John McArthur’s New Venture Blog

My recent blog post on Skype and Logitech inspired one of Skype’s bloggers, Villu Arak, to locate this history of picture phones.   If you look through the history, you’ll notice several different jobs that were being proposed for the picture phones: business communication, grandparents staying connected with grandchildren, soldiers calling home.  While AT&T’s initial implementations failed, the jobs still needed to be done.

This post by Villu confirms that fact, as he writes about some of the ways that Skype is being used today:

Distant lovers enjoying dinner — and each other’s company — over a free video call.

Local-government officials replacing meetings with multichats.

Homesick soldiers keeping a line open with their families. (more…)

 

Thought I’d better write this before Jon Toigo corrects me.  It was late when I finished writing my last blog post.

Jon, please accept my apologies for ever implying that you would do anything in an abashed or covert way.

There’s nothing stealthy about Jon.  Here is Jon’s invite to his Non-SNW event in Orlando, available by way of link to Jon’s recent DrunkenData blog post, and reprinted here entirely without permission: (more…)

I’ve spent a good part of this past week getting ready for Storage Networking World, co-sponsored by SNIA and ComputerWorld, and the I’m-Not-Going-to-Storage-Networking-World event hosted entirely at his own expense by Jon Toigo at a nearby, but semi-secret, location.  In honor of the two events, I felt compelled to write about storage.  But first, I’ll start with a one-question qualifying quiz.

Small and Medium Business (SMB) Storage Administrator Qualifying Exam

Question: Your “storage system” consists of 25 disk drives that are housed in 8 separate database and file servers.  Some of your applications are growing rapidly and require a lot more storage.  Others are not growing. In total, you have plenty of available storage capacity, but it sits inside servers that aren’t accessible to the applications that need extra capacity.  You want to move to a storage area network, because you’ve heard that all of the storage will then be available to all of the applications and can be managed as a shared pool. You must accomplish the migration of data from the internal drives to a new, blazingly-fast, infinitely-scalable storage area network without interrupting application availability or data access, and without screwing up volume names.  From the following,  select the answer that most closely describes the correct approach: (more…)

While I am constantly immersed in some aspect of technology, on a personal level, I’m a bit of a technology laggard.  If something is working, I don’t have a driving need to replace it with the latest technology. I still own one black-and-white television and two of my televisions have rabbit ears, though I won’t keep them past February 17, 2009, when a  digital converter will be necessary to allow them to continue to work.

However, having just returned from the U.K., where I spent $0.99 per minute to make calls back to the U.S. on my AT&T Blackberry (that’s with the International Calling Plan discount), I decided I need to join the more-technically-current crowd.  Turns out that for many situations, a Logitech camera and microphone together with a Skype account provided the perfect remedy to the pain of expensive international calls.

I was in New York in 1964, to see the 1964 New York World’s Fair.  I don’t think that Skype and Logitech are what AT&T had in mind, when they showed their Picturephone at the Fair.  It’s rather impressive what 44 years of additional innovation can bring.

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I got a call today from a solutions specialist at one of IBM’s larger resellers.  He had what he thinks is the perfect first opportunity for our client, Tek-Tools. The opportunity was at a relatively small shop - 2 VMware ESX servers and one IBM N-Series filer.  The issue was that the person responsible for managing the environment was having performance problems and the environment was growing rather quickly.  Maybe too quickly.  So he needed some visibility into the source of the problems and the growth. I had shown him Tek-Tools Profiler for VMware and Profiler for NetApp, about a month ago. Sorry, I can’t give you the reseller’s name, because you never know how the parents might react, if you know what I mean.

Some have described Tek-Tools’ Profiler Suite as a bit of a Swiss Army Knife.  It provides reporting and monitoring on almost everything.

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RyanAir is in a lot of businesses, but they are definitely not in the airline business.  The airplanes they fly are simply the delivery mechanism for a lot of other services.  And since the airplane is the method of delivery, RyanAir has done everything they can possible do to reduce their per-plane cost. For example, they have

• Maximized seat density, making it impossible for anyone with an inseam greater than 32″ to slouch in the seat.
• Eliminated the removable safety-instructions card and replaced them with laminated labels on each seatback.
• Eliminated the seat-back pockets so passengers won’t put trash in them, thus reducing the time to clean a plane.
• Boarded and deplaned from both the front and the rear of the plane, thus reducing the airport turnaround time to about 25 minutes.
• Standardized on a single style plane, the Boeing 737-800, to reduce pilot and crew costs.
• Arranged for landing rights and terminal gates in the lowest-cost locations in Europe.

You may be asking, “If RyanAir’s not in the airline business, then what business are they in?”  Well, here’s a hint… (more…)

It’s been just over a year, since I left IDC to form Walden Technology Partners, Inc. with David Burmon.  While I didn’t expect to continue spending so much time in the storage and data management industry, that is how things have worked out initially.  All of our current clients are involved, at least in part, in some aspect of information protection, storage, or management.  And with the continued growth in information and content, a growth that is relatively immune to the effects of economic conditions, it should not have been a surprise to me. 

Note that I said that the growth of content is relatively immune to economic conditions.  The market for storage hardware and information management software has been proven many times to be highly affected by economic conditions.

Problems in information management have been around forever, and will persist far into the future, as this YouTube video documents.  You’ve got to watch it.  Really.  And it’s not a product pitch.  (more…)

Shortly after I started working with StorMagic, I suggested they create a Facebook group.  One of the initial target markets for StorMagic is the education market, and given the number of college students on Facebook, it seemed like a logical fit. We’re only a few weeks into this, but I’m pleased to see that the number of members is up to 46 and includes some pretty well-known, well-connected analysts, venture capitalists, and potential partners and customers.  Facebook groups are a great way to notify interested people about changes, enhancements, new materials and upcoming events. 

That brings me to the Web 2.0 double-dip comment.  Facebook is one tool that can be leveraged for marketing and community-building.  Another is YouTube.  StorMagic just completed their first video and uploaded it to YouTube.  You can see it here.  But they also notified the 46 members of the StorMagic Facebook group about the video, by posting a notice on the group’s posted-items board.  We’ll see what kind of traffic it generates, but having created the video, YouTube is a low-cost way of beginning to circulate it.  I just watched it, and it does a pretty good job of demonstrating the simplicity of implementing a StorMagic iSCSI storage area network.

I’d really like to hear your opinion on two things:

1. Using Facebook as a community building and marketing tool
2. Using YouTube to cost-effectively demonstrate key features of a solution

I’d also like your suggestions for other Web 2.0 tools that are effective in raising awareness and building communities for a supplier’s customers, partners, and prospects.

One last thing.  Can you give us some feedback on the video?