Chalk Talk

Dangers of Hyper SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 21:32:00 +0000

SEO tactics have continuously become more sophisticated as marketers learn how to get the results they want from Google, Bing and Yahoo. What we are hearing from the search engines however is that they are trying to give visitors the best possible experience by providing information that closely meets their search criteria. Google and Bing both have indicated recently that so-called Hyper SEO tactics will become less effective as the search engines put more emphasis on freshness and quality of the content as well as social media signals.

Google recently announced Google+ Your World search which where google users will get results that include information from people they follow socially. Matt Cutts, the chief of Google Webspam prevention went further in recent comments suggesting that those engaging in Hyper SEO practices run the possible risk of being delisted by Google.

Hyper SEO tactics most commonly used are paid blog/comment postings and using mini sites to build links to sites. The danger signal is when the search engine is seeing a lot of links to the root domain and not a lot of deep links. Interesting sites generate lots of new page content and interested readers who share them.

How do you deal with this change? Simple start creating interesting content! If you really engage in social media and start talking to your audience through blog and social outlets, your going to gain the benefits of the increased engagement and avoid getting slammed by Google.

How do I market my online training courses?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:34:00 +0000

Effectively marketing your online training courses can be one of the most challenging aspects of building a training business. As subject matter experts, you are expected to know the topic you are teaching but to be an effective training business person, you also need to know how to attract and sell prospective clients on your services. Here are a few tried and true rules and tips to keep in mind.

1. Identify your market (be specific!) - To begin marketing, you must be certain of your market. Be very specific. If you say "Anyone can take my course" then you should start marketing door-to-door. A well defined market might be "Electrical Engineers who require annual continuing education courses".

2. Know your audience - Who is the typical buyer? What are their motivations for buying your course? What problem does your course solve for them (CE credits, hard to find skills etc.)?

3. Do what already works - If you are effectively marketing classroom based training, the same marketing techniques will work for online courses. Putting your courses online doesn't create a new market for you, it creates a new audience of consumers. Don't assume you have to do all your marketing of online courses through online methods.

4. Make it measurable - Use promo codes, tracking codes and coupons to help identify what tactic you use is effective and what is not. Make sure you plan time to tally and measure the results so you can use that data to refine your message and focus on the most productive tactics.
If you follow those rules, it's hard to go wrong. Here are a few tactics that have been most effective for our customers.

a. Email blasts & Newsetters - Your best clients are your existing clients. Send them helpful, simple informative emails (not more than monthly) that let them know about new courses and special offers. Email is (almost) free and has fast, measurable results.

b. Direct mail - Direct mail (yes, I said that) post cards and tastefully written (ONE PAGE!) letters to your target market. We are on the Internet now, direct mail is dead right? WRONG! You get dozens of email ads every day but how many letters do you get? Direct mail can go to new contacts the CAN SPAM law don't allow you to email.

c. Business to Business - Find associations and organizations that would benefit from offering your courses and get them to promote the course for you. The right affiliate partner can produce thousands of new clients.

Notice, nowhere did I list a great flashy website. The internet is clogged with websites. Yes, you should have a site but don't spend more than 15% of your marketing budget on web design, it simply won't pay you back. Web advertising can be highly effective, (DigitalChalk get's over 80% of it's business from online ads) but it can be expensive per new client unless your training packages sell for several hundred dollars or more.

Create eLearning with HD Video

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:20:00 +0000

Building great elearning courses using HD Video is getting a lot easier. When we launched DigitalChalk over four years ago, we devoted a significant effort to making it easy to upload and share videos for training. Unfortunately the elearning market wasn't quite as ready for video as we hoped. Things have definitely changed and at this point even the most technology aversed instructors are embracing the idea that they can and should use video as a training tool.

Earlier this year we launched a new technology for building courses using high definition video called HDLearn. We dramatically increased the maximum quality of the video that can be delivered and significantly reduced the complexity required to upload and share videos in DigitalChalk. I thought it might be helpful to give you a few tips on how to produce videos that can be shared quickly on DigitalChalk.

1. Camera options - There are really two kinds of video used in elearning, the video captured from a video camera and the kind of video captured by recording software on your computer. When talking about recording video of lectures or discussions it's important to be sure your camera supports 720p or 1080p recording in MP4 or MOV formats. If you camera has both 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios, it will give you the most flexibility. I recommend you stay away from MiniDV cameras because moving the files from tape to a computer is an unneeded hassle with today's flash and hard-drive capabile cameras.

2. Lighting and background - It's really essential that you spend time thinking about the lighting and the background behind the subjects on video. Poor lighting becomes very obvious to the students. A neutral low contrast background will also improve lighting as well as help keep students focused on the subject on camera.

