I recently did a briefing with Josh Greenbaum of Enterprise Applications Consulting on nGenera’s new collaboration platform for social business, called Spaces by nGenera. Josh and I had a great conversation about our unique approach to this market with this product, centered around having created a compelling user experience geared to drive end-user adoption.

Josh recently blogged about our conversation and makes a compelling point – SharePoint is a strong development environment, and it has a developer advantage in the market. What SharePoint does not have is an end-user advantage, like Excel had / has. With Excel, in many cases the end-users were the model developers and that led to the high degree of stickiness. The end-users felt a certain degree of control over their application and the ability to modify it at any time. I faced this in a prior startup which was selling an enterprise collaborative forecasting offering – the key requirement we found was the ability to export the models from our application to Excel. This was a huge barrier to adoption and Josh’s point came across very clearly to me.

With SharePoint, the IT departments are the ones in control of building the applications, and SharePoint has a distinct advantage with the IT department and developer community for collaborative business applications inside the enterprise over any other platform today. The end-user just needs solutions, and does not care so much about what platform was used to deliver them. To the degree IT can deliver adequate applications to the end-users in a timely manner, the end-users will be satisfied enough to NOT create a groundswell of support for a different platform. For some percentage of applications, this will be the case and SharePoint will be used.

However, with collaboration platforms, meeting some percentage of user cases in the long haul just does not work. These platforms thrive on increased usage and adoption in a viral way. The game is changing with enterprise applications for social and collaborative business uses. Bad applications with poor user experiences can no longer be forced up on end users. Today, there are simply too many choices, and end-users will gravitate to the choice that allows them to be most effective in doing their jobs and meeting their performance expectations. Witness Yammer’s adoption success as a use case. This social and collaborative business software market operates by a pull model. In the prior push model, the path of least resistance was to take whatever IT gave you as an end-user – in most cases, like financials and HR, it was required for the company to actually operate (try missing a payroll!). In the pull model, the path of least resistance is the application that is easily available and best suited for the job, as decided by the end-users.

This end-user pull will not happen overnight. It begins by addressing use cases where SharePoint applications are not being or cannot be provided by IT departments – where “good enough” won’t do or cannot be delivered. For example, the case of a collaboration environment for a company to interact with one to many partners or external vendors is a good example of a SharePoint weak spot. It is also a good example where an end-user can take control over the application needed to address their need and one where a compelling user experience (simple, intuitive, zero-training, and integrated with existing workflows) will make a compelling difference.

As end-users get experience with new application platforms like Spaces, demand will grow for these types of solutions over the more rigid SharePoint applications through end-user pull. This also leads to a developer advantage for the new platform as the user base grows and developers find an attractive market for creating templates, themes, and plug-in applications for these new generation platforms.

I too agree with Josh that the new generation application providers need a strong capability as teachers as well as application development expertise. Read our recent Flash Report and listen to our recent Webinar “Enterprise-wide Engagement by Design” for an example of how nGenera does this.

We are entering a very liberating decade in corporate computing for end users!

I’m determined to get back to using a single smartphone. I was there with the introduction of the iPhone back in 2007. However, once the iPhone 3G came out, I started having the infamous dropped call problem. Since then, I’ve signed up with Google Voice, pointed my Google Voice number at my iPhone, bought a Nokia phone from AT&T, pointed Google Voice at that for taking and making calls, dropped the Nokia and bought the Droid android phone from Motorola on Verizon and pointed Google Voice at that too. I’ve been between worlds for over a year now and it is really painful dealing with two devices.

The Droid just works. I’ve said this many times, and I have most of the apps I need for work. Its user experience is nowhere close to that of the iPhone, and it does not have all of the other consumer app benefits that I get from my iPhone. Plus, I am an Apple nut and really want to stick with my iPhone.

The iPhone is awesome in all regards except for the dropped calls. The basic thing I need is the confidence that my calls will hold and not drop multiple times per conversation.

Here are the options I believe I’m facing for how I can solve this. I hope this may be useful for others facing a similar dilemma.

1. Stick with two devices so that I can keep my iPhone. If I want to manage my costs, I would go to one network and get a simple reliable phone (Nokia bar phone) with a very long battery life. To really manage costs, turn the iPhone into a iTouch and use it with Wifi. I do subscribe to Verizon’s MiFi product which gives me cellular based internet access for 5 devices and use this for my iPad, so I could connect my iPhone there in a WiFi only mode. I doubt I would do this.

2. Ditch the iPhone and get the Droid X. I could also brick the iPhone and connect it via WiFi and MiFi, but it’s unlikely I’d carry around the iPhone and Droid a lot together. The downside is that the user experience degrades with the Droid only approach, as does my app experience on the consumer side – photos, videos, games, etc.

3. Modify my usage of the iPhone to optimize for phone calls. When at home or in the office, turn off the 3G service and use the far more reliable Edge network on AT&T (I do not drop calls on Edge) & turn on WiFi for high speed data access for my apps and web browsing. When mobile, before a long drive where my only use case is to make calls, turn on the Edge network. When mobile and I do not expect a lot of long calls or to be in a car, keep on 3G for high speed data and take a risk that I may drop a call or two if I’m taking or making short calls.

