Economics

Venture capitalists tire of Twitter-y start-ups

New data from research firm CB Insights shows that venture capital firms have tired of pure-play Twitter start-ups as investment financing has dropped by half over the last year.

From June 2008 to May 2009, $21.6 million was invested by venture capitalists and angel investors into pure-play Twitter start-ups. In the June 2009 to May 2010, time frame, the investment funding dropped more than 50 percent to $10.4 million. The average amount invested also dropped dramatically from a nearly $2 million average round last year to just over $1 million more recently.

According to CB Insight's Anand … Read more

Benchmarking-software industry remains profitable

Despite the fact the economy remains teetered on the edge of oblivion, software companies have increased their profitability dramatically over the last year, according to a recently concluded annual benchmarking study of the small and mid-sized software industry conducted by information services provider OPEXEngine.

Benchmarking is an important part of the software industry these days as companies look to ensure that they are providing what customers want and that your company meets the performance needs.

The 2010 benchmarks were developed in concert with SIIA and were based on the confidential data provided by approximately 50 small and mid-size software vendors … Read more

Survey: 98 percent of enterprises using open source

Not only is open-source software thriving in systems management but across businesses as a whole, according to a new survey released Tuesday. A nearly 4-year-long survey of open-source systems management usage compiled by open-source software developer Zenoss showed that 98 percent of the respondents said they used open-source software in their enterprises.

These latest statistics, along with survey results from consulting firm Accenture, are further testament to the inevitability of the pervasiveness of open-source software.

What's important to note about the survey results is how both the perception and reality of open-source software has changed--users believe the software is … Read more

From feature to product the free-mium way

One of the struggles in developing software is figuring out which features are part of a bigger product and which ones may be products in and of themselves.

A case in point is Zurb, which makes the Notable application for Web site feedback. In June, Zurb launched a simplified version of Notable called Bounce, which it viewed as a demonstration of just one of Notable's features. Little did Zurb's team know that Bounce was not just a feature, but a new product that intrigued a broad user base.

Bounce saw these results:

The Bounce site went from zero to more than 30,000 links pointing to it in first seven days after launch. Bounce went from zero to about 150 countries using the tool in first seven days after launch. In its first month, Bounce made it to the No. 4 spot in Google search results for "bounce."

While these statistics will surely change over time, they are impressive. So what made this launch successful? … Read more

Big data in context

A few weeks back I attended venture firm Accel Partners' New Data Workshop event and learned quite a bit about the state of what we are now commonly referring to as "big data" and the challenges that await the vendors trying to target this new way of slicing and dicing vast amounts of information.

One of the big takeaways for me was the realization that even with all of the processing power available nowadays, the amount of data is growing at such a rapid pace that people are simply looking to cope with the problem, rather than facing it head on.

The issue of processing large amounts of data is not necessarily new--most developers and IT staff can tell you about having too much information to deal with--but, the big difference is that there are new approaches, tools and technologies that can help alleviate the difficult in processing.

Over the course of the last 30 years or so the way that machines process transactions has changed, but so too has the vast amount of data that is being processed and collected, now with an eye toward real-time analysis of information.

This has led to the advent of a number of technologies that allow for data processing to be offloaded and managed in both structured and unstructured ways--examples include open-source projects like Memcached and Hadoop as well as NoSQL data storage mechanisms like Cassandra.… Read more

Report: Women driving virtual good sales

Set to be released later today, the latest Digital Goods Spending Report by analyst firm VG Market and in-game monetization provider Playspan, shows that the burgeoning market for virtual goods is still just scratching the surface of the enormous opportunity ahead.

July's report reveals that 75 percent of the respondents (a sample size of 2,221 respondents was polled) have used real-world money to pay for virtual goods, and that roughly half expect to continue to spend about the same amount of real-world cash over the next 12 months.

Additionally, women over the age of 25 are stepping up … Read more

Rackspace goes open source with cloud platform

Data center and cloud infrastructure service provider Rackspace is expected to announce Monday the release of a new open-source offering that will allow users to build and launch their own internal and hosted clouds.

Dubbed OpenStack, the new Apache-licensed project will feature several cloud infrastructure components, including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, the company's highly scalable storage engine.

In addition to the initial offering, a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology is expected to be available later this year.

Rackspace has been hosting enterprise computing … Read more

Want venture capital? Come to California

Despite the fact that the state is constantly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, California remains at the top of the venture capital heap churning out the most deals with the most dollar volume in the second quarter of 2010.

A new report from private company research firm CB Insights reveals that California companies took more than 50 percent of total venture dollars in the second quarter with financings breaking the $3 billion funding mark and more than half of those funds going toward health care and Internet companies. In addition to California, two other states--Massachusetts and New York--accounted for … Read more

Cloudera goes enterprise with new Hadoop offering

Cloudera, a provider of support and services around the open-source cloud platform Apache Hadoop, on Tuesday announced Cloudera Enterprise, a suite of subscription-only add-ons to its free distribution.

The core platform, called Cloudera's Distribution for Hadoop (or CDH for short), was first unveiled in March 2009 and is 100 percent open-source software. Now, the company is offering Cloudera Enterprise, a suite of additional tools for monitoring, managing, and administering a cluster in production to complement the core CDH platform--for a fee.

This business model fits into the open-core category, where companies charge for exclusive tools or functions on top … Read more