3. Screen recording tools are very plentiful. Make sure the recording tools you use can export a standard video file type. In our experience, it's better to use standard video formats rather than Flash or Silverlight animation files. Standard video formats can be edited with other camera video and you can use any standard video editor to make changes.

4. Video editors - Depending on what you are recording, there are a lot of options for video editing. Most computers have either Windows Movie Maker (WMM) or iMovie (Mac) preinstalled. These products are perfectly fine choices for the casual media editor who is cutting a few clips together. Most businesses have access to Adobe Creative Suite or FinalCut Pro for the Mac.

5. Importing video to DigitalChalk - Once you are satisfied with your editing, it's time to export your file from the editor and upload it to DigitalChalk. With DigitalChalk HDLearn technology you have a maximum of 1 Gigabyte per video file you can upload (or one hour, whichever is greater) per individual lesson. The best settings for exporting are as follows:

a) H.264 MP4 codec (others are supported but this is ideal)

b) 720p (1280x720 widescreen or 1280x960 standard screen) size

c) Target bit rate or quality of 2.5 megabits per second (2500kbps)

If you follow these settings you should be able to export a high quality video file of up to an hour long at well below 1gigabyte in size.

Once you have created your lesson chalkboard in DigitalChalk you select the Manage Media link and click the + button to add your media file.

6. Tips for video lessons - Don't forget that DigitalChalk has a lot of options for putting in chapter points, check point questions and displaying slides in the chalkboard editor. Sometimes you can mix the media and ask a question on video with a pop-up that is triggered inside of the DigitalChalk chalkboard to create a highly interactive feel to your video lessons.

Sell Online Courses

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:57:00 +0000

DigitalChalk has become a market leading platform to sell online courses. We are thrilled to see the growth in sales our content partners are enjoying on DigitalChalk. When it comes to online video training software, DigitalChalk has taken the lead in giving you a complete toolkit to develop, sell and deliver online classes that include s treaming HD video.

If you are interested in marketing your professional skills in the form of online training courses or take your current classroom content to the Web, we would be honored to serve you. DigitalChalk currently has over 1,600 organizations delivering more than 4,000 courses worldwide.

Setup Training Online

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 19:20:00 +0000

The effort to setup online training has become much easier in the past few years with the introduction of hosted software systems like DigitalChalk. The hurdles of purchasing, configuring and managing software and servers have been removed with the introduction of Software as a Service (SaaS) products. If you have course content ready in a digital format such as Powerpoint, video or SCORM modules, you can setup, configure and deliver online training in just a few hours.

At DigitalChalk we are constantly striving to reduce the time and complexity required to product high quality elearning courses for online delivery. We offer online tutorials on how to setup online training for free. If you would like to have a live demonstration, contact us at 877-321-2451 option 1.

Keywords with Google Wonder Wheel

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 19:21:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered what people search for in place of the keywords you are already buying in PPC or optimizing for in SEO? Wouldn't it be cool if Google would give you a search "thesaurus"? They actually do, it's a very cool tool call the Wonder Wheel. Here is how it works:

1. Bring up the classic google search page and make sure that Instant Search is off. (for some reason Google thinks we don't need wonder wheel if we are instant searching)

2. Search on a keyword or phrase that use commonly use for your target audience. One the result page you will see the option for the wonder wheel on the left column.

3. Click on the wonder wheel and you will automatically see a spoked wheel representation of all the other phrases people search on when they also search for your keyword/phrase.

Pretty cool huh? For me this visual representation of the phrases is much better than suggested keywords in PPC.

More Bang for your Bing Buck

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:44:00 +0000

Bing's Adcenter is the first potential PPC challenger to Adwords I have found. The experience is better than Yahoo and the early returns on ad results are surprisingly good.

I have to admit, I was a little reluctant to jump into PPC ad marketing on Bing. Last year when they announced Bing, there was absolutely no way I could find to even setup an ad account. I recently used Bing to search for airline tickets and found that their user experience was better than any of the travel sites. As the market data recently reveals, Bing is growing at the expense of Yahoo, not Google so clearly it's a potential avenue for getting more clicks from new eyes. As a relatively seasoned Google Adwords administrator for our brand DigitalChalk as well as managing campaigns for several customers, I have a few preconceived ideas about how PPC should work and how it should be managed. My initial reaction of how Microsoft Adcenter works was surprisingly positive. Here are the pros and cons compared to Google Adwords and Yahoo.

