics Industry Growth (video)

March 23, 2011

At a press event today, Samsung Electronics gave a brief overview of some of the key technologies and driving forces that the Korean company is working on these days.

To kick off the lunch event, Vice President Jim Elliott described how mobile computing has reached a key inflection point within the electronics industry.

Mobile Computing to be 10X Desktop Computing

Mobile Computing to be 10X Desktop Computing

“We’re expecting more than 10 billion units of sales of these connected devices or mobile Internet devices over the next decade. This is an order of magnitude over the desktop Internet era which helped propelled the growth of the last decade,” said the Samsung executive.

These connected devices are GPSes, laptops, tablets, all integrated seamlessly to the cloud. “There is a tremendous amount of back-end infrastructure that is needed to drive all these connected devices seamlessly as people look more and more to the cloud to power this data transfert.”

Samsung sees Facebook driving the growth of the entire electronics industry

The Impact of Facebook on the Electronics Industry Keeps Growing

Interestingly, for Samsung, Facebook is now the new killer app that is driving the whole electronics industry. The social network is having a huge impact on connected device sales as more than 200 million people are accessing it a mobile device. And according to Facebook, people that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active than non-mobile users.

“In the past, a lot of times it was when a new operating system launched that really spurred PC sales, now it’s social networking and particularly Facebook is so impactful on people’s usage patterns and daily lives and this is having a huge impact on infrastructure and device sales,” adds Elliott.

For the Samsung executive, social networks are also the driver for Internet usage, even more popular than e-mail!

Web 3.0 traffic has a huge impact on Internet traffic load

“Think about the traffic, the load impact that this has on the Internet, on the backbone to move this around. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, about 31K petabytes per month needed to drive these pictures, videos… 1 petabyte is 13.3 years of HD video.”

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[SDForum] Cloud Startups Must Hit $10 Million To Attract Venture Money

April 16, 2009

Speaking at last night’s SDForum‘s town hall event on venture capital investment in software startups, venture capitalists from Morgenthaler and Shasta Ventures want to see software-as-a-service (SaaS) or enterprise Cloud computing startups reach $10 million in sales before considering investing in it.

“What we’ve learn over the last 5 years is that SaaS companies take a lot longer to get profitable that what most VCs plan on. And a lot of these SaaS companies can hit $10 million in revenues and then they hit a ceiling. And so we’ll go very early stage in a few things but things like SaaS where we learned that lessons through the years – unless there’s an extreme hockey stick ramp – we’ll wait until they hit that [$10 million] mark,” explains Morgenthaler Ventures principal, Rebecca Lynn.

And to further make her point, Lynn adds:

“There’s just a lot of expense to get that momentum going. But if we see something as compelling as Salesforce that is taking off like wildfire and virally adopted, that would be an exception. in general, what we’ve seen in SaaS is that they could be very good companies but is sort of a slug up to a certain point.”

However, cloud startups can break that $10 million ceiling by having quick sales cycle, as Shasta Ventures, Evan Liang explains:

“What we’ve seen about this $10 million ceiling is wether or not that company can be very crisp in their value proposition and have a very repeatable sale process. It seems that if you have a great founder, he can personally bring himself to a certain revenue, but if you can’t build that sustainable, scalable salesforce that’s when they hit the wall.”

For Shai Goldman, who co-manages Silicon Valley Bank Capital‘s Venture Exchange program, the cloud startups that are doing well do telesales and use a lot of self-service features to accelerate the sales cycle rather than having a lot of salespeople out there trying to sale one company at a time. “I’ve seen companies with $1 million revenue run-rate, meaning you have to hit a $100,000 in revenue or so and growing, and at that point they can raise a series A,” said Goldman.

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Netbooks Are Hot And They Might Learn To Boot Up In Seconds

December 1, 2008

Small, cheap notebooks – known as netbooks – are among the hottest products in the PC market place.

