ServePath Blog

Bill Gates and Larry Ellison will be sharing a demo table at the next ServePath-sponsored SFBeta, taking place on April 1st, 2008. Promising to be an action-packed event, this latest SFBeta meetup will be taking place at 111 Mina on April 1st, 2008 from 6pm to 9pm. Tickets are $15 online and $25 at the door.

A bit about SFBeta:

SF Beta is San Francisco’s largest monthly startup mixer. Since launching in September, 2006, the event has brought together thousands of people from hundreds of startups, creating innumerable connections along the way.

Some people come to the event to be social, some come to make business connections, and many come to do both. The event, called the “king of Web 2.0 mixers,” offers something of everything.

Demo Companies (2 of which are ServePath customers) are as follows:

Table 1 (Front Room - Table)
6:00-7:30: Twine - “Twine is a new service that helps you organize, share and discover information about your interests, with networks of like-minded people. You can use Twine alone, with friends, groups and communities, or even in your company.”
7:30-9:00: Micurio - “Remember how you loved Show and Tell? Micurio takes that concept online, offering a free community for sharing all your collectibles. Whether your collection is a simple gathering of favorite items, a rare antique with provenance or interesting objects plucked from your grandma’s attic.”

Table 2 (Front Room - Table)
6:00-7:30: ToneThis - “ToneThis is a desktop application for delivering personalized and third-party content to your phone. Unlike traditional content stores (ringtones, wallpapers, videos, games), ToneThis sits on your desktop enabling you the freedom to select and personalize your own content for delivery to your cellphone.”
7:30-9:00: Viddyou - “Your Life. Your Video. Organized Your Way. Viddyou is more than a video storage site – it’s a custom built video tool that allows anyone to quickly and easily archive and express their life in short-form videos. Featuring intuitive organizational tools, Viddyou enables you to quickly record, organize, share and protect these video chronicles.”

Table 3 (Back Room - Table)
6:00-7:30: SurfCanyon - “Using semantic real-time implicit personalization, Surf Canyon develops Discovery for Search™. This patent-pending technology is embedded in a browser extension that can work with virtually any third-party search engine, and assists users in finding relevant information that’s buried within the often overwhelming amount of search results.” SurfCanyon uses ServePath’s hosting solutions.
7:30-9:00: iolo Technologies - “iolo technologies, LLC produces award-winning utility software that optimizes and protects computers running Windows. A privately held firm located in Los Angeles, iolo is recognized around the globe for providing comprehensive and effective solutions that meet a wide range of computer needs. Since its formation in 1998, iolo has established itself as a leader in the competitive utility software market, receiving awards from industry analysts and media year after year.”

Table 4 (Back Room - Table)
6:00-7:30: InMyLeague - “The FREE, fast, fun and SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN approach to online dating. We believe that online dating should be free, fast and fun. Rather than make you fill out endless questionnaires about yourself, or make you sort through the dregs of the online dating pool in the hopes of finding someone you’re interested in, we cut to the chase and introduce you to people you’re interested in meeting and have a shot at.”
7:30-9:00: Cooliris / PicLens - “Cooliris Previews is a free browser add-on that lets you preview links and rich media without clicking or leaving your current page, so you can browse the web faster than ever. Simply mouseover your link or our Cooliris icon, and a preview window instantly appears with your content. No more clicking back and forth! PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web. Photos will come to life via a cinematic presentation that goes well beyond the confines of the traditional browser window. With PicLens, browsing and viewing images on the web will never be the same again.” Cooliris & PicLens use ServePath’s hosting solutions.

Drop by the ServePath table and ask about our exciting new on-demand hosting solution called GoGrid!

Last week, some ServePath colleagues and I attended the Under the Radar event at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, CA. Touted as a “full-day networking and deal-making event,” Under the Radar showcased several hot properties and companies in the social networking and technology sectors.

About Under the Radar

Presenting companies had to be in an “early-stage” development cycle (launched within the year), an actual start-up (not affiliated with an older large company), have a beta (or beyond) product, monetization-ready and with a unique value proposition.

Instead of re-hashing all the companies and their offerings, I thought that I would take a different approach to this event summary and offer a bit of insight into what I learned as well as offer some tips and tricks on how to make good use of these types of events. Overall, the event was incredibly well organized and thought through. While it was interesting to learn about these companies, the side meetings and social aspects were and are, in my mind, much more important. Unfortunately, there was not enough time to do meet-and-greets and networking as I and my colleagues found ourselves “late” to many of the sessions because we were having engaging conversations with people next to the food and coffee.