Setup steps
The setup was simple and fast. Just as with Google and Yahoo, the setup wizards are designed to be usable for first time web marketers. I did have an initial hiccup, as a Mac user, the only browser Microsoft supports on my machine is Firefox so Safari & Chrome lovers, tough luck. This is unfortunately what I have come to expect from MS. Overall, the flow to get my first campaign going was good. It looked like a lot of "borrowing" of ideas from Adwords happened but that make setup feel more familiar to me. Early in the process, they mentioned that campaigns could be imported from Google but that turned out to be less useful than I had hoped. I was forced to create a campaign and bring in keywords before I was show any information about importing from Adwords. It turns out that the import really is just an option to bring in a campaign as a CSV exported from Adwords but you have to manually edit the CSV headers to make it work so on balance, just copying stuff in was as fast.

I started by building a campaign that mirrored my primary, highest performing campaign in Adwords. My goal was to get a feel for how the two performed side-by-side in a similar campaign. I used the same ads and keywords. I was initially thrilled that I could just copy from the Adwords Spreadsheet editor my keywords column and paste it into the keyword box without error. It was a bit disappointing when I realized Adcenter stripped out all my exact match [] and phrase match " " parameters but the upside was they stripped those out for me instead of throwing an error. The better thing would have been to parse my parameters and set them on the campaign. On balance, the whole process was fairly quick. I had my campaign published and my account setup in about 20 minutes.

Bidding and configuration
Once I got into my campaign and started to look at how Adcenter had created it, I found a few differences that didn't initially compute for me but some of that is probably adwords assumptions. For those of you accustom to using Adwords, you realize that for a given campaign, you can select the target audience of Search or Content Network in the settings. Adcenter assumes that you obviously would want to have both search and content in your campaign by default. What was a bit odd to me is that rather than letting me specify the target by campaign, it created two identical keywords, one for search and one for content. At first I thought their underlying model is bleeding through to the control panel but as I started to use it, I realized I liked that better than having to manage two campaigns. Adcenter does allow you to set bidding preferences for each type and also set unique bids for each keyword.

The keyword management was a bit buggy feeling. It could have been sub-par support of Firefox but one very annoying thing was that you have to switch to an edit view to set the Exact Match, Phrase Match or Broad settings. If you have to paginate to view the second page of keywords in this editor, it throws an error message telling you changes must be saved. The only way to save is to click Next to exit from that view. With seven pages of keywords, I had to edit, save, exit, return and edit seven times. You can however change your bids from the main view, so that was redeeming. The rules for pagination seemed odd also. In the main view my keywords took three pages, in the edit view they took seven.

Cost and results

When I setup my campaign in the initial wizard, it asked me what I wanted my total budget for a month to be (Note: to Microsoft, we LOVE our daily budget on Google) and a max PPC. I setup a campaign that was 1/3 of the Adwords budget and about 70% of the max PPC I use in Google.

There is no recommendations engine for Adcenter that I can see so if you are a first time marketer in PPC, choosing a starting bid is a stab in the dark. After realizing the content and search keywords were separate and all included in the campaign, I went in and set the global search and content max bids separately (good feature microsoft). Here is where it got yummy good, the ads pushed live very quickly and reporting data started flowing back in within the first hour. For a compulsive report watcher, that was like candy to me. I quickly realized I was hitting first position on most of my placements at the default bids and my cost per click was about 1/3 of what I was paying in Adwords. I dropped my default bid and tweaked a few keywords out that were behaving differently than on Google. Right now my average CPC is about 30% of Google with about the same number of impressions.

Reporting

As I mentioned above, the data started flowing in faster than I am accustom to with Google. This could be a very good thing in managing new campaigns but in the long run, you may find yourself making too many small course corrections if you watch the hourly data too closely.

The Adcenter gives you a way to generate a conversion tracking code. This is helpful but I would much rather that Bing pass the keyword parameters over in the URL like Yahoo and Google does. Right now Google Analytics is the thing most of us use for tracking the life-cycle of the visitor and Bing data doesn't include the keyword.

Final Analysis

As I am sitting her writing this, I got an email from Yahoo marketing, informing me that they will be transitioning all of their ad marketing into the Micrsoft Adcenter. That's great because I gave up on Yahoo ad marketing some months ago.

In the short time I have run these campaigns side by side between Adwords and Adcenter, the results are very good. I'm getting more clicks per dollar spent on Adcenter. This is probably mostly due to the lower amount of competition for placement on the same keywords. It does also appear that Microsoft is more generous in their ad placement algorithm as well. I don't seem to be getting zinged on lower quality keyword-to-ad matches as I am in Google.

My tentative recommendation is that if you are feeling tapped out on clicks for your primary keywords on Google and you have the budget, go ahead and jump into Bing.

eLearning Outperforms Live Training

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:36:00 +0000

A recent study conducted by the US department of education concluded that digital learning, most specifically online learning, produced better results in learners than live classroom training.