I’m going to “pilot” option #3 above and leave my Droid off for a week and see how it goes. The switching on and off of 3G/Edge is a pain, but less of a pain and less costly than two devices and gives me more of what I want than option #2 above.

I’ll report back on the final decision on #3 and if I will pilot #2.

Image borrowed from successandhappiness.net

While on vacation over my holiday break late last year through early January 2010, I came across this blog post by venture capitalist and prolific blogger Fred Wilson. The post is about The Happiness Project, a book and blogging effort and personal initiative of Gretchen Rubin. Fred piqued my interest enough to purchase this book. I have since embarked upon a lightweight personal happiness project, nothing close to as intense as Gretchen’s effort, but nonetheless, it is turning out to be powerful for me.

Like Fred, I too consider myself to be a very happy person. I am healthy, was born to and raised by incredible parents providing me with life skills that have served me very well, had wonderful educational opportunities, at a young age met and married the love of my life, have two wonderful kids who are the biggest blessings of my life and have great friends. I could go on, but the point is that even with this backdrop, I found Gretchen’s book to be compelling.

Trust me, I don’t run around every day, all day, with a wide smile plastered across my face. Those of you that know me know this to be true. Kids and parenting bring stress, my job as a serial entrepreneur in high technology brings a lot of stress, and my personality requires me to bring stress upon myself despite any best intentions otherwise. These are all threats to my happiness, which is an ultimate life goal for after all; if you are not seeking to find happiness in your life, what are you really doing?

My goal in writing this post is to point people to Gretchen’s book – those that really need it and even those that generally consider themselves to be very happy can find a ton of value in seeking, attaining and maintaining that nirvana of happiness.

Fred mentioned Gretchen’s four splendid truths in his post, which I also found to be compelling. For quick reference, they are as follows:

• To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth
• One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy; One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself
• The days are long, but the years are short (parents of young kids know this one well!)
• You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy; corollary: you’re happy if you think you’re happy

I’m working to remind myself of these truths as I go through my daily activities. In fact, the reality setting in on the truth of “the days being long and the years being short” led me to pursue my project once I got through the first few chapters of the book.

My project is set out much like Gretchen does in her book. She identified 12 “areas to work on” for improving her overall happiness – she calls these her “important elements to happiness”. Like Fred and me, Gretchen was also already a happy person. Yet, as I read the book I realized that I found myself falling short of the four splendid truths on a regular basis and that attacks on my happiness were happening all of the time. I figured anything I could do on a habitual basis to improve my overall happiness will be felt positively by those around me – my wife, kids, family, colleagues, investors, and so on. The project was intended to make seeking happiness a habitual pursuit.

I finally got around to this plan by the end of February and committed to the process. I picked by 12 critical factors, and will work on one factor per month for the next 12 months. After a year, I will re-assess the factors and start again and seek to make this a lifelong endeavor; I expect many or most of the factors will carry-over from year-to-year as they will require annual tuning and attention because they are so fundamental.

My 12 factors for this year are:

Passion, Energy, Marriage, Parenthood, Work, Attitude, Money, Health, Friends, Eternity, Play, Mindfulness.

The ordering at the front-end had to do with some things happening in my life as I assessed my next 10 years, a period of time when my kids (quickly) will go from being very young kids to teenagers and when I will grow in the next stage of my career. I am approaching an inflection point in my professional career and would like to set a course for the next 10 years that builds well upon the last 10 years.

I’ll attempt to post about my findings on each factor after each month. I started the project with the element of Passion – with the thinking that if I found my core passion around work, career, and contribution to society, then that would help chart the course for the next 10 years. March just ended so the Passion post is coming soon.

Purchase Gretchen’s book – even without a happiness project of your own, you will be stimulated by ideas from the book that will make you and others around you happier overall!

Bill Gross, the legendary bond fund manager at PIMCO, has been writing for a few years now about the new normal of global finance and the implications for investing and investing strategies going forward. I recently came across this awesome guest post by George Zachary of Charles River Ventures on the Venture Hacks blog – and it struck me as describing the new normal of venture investing and as a result of venture-backed startups.

It is a must-read for any entrepreneur operating in VC-backed startup land as well as for anyone in venture capital.

In particular, I noted this chart below which was included in the post. The data on this chart make a pretty clear case that cheap money is not only gone, but it will not be around for a long time. The dynamics of capital have changed, and we are entering a new normal phase for the foreseeable future.

Lastly, note the first commenter in this post as well … the good news, in my opinion, is that innovation will not stop, and cloud-computing, mobile technology, smart-grid, clean-tech and others will continue to add value and generate strong returns and new market leaders. Remember, the 1966-1981 period of prior negative aggregate speculative returns was also a period of time that produced such market leaders as Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Genentech and others. We are indeed back to fundamentals.

This 2004 Stanford University eCorner lecture series interview with Randy Komisar, serial entrepreneur and Partner at Kleiner Perkins, is one of the best snippets of what it takes to succeed as a venture capital backed entrepreneur. Randy also highlights the value and key attributes of the US Venture Capital model. The video is 8 minutes long and is a “must watch” for every entrepreneur playing or seeking to play in the venture model.

Enjoy …