Cloud OS boots inside a browser with icons at the bottom on the screen

Cloud OS boots inside a browser with icons at the bottom on the screen

Good OS would also like them to become quicker to turn on. The Emeryville, CA, company that supplies the Linux operating system that debuted in computers at Wal-Mart, announced a stripped-down operating system it says boots in seconds.

The product, called “Cloud,” opens in a browser and displays icons at the bottom of a Web page much as they are displayed in the Macintosh OS from Apple. Users navigate among the icons to make Skype phone calls, access Gmail e-mail, or reach Google Docs.

The OS is to first appear in a touch-screen laptop made by Giga-byte Technology of Taiwan and distributed early next year. The laptop is to be shown off at the Netbook World Summit this week in Paris.

According to Good OS, Cloud also allows users to “switch to the main operating system (Windows or a full version of Linux) with a single click.”

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Posted by Mark Boslet

[Dreamforce '08] Salesforce.com CEO: Our Strategy Is “Love”, Microsoft “Hates” Everybody

November 3, 2008
Salesforce.com CEO thinks he's Neil Young!

Salesforce.com CEO thinks he

All you need is Love. And love was indeed what Salesforce.com CEO needed after fielding questions from media and analysts for close to 2 hours – probably the longest I ever attended!

The question about Microsoft competion actually started Marc Benioff’s rant against the world’s largest software company. “They hate everybody and we love everybody. We love Microsoft, even if they hate us. And that’s how we are different. Our Force [referring to the company's cloud computing platform] strategy is love,” joked Benioff.

Salesforce.com dreams of a world of multiple “open” clouds

For the Salesforce.com co-founder, Microsoft will never release its customer relation (CRM) software on the iPhone or the Blackberry because Microsoft “hates them.”

But beyond the rethoric, Benioff’s vision is a world of clouds, of multiple clouds connected to each other: Salesforce.com cloud, Amazon cloud, Google cloud and even Microsoft cloud, if they ever open it.

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Trend Micro Bets Company Future on Cloud Computing Offering

October 14, 2008

John Maddison, vice president of core technology solutions, Trend Micro

Speaking at the Cloud Summit Executive conference in Mountain View, Calif., John Maddison, vice president of core technology solutions for Trend Micro, was so bullish about the prospect of cloud computing that he’s willing to bet the future of the anti-virus company on it!

“Our vision is that most of the processing and analysis of computer threats will happen in the cloud and that endpoint clients [be it PCs, mobile...] will ping the service to check on potential malware or threats”, explained Maddison.

Trend’s cloud offering dubbed the “Smart Protection Network” is currently in beta testing and requires to download on a computer a very light weight software client that will then in turn call the company’s on-line service every time there’s a change on the computer.

“This client is one-tenth the size of a traditional antivirus software. Both the antivirus engine and the signatures are on-line versus running locally on the computer”, adds the Trend Micro executive.

Read the rest of this entry »

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[SDForum] Cloud Computing Bubble to Burst Early 2010, Forrester Research Predicts

October 1, 2008
James Staten, analyst, Forrest Research

James Staten, analyst, Forrest Research

At SDForum‘s Cloud Computing event this morning in Santa Clara, Calif., Forrester Research analyst James Staten, predicted the burst of the Cloud Computing “bubble” for January/February 2010.

“What’s going to happen is that in the fourth quarter of next year, people are going to look for examples of who’s doing cloud computing profitability and for enterprises that are changing their practices to adopt cloud computing technologies. And they’ll find none or a few and the market will move on to the next new thing”, said Staten.

In his talk, Staten tried to dispel some of the Cloud “washing” or hype. The Forrester analyst also predicted that service providers (ISPs, ASPs…) are going to add cloud computing offering in their service portfolio and that enterprises will build “inferior” internal clouds which will also connect to external clouds from Amazon, Salesforce.com and the likes. Finally, the cloud computing market is getting crowded, even VMware and Citrix have a cloud offering!, and much more diverse: public (ISPs, Amazon…), private, application focus (Google, EngineYard…) and probably a mix of all this.

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