The research, which can be found at ed.gov was gathered from over 1000 studies conducted over a 12 year period. While it has been long suspected that eLearning had better results than classroom training alone, it was discovered that a blend of classroom and elearning did no better than elearning alone.

“The studies of more recent online instruction included in this meta-analysis found that, on average, online learning, at the post-secondary level, is not just as good as but more effective than conventional face-to-face instruction..” said Marshall “Mike” Smith, a Senior Counselor to the secretary of Education.

At DigitalChalk, we are committed to providing free online elearning course development tools for any instructor. We believe the future is shaped by the quality of learning today. Let's get started building more online courses together!

DigitalChalk Offers Free Accounts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:44:00 +0000

Recently DigitalChalk launched the Einstein version 3.0 release. On Monday August 10th they are announcing the availability of a free instructor account that let's anyone setup an account and build courses in a privately branded learning site. The free account setup option just showed up on the DigitalChalk homepage so you should be able to go register today.

There is a cost involved in delivering training to students but they are waiving the setup fee for this free account. You don't get any live product support or the optional high resolution video but if you are interested in a quick and easy way to start delivering elearning, this is a great option.

DigitalChalk ASTD 2009 Twitter Game Rules

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:52:00 +0000

#DigitalChalk will be giving out a total of three $100.00 Visa gifts cards – one for day one and two on day two of ASTD 2009 Expo (June 1^st and 2nd); those eligible must be at the conference to win and must be a follower of @DigitalChalk on twitter. There is a limit of one prize per person.

The goal of the game is to figure out a three-word phrase from clues on tee shirts. Here is how it works:

1. June 1st and 2nd, we will send out three tweets announcing the release of a clue.

2. The first four people to report to the DigitalChalk booth 1519 will receive a free DigitalChalk tee shirt with a clue on it.

3. The first person to observe all three keywords, Tweets the phrase to DigitalChalk and shows up at the booth will receive $100 Visa gift card

Click Here to view a short video about the game

My Twitter Confessions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:04:00 +0000

I have to confess that for the first couple months I was on Twitter I actually took them seriously when they asked "What are you doing?" I kept hearing people rant on about using twitter for relationship building and brand marketing and customer support and and and.... I just didn't get it. I have to give big props to @ttolle (oh my, did I just do that @ thing?) for finally helping me see the light. We went to #SXSW this year and everywhere I went people were making connections on Twitter. The real eye opener was when I sat through a lecture by @Werner CTO of Amazon and the best questions for the panel came from Tweets the moderator read.

Yes, I have the twitter bug. My Facebook status is automatically updated from it and I have a tweet client on every connected device I own. Here is why, I recently had two old friends sign up on DigitalChalk because of tweets they read on my facebook. Today I had someone DM me on twitter asking what is DigitalChalk. To top things off, last week we saw a DigitalChalk and XYZ company product comparison question posed and were able to respond. This week I was able to tweet about two of our new customers training offerings on DigitalChalk.

The thing that I finally figured out? Twitter is like everything else that's worth doing, it takes time to learn it. Who knew you could do so much with 140 characters. Maybe that's exactly the point...

Enterprise Cloud Computing Misses the Point

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 16 May 2009 19:04:00 +0000

With the recent Google outage, the tech news world is full of prognosticators who want to pass judgement on Cloud Computing readiness for the Enterprise. The 24 hour news churn seems to be impacting even the tech news crowd. My guess is that Nicholas Kolakowski and Garret Rogers both wrote their pieces about Cloud Computing from a large corporate network that they complain about (privately) and they are probably required to email a copy of their postings to someone using the corporate Exchange Server that mysteriously keeps going down. Come on guys, are you kidding? Cloud Computing IS the Enterprise.

Let's get real for a minute, the Cloud is simply virtualized, externalized services. In many cases these services are servicing the same organization internally and they find it useful to timeshare externally for a profit.

Examples include Google, Amazon or Force.com. Ok, let's be honest, nobody's network services are immune to outage. Five nines of reliability (depending on how you count them) still amounts to 8.76 hours of downtime per year!

Are outages annoying? Sure, can they be costly, of course. I'm all about making the service providers deliver as promised but I also am pragmatic enough to know that in all of the enterprise accounts I have worked, I have never found one that didn't have it's share of outages.