The event was divided into two presentation tracks, each held in different auditoriums. Each track was broken up into 4 presenting companies under specific themes. The companies were given 6 minutes to present their company and offering and then were asked questions by both a panel of distinguished judges and audience members. At the end of each 1:15 minute session, the audience (and the judges) voted on the company that they liked the best (the audience voted via text messaging for real-time results). The results are now posted. The sessions were as follows:

• Business Calls
• Virtualization
• Get Aggregated
• Manage Up
• Happy Customers
• Virtual Worker
• Work Together
• Marketing and Measurement

The Sessions I Saw

Since I couldn’t be in two places at the same time, I can only comment on the sessions that I saw. But a general theme that seemed to link everything together was how business coupled social networking tools and other more traditional business practices into creating unique value propositions.

Virtualization - the common theme for this session was taking the complexity and lack-of-standards out of the equation. It’s pretty obvious that as technology advances, so does the complexity and perplexity that is tied to it. The companies at this session are making inroads on making the process easier and faster. DeviceVM makes the OS as an “instant on” option. Elastra simplifies elastic relational databases and server and software topologies through the use of markup languages. JumpBox takes the pain out of installing and configuring OpenSource applications. And Universant provides an application modeling studio. All under the umbrella of “virtualization,” these companies are aiming to create “containers” common business hurdles.

Bottom line - if you can componentize or compartmentalize a critical business issue, you are well on the way a potentially successful business.

Manage Up - while a bit of a cryptic title, I believe the gist of this session was finding a niche where your product solves a management dilemma. For Act-On Software, enabling on-demand communication and collaboration with your sales and marketing teams is critical. Magento presented a new OpenSource eCommerce platform for managing multiple eCommerce sites from a single administrative node. Mumboe showed how their product took the pain out of organizing and managing legal documents. And NetBooks brought financial and bookkeeping management to a more accessible level within the small business.

Bottom line - be sure you understand core management hurdles and bring a product that reduces the management risk as well as enables the core players to do their job better and more efficiently.

Happy Customers - this session strongly presented how critical customer service and support mechanisms are to the success of your business. Often overlooked or under valued, support can actually help you not only retain your customers, it can have an incredible impact in growing your business. The companies presenting offered innovative approaches to understanding your customers and the pain (or happiness) they are feeling. FeedbackFX provided a visual tool to enable conversation with every single customer. GetSatisfaction showed how a collaborative help network can help companies engage and get value. HiveLive showcased how their enterprise social networking platform allowed users to share anything with anyone in order to create business communities. And SupportSpace demonstrated a “new standard” of outsourced tech support.

Bottom line - to me it was pretty clear that helping the customer now goes well beyond just that. Assisting the customer actually helps your product and company. As the theme of “complexity” in business or technology grows, your customers are going to become more confused and need more help navigating the waters. If you want to start a company, keep that in mind; if you want to start a business around customer service, be sure that you focus beyond just customer service; the space is much more than just that.

Tips and Tricks and How to get the most out of these conferences and events

• At any conference, the best leads and conversations you can have are usually with the person sitting next to you are during the breaks when everyone is mingling. The “lobby” is really the best place!
• VC’s (of which there were many at this conference) are usually only interested in a few key things:
  • What place in the market do you fill?
  • How are you better than the people already out there doing the same thing?
  • How are you going to make money (and make them money)?
• Don’t be afraid to just talk to a stranger, and when you do, open by asking them questions about what they do. Many people just love hearing themselves talk (grin). You will find a time to talk about yourself, don’t worry.
• Cover the event “live.” I was using Twitter through most of the event and within an hour or so, had 6 new Twitter “friends.” I was even able to make contact with one face-to-face (the CEO of eyejot.com). Along those lines, be sure you add some of the judges or presenters to your Twitter account prior to the event, as many of them tweet out their opinions real-time and offer valuable, real-time insight (like Robert Scoble and Rafe Needleman, who I talked with at this conference).
• If you are a provider, attend conferences where your clients are presenting. One of the main reasons I went to Under the Radar was to meet Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare, a customer of ServePath’s.
• Follow up immediately with the people you meet. (I made many new connections on Twitter and subsequently got access to several private betas.)
• Figure out a unique way to make people remember you. Often people meet hundreds of people so make yourself stand out (I wore a red shirt and carried a camera, for example.)
• Attend more events similar to these. You will start to make friends and potentially find shared business practices and even business partnerships. SNAP Summit is a good example of an event coming up that has a similar audience to Under the Radar.

