T-Shirt Friday #19 – Search Engine College
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series. If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decisio

Thanksgiving huh?
So it’s Thanksgiving. And it makes perfect sense that the only regular CloudAve writer who ISN’T based in the US should get to have a holiday as well… even if he’s actually going to be at work today (Thanksgiving isn’t a New Zealand holiday although, as anyone who has visited here will attest to, we sure have lots to be thankful for in our country). So ther you go – no mention of cloud computing, PaaS offerings, SaaS solutions, integrations, VC funding, pricing models or any of the other minutiae that normally graces these pages. Rather a thank you to you all… Thanks to

Mixing SaaS and OpenSource, A Case Study…
One of my favorite posts was written over two years ago, back when I was still trying to tie down this SaaS thing. In my post I called for an approach by SaaS vendors to recreate parts of the OpenSource ethos in order to build their customer base and even their product. I said in my post; Imagine if you will a situation where a revenue generating SaaS product builds a community of such committed users that they become the salesforce, an integral part of the development team and the PR gang. I was talking recently to a SaaS vendor who i

Chris Liddell Leaving Microsoft
Big news for the Kiwis out there – Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell is leaving the company at the end of the year. The Microsoft position was a bit of a coup for New Zealand, one of our own filling a high profile role for a (very) high profile company. Liddell himself seems upbeat, saying that; My time at Microsoft has been an outstanding experience, and I am delighted to be leaving the company in such great shape, we have built a world-class finance team and established strong internal accountability. Microsoft is c

Collaboration? I’ll have Two of Those – In Blue Please
My good friend and buzzword slayer Mike Riversdale, is in the habit of slaying the dragons of enterprise newspeak. He regularly bemoans organizations whose collaboration strategy is articulated (somewhat facetiously) by the title above – you know, the organization who pay lip service to collaboration and fully believe that it’s a technical issue rather than a cultural one. It’s an issue I come to time and time again in two distinct fields – collaboration and social media. In the social media space it generally rears its head in the form of a large business that wants to “do” social media – either because they see it happening in other business and want to play