Here is the real question, is the Enterprise in need of a Cloud service? Small and medium size businesses and individuals need access to the services Cloud Computing can provide. Enterprises have the opposite problem, they need to make sure they reach maximum possible utilization of the services they have. Cloud Computing is comprised of a lot of services being provided by Enterprises who want to maximize efficiency. The story is best told when looking at the Amazon 2008 earnings "Amazon’s “other revenue” — which includes that of AWS — totaled $550 million in the last 12 months, up 32 percent from a year earlier. " Courtesy of Kevin Kelleher at Gigaom

Bandwidth caps spark innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:18:00 +0000

The race to cap bandwidth in the consumer market will have the opposite effect desired by the network providers. How can I know? Simple, these companies are just not very nimble. The very fact that they are trying to hold the dyke back with their thumb (and a straight face) is proof that they have no clue what the future holds. This reminds me of the days when they tried to enforce a ban on home networking and WiFi. These same guys thought they could tell consumers they must buy a separate connection for each computer in a household. Wise up guys, I will gnaw off my arm before I become your hostage.

The short term effects could pose a threat to businesses who rely on customers to consume large files such as video, the backlash will come quickly when people realize they are getting gouged. Look for the following new technologies to emerge shortly:

1. Network resource aggregating tools - I've often wondered when someone will make a tool that let's me subscribe to multiple services and manage them through a single network hub. When my Cable connection goes down, I roll over onto AT&T fiber for example. I suspect this will come out very quickly if caps are enforced.

2. WiMax - This is already rolling out but it will get more traction when people start feeling shafted by their hard-line (pun intended) provider. I will go out of my way to punish a provider who is acting in bad faith. Most of us feel that way don't we?

3. Shared Services - From my house I can see three of my neighbors WiFi networks. The more we feel screwed over by the cable company, the less guilty we start feeling about setting up a nice shared secure network.

Don't despair, we consumers are a lot brighter than the guys running these cable companies. The biggest risk we really run is that we put these guys out of business when we punish them, that would reduce choices (but right now, it looks attractive to me).

Micro SaaS Success

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:17:00 +0000

Over the past few days much has been said about the apparent decline in growth at Salesforce and how that might reflect on Software as a Service (SaaS) providers in general. Salesforce has become the poster child for SaaS, not in a small part because of it's market share and rate of growth. It seems to me that the media and industry pundits are unsure if the rules of free market (saturation, segment maturity etc.) apply to SaaS. Salesforce is doing incredibly well but by no means is it immune from the basic trends of a market downturn, when sales are down, CRM products take a hit, SaaS or not. The real question is how is Salesforce doing against it's sector. When you examine their traditional software cousins in this market, Salesforce looks simply stellar.

It is my opinion that the real barometer of SaaS success in the marketplace is not to look at the elephants but the rabbits. In a tough economic period, how does an emerging market perform relative to the broader economy and within that market how do the startups and innovators fare?

For some time now I have railed on the virtues of embracing a "traditional" business model when running a SaaS cloud service. As in 2000 and now 2009, "if we get the users, we will make money" mindset falls down without an established revenue model at the onsite. At some point investors are about an ROI. Excitement and cool AJAX don't pay for salaries or bandwidth. DigitalChalk is proving the point, from the time of the market collapse and finance meltdown, our growth rate, revenue and average gross profit per user has steadily gone up.

there appears to be two types of SaaS providers, the elephants that get the press and the rabbits or "Micro SaaS" that get fat on the grass right at their feet.

The DigitalChalk core product revenue growth in the 4th quarter of 2008 grew at over 20% month over month with the average gross profit per transaction in a range most blue-chips would kill for. Our February is tracking at 37% growth in transactions over January with gross profit up over 11% month over month. In short, we are looking at some pretty amazing hockey stick growth charts for the past seven months. The very cool thing about this business is (a statistic VC in 2007 would have gagged on) we have less than 10,000 users on DigitalChalk. We are truly a Micro SaaS. DigitalChalk will exceed $1.2M in core product revenue in Q3 2009 at current growth rates and we will do it with under 16,000 active users.

Would I like the have Twitter valuations and VC funding raining down? Sure, but I like my prospects of employment and profit in three years a lot better at DigitalChalk!

Salesforce Site Hosting will Prod Business Cloud Adoption

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:30:00 +0000

Salesforce today announced the availability of Force.com Sites, a place for businesses to host their websites on Saleforce's Force.com infrastructure. This announcement is significant and should serve to push Google's AppEngine to address the needs of business. Here is why:

1. Salesforce has established a reputation of reliability in the business SaaS marketplace. Corporate executives, who would never consider deploying a critical business application on Google or Amazon, routinely run their entire business development engine on Salesforce.

2. Salesforce has done it right. By starting a community of developers around Apex, expanded to Force apps last year and now introducing public facing web applications, Salesforce is exploiting existing processes and data that businesses want to access.

The question of when businesses will start moving to the cloud has been hotly debated over the past few months. I believe the question assumes the "why" they should move to the cloud is obvious, but we shouldn't make that assumption. Until now, there has been very little "why" for businesses to make the leap. The benefits may now outweight the risks. Business technology is essentially comprised of services for storing and controlling data and processess that govern the business model. Gaining fast, reliable access to these processes and data is the business mission of corporate IT. It's going to take time to get the word out but I think this might be the game changer. The old adage "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" might well be stated the same for buying Salesforce.

The Web 2.0 Diaspora - profitability now matters

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:44:00 +0000

The term diaspora is normally associated with the scattering of a people group geographically from their homeland. The term is originally Greek and is literally translated "a scattering or sowing of seeds". There is little question that the original homeland of Web technology is Silicone valley California but I often find myself mildly annoyed when listening to a Twit podcast or Buzz outloud and hear long narratives about local valley activities or politics. Don't they know there is a whole generation of us Web 2.0 businesses born outside the beloved homeland?

Being outside the valley has a few notable drawbacks. We are less subjected to the clouds of money floating down from the VC sky. Many of us started online businesses with the mistaken idea that a business model that included a plan to generate revenue was necessary. Oblivious to the obvious drawbacks of charging a fee for our services, we blindly went forward telling customers what value our service could provide and insisting they pay us for using it.

Lately I've been hearing how the winds of economic trouble has begun to blow the clouds of money away from my distant cousins in the valley. There is much fear of drought and disaster among the sequoias and other farmers in that region. I fear many of my friends in the valley may become chafe, blown by the winds of trouble and scattered abroad.

I would like to share a small lesson learned from those of us scattered beyond the reach of the money clouds. There is hope, even now if you stop relying on the rain and start digging wells. There is money in the fertile soil of software as a service (SaaS) but you must have the vision to build something of value that you can bring to the "farmers market" and sell.

Open Source Moodle is Driving Blackboard Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:14:00 +0000

We recently announced an integrated solution using Moodle on Amazon Web Services that provides a highly scalable option for schools and Universities running or interested in running Moodle. This give us the option to do single sign-on integration with DigitalChalk and offer a combined package that will work both inside and outside the Amazon cloud. The really interesting thing about this deal was how rapidly were were able to create this solution using open source. From inception to delivery took about six weeks to complete. Most of the development actually fell into our codebase, the open source SSO server and Moodle required very little work. For almost two years we have struggled to address SSO with the commercial market leader, Blackboard. Their building blocks toolkit were poorly documented and questions about supporting authentication outside their app architecture was addressed by telling us that Blackboard must be the primary athentication mechanism and they will provide very little to the external app.

Our announcement about Moodle on the Amazon Cloud got picked up by a prominent ZDNet blog about open source (thanks Dana!). The Blackboard World conference is going on right now and someone chimed in on comments to tell us how great the new Blackboard is. One thing is for sure, Blackboard has remained on a very Web 1.0 archtecture for many years. Feeling the heat from open source may have forced them to innovate and catch up. Disruption in the marketplace always forces innovation! (See the BB reps comments below)

Keynote speaker Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen demonstrated the power and direction of Blackboad NG at today's afternoon session of Blackboard World '08 in Las Vegas. TRULY a Next Generation product that makes any institution's 'learning' go everywhere. + It will now wrap Moodle & Satai. + Courses will be available from Facebook and other social networking sites. + Content displays on iphones, cellphones and other mobile devices + Open API's and Open Source code development for Building Blocks, Modules, add-ons and more! Blackboard is no longer a stand-alone Learning Management System---it just made "learning" ubiquitous to a new generation of users. The glimpse on their web site (http://www.blackboard.com/projectng/) is only a peek compared to what CEO Chasen demo'd today! (not a Blackboard employee but someone who was at the presentation and more impressed with NG then ANYthing I've seen in a decade of online learning/teaching/CMS/LMS)

-YEA RIGHT.....

Greed Tarnishes Salesforce Reputation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 02:32:00 +0000

On Thursday I was almost giddy when I found a link to get the iPhone upgrade for my (now legacy) iPhone a day early. I upgraded iTunes and my iPhone and started installing new applications. One of the first choices (and high on the most popular list for business.. hmm... who else broke in early?) I made was to get the Salesforce app. This was particularly interesting for me because as a Salesforce user and compulsive slave to my email, I regulary access my Salesforce account on my iPhone to view incoming sales leads as soon as I am notified. The Safari browser is ok but with the scrolling and zooming required it is always slightly annoying.

The Salesforce App looked like a great find, views formatted and scaled to the iPhone screen. I installed the app and entered my account information. It gave me a message saying there was no user in the account with that ID. Odd I though, so I retyped and got the same results. Ok, I'm in a hurry. I'll just wait a day and try to access the system on Friday, after all, they aren't expecting users today right? Next day, same deal, no user in the system. I went so far as to research things on Salesforce support but found nothing. I got busy and didn't get back to it until Saturday. A Google search on Saturday gave me the sad results, I must purchase a Mobile user account to access the system. How much is a mobile user account you ask? $50.

You have to be kidding right???? The app is free but access to the system is $50?!? I get their business model but this really was a bone headed decision, I'm already paying over a $G per user per year to access the system. Accessing the system on mobile Safari cost me $0.00 extra. Salesforce is missing a great opportunity to increase my addiction to their product. Right now they own the CRM SaaS market and they have my data. I've been willing to live with a mild case of vendor lock-in because their technology is so good but now I am beginning to wonder if someone from Redmond recently got hired in their product planning department.

I smell an opportunity. Any of you hot shot Apex developers interested in building your own version of an iPhone app for Salesforce? I'll pay up to $4.99 for your app. Anyone??

Hanging out in the Cloud Cafe

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:00:00 +0000

There is beginning to be a nice ecosystem of service providers popping up around Cloud Computing. Today I enjoyed a conversation with John Willis, host of the Cloud Cafe podcast. We spent time discussing the future of cloud computing and where things are heading with regards to standards, cloud portability and the business model of using cloud computing.

For anyone interested in learning more about the geeky things in DigitalChalk, you will enjoy this podcast. John maintains one of the most comprehensive venues for all things cloud computing related. I'm personally excited to see him start introducing Amazon Cloud training courses on DigitalChalk.

Why Yahoo Can't Sell Search

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:30:00 +0000

I want to thank Yahoo for sending me a notification today that my credit card was going to be charged $150 again for the privilege of being listed on search index. It allowed me to (try) to remove my payment information to avoid wasting another $150 this year. It seems that with Yahoo stupidity has not bounds. Not only did they charge me to get our site indexed on a timely basis, they failed to deliver on the stated benefits. For the past year Yahoo delivered a whopping .04% of DigitalChalk organic search traffic and it took them SEVEN MONTHS to get us into their index. Of the 492 websites that provided me with referral traffic in the past 12 months, Yahoo ranked 17th behind AOL, ASK! and news.com (all of whom I did not do anything to get indexed with). Do I need to tell you who was first? Of course not. I paid nothing to Google for my site to be indexed and through simple SEO activities we moved from start-up to a PR4 in our first five months.

I'm happy to spend my SEM budget on Google. Now that they are supplying the ads for Yahoo search I'll get placement on whatever paltry search scraps Yahoo throws my way.

Oh, by the way, you can't cancel with Yahoo. Once they take your credit card, it's a black hole. You have to see this from their FAQ to believe it. To stop paying them the $150 I had to change my credit card information to something bogus. There is no such thing as cancellation when it comes to paid listings on Yahoo. The reason given? "For security reasons, we are not able to close customer accounts." Who's security are you protecting Yahoo? Jerry, it's not going to work buddy! Carl, save yourself the humiliation, there is nothing worth saving.

Net Parenting Destroys Productivity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 21:03:00 +0000

There are two fundamental schools of thought for enterprise IT management. Having experienced both extremes I am convinced that most CIOs are the victim of their own well-intended efforts to enforce boundaries. It is the natural inclination of most IT professionals to place boundaries around what software and and network resources are available. This is a behavior born of necessity, everyone can't have access to everything and the truth of the matter is that it's a matter of self preservation for IT. While acnowledging a need for boundries, productivity is born from creativity and rapid access to content and data. At some point if we take the control approach to an extreme the tools intended to empower users become the shakles that bind them.

I was recently helping in a small organization and during a meeting the presenter approached me to see if someone could play a specific piece of bumper music as an intro. When I inquired about that and suggested we just download the song from iTunes I was informed that would not work because iTunes was blocked from access on the network. Why? The answer I got from the system admin who made the decision was "we can't let people just be downloading music here at the office." "Really", I reply, "why not?" I get a blank stare... I must be stupid, didn't I know music could destroy the business....

Opening up the toolbox to users so they can do things we didn't anticipate them doing is going to clutter up machines and make more work for IT to clean up right? Probably so but then again, maybe it's time for the tail to stop wagging the dog. There are smart ways to establish boundries. We don't have to enforce all boundries with technologies. People are amazingly adept at learning, let's start teaching them how to use technology in a safe and productive way instead of treating them like idiots. If we find we have technology idiots on staff who can't learn then perhaps we can create a dunse community and send them to it.

Here are three ways small to medium sized orgs can reduce IT cost/effort and headache:

1. Outsource your net-nanny activities to OpenDNS.com. It's free, effective and they will do a lot better job of policing the "bad" sites than you ever could.

2. Move your internal mail server and network storage servers to Google Apps for Business and Jungle Disk. It's the 21st century, quit hosting your mail and storage locally, it's a headache and your staff will never be as good as the pro's at the hosted services.

3. Take the dollars saved and buy Macs. Your employees will love you and your PC support cost savings will more than offset the difference in price.

The Dell Cloud a Microsoft Threat?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:27:00 +0000

Dell is quietly moving into the cloud space. Steven Schuckenbrock, CIO of Dell talkes at length about X86 infrastructure in cloud computing in a recent interview with Dan Farber. There is almost no mention of Microsoft when talking about virtualization capabilities. The only mention of Microsoft in the 10 minute interview was in describing competitive cloud computing initiatives, Microsoft was listed along with Google and Amazon as an example of trends in the cloud.

Dell has the potential to be a cloud computing powerhouse and they are clearly thinking about SaaS and cloud computing in a unified strategy. I'd bet on Dell making a strong play for moving enterprise customers over into a cloud delivery approach. They dominate the desktop hardware arena in the enterprise and are a trusted partner for most corporate CIOs.

The message that Steven is telegraphing is that the era of desktop computing has ended, at least from the standpoint of new market share initiatives at Dell.

Big ships are slow to turn

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 21:37:00 +0000

Much has been made about why Microsoft cannot seem to compete effectively in the Web 2.0 world. One would assume that with virtually unlimited development resources and the ability to hire the brightest minds in software, Microsoft would be able to at the very least successfully copy the Google or Amazon model. Microsoft has a long history of successfully copying a technology and dominating the market with their own version but of late they seem to be struggling to duplicate some of the simplest concepts. I have a theory on why that is, bureaucracy.

Microsoft is struggling to support the weight of it's own infrastructure. We see the most obvious evidence in Windows. There is no freedom to innovate because of the sacred cows in the product and the dependencies of historical features that must be supported. Another pitfall that seems to have trapped Microsoft is the insatiable desire to plow their own flavor of standards into any new product. I recently found an article in PC World that illustrated how the Federal Government is unable to innovate because of the layers of standards and many Gov websites are running on 2001 technologies and designs. Most of the .gov websites have missed the Web 2.0 wave. Microsoft is in the boat with them.

The best thing for Microsoft would be to spin off and divest itself of several divisions. It's time to let the kids leave home and go innovate on their own. That my be the best and perhaps the only hope of avoiding a slow decline into obsolescence.

Eucalyptus is Smelling Good

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:58:00 +0000

Troy Tolle sent me a link to look at a new open source tool from UC Santa Barbara called Eucalyptus. This looks very promising for a much needed tool for managing Zen VM images across multiple host services. The point of the tool is to manage VM images in a cluster with the first implementation for Amazon EC2 but with the flexibility to support other interfaces it's going to give us more options over time.

The intriguing thing that strikes me is the potential to marry this with the many new cloud computing platforms coming online in the next few months. Competition in the cloud is going to help everyone get a better product.

CDNs On The Ropes

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:16:00 +0000

If you work for a Content Delivery Network (CDN) you might want to shop your resume at Google. Current CDN bandwidth rates are running between $1.60 and $.85 per Gig. That makes for a very tidy margin when buying commodity bandwidth at $.06-08 per Gig. With the introduction of Google Apps Engine pricing of $.09-.11 per Gig the game has just changed. Google is starting a bidding war with Amazon for the Platform as a Service (PaaS) market and the collateral damage will be the CDNs.

I recently reexamined the benefit of migrating our video storage and streaming from Amazon to one of the top CDNs but could not come up with a valid reason to increase my streaming costs by 500%. The classic argument from the CDNs is that with thousands of regional edge nodes, my content will be delivered quickly and locally. The reality is that quality of service in streaming services is often less about the number of hops to the server and more about the through-put of the last mile to the consumer. If there is a 250ms lag at the beginning of the connection but the stream stays connected during the live of the download it's transparent to the user but let that same video file start buffering and the customer is going to complain. Bottom line, the CDN brings one big value, the ability to scale to big loads if your content goes viral. We did the math, we can build out a nice scaling infrastructure and still have money left over on Amazon. Let's face it, most of our applications will never have 10,000 requests per hour.

The destructive cycle of technology always weeds out products with relatively high profit to value ratios. As the PaaS solutions come online, more developers will be able to access the low cost commodity pricing and it's going to drive down the value of CDNs significantly.