These types of events are very important to getting your company on the map, to find business partners or to simply expand your professional circle of contacts. Attend many and do so frequently.

A few photos from this event have been posted to the ServePath Flickr account.

Tomorrow (March 25, 2008) is the second annual SNAP Summit held in San Francisco. SNAP Summit is a one-day, two-track conference focusing on the business and design of social applications. Held from 9:00am until 5:00pm at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, SNAP Summit promises to deliver a group of experts and timely topics.

Have you ever wondered how you could make your applications more viral or which applications advertisers like targeting the most? What will be the next “killer app” on FaceBook or is there another platform that developers or businesses should be developing on? Want to learn how to get a pre-configured, “Facebook-ready” server with a quick deployment feature? (You have to come find ServePath for that one!)

Prices are $399 online or $499 at the door. BUT, if you put in discount code “ServePath”, you get $100 off your ticket online!

Speakers include:

• Jessica Alter - Director of Platform and Business Development @ Bebo
• Kevin Barenblat - CEO @ [context]
• Jim Benedetto - VP of Technology @ MySpace
• Siqi Chen - Co-Founder/Developer @ Friends for Sale
• Jeff Clavier - Managing Partner @ SoftTech VC
• Jaren Fliesler - Director of Business Development @ Slide
• BJ Fogg - Psychology and Technology Professor @ Stanford University
• Seth Goldstein - CEO/Co-Founder @ SocialMedia.com
• Martin Green - VP of Business Development @ Meebo
• Steve Jang - CMO/Head of Business Development @ imeem
• Aaron Kahlow - Managing Partner @ BusinessOnLine
• Jeremy Liew - Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Lee Lorenzen - CEO @ Altura Ventures
• Dave McClure - Advisor/Investor @ Blogger & 500hats.com
• Dave Morin - Senior Platform Manager @ Facebook
• Jeremiah Owyang - Web Analyst @ Forrester
• Rajat Paharia - CEO @ Bunchball inc.
• Joshua Porter - Founder @ Bokardo.com
• Jim Scheinman - Entrepreneur-in-Residence @ CRV
• Jia Shen - CTO/Co-Founder @ RockYou
• Anu Shukla - CEO/Founder @ Offerpal Media

Topics include:

• Effective Social Interface Design
• Methods of Boosting User Engagement
• Metrics: Where Users Come From
• Mass Interpersonal Persuasion
• Future of the Social Platform
• Social App Exit Strategies
• Building what Users (and Advertisers) want
• Viral Tuning and Viral Marketing - Best Practices and Real Life Examples
• Legal Issues Facing Social Media Companies
• Taking that App and Making Money - how does one really do it?
• Infrastructure Scalability 101: What you don’t know CAN hurt you
• Fundraising Strategies for Startups

ServePath is one of the sponsors of this event. We will have a table and people showcasing ServePath’s newest product offering: GoGrid which allows you to deploy a fully load-balanced server network in under 10 minutes. Look for us there!

This was a very special SF New Tech for us at ServePath. Last night we demo-ed our new product, GoGrid, to a packed crowd. It was actually the world’s first public demo of the new instantly scalable, on-demand, web-based hosted server offering (whew, lots of adjectives there).

At SF New Tech, companies sign up to give 5 minute demos of their product and service. The list of companies presenting were: GoGrid/ServePath, Surf Canyon, Buddy Fetch, Xeequa, and Askpedia.

GoGrid was the first demo to be seen with Paul Lappas (VP of Engineering) and Paul Lancaster (Business Development Manager) showing how a server could be created and a series of servers load balanced within the 5 minute demo window. To make matters even more interesting, “Murphy” was in the audience somewhere, causing the Internet connection to crawl, thus chopping a minute off of our demo time. That hiccup didn’t prevent the demo, and actually Lappas was able to not only initiate the creation of a server, but also clearly demonstrate how an F5 BigIP load balancer could be created and load balance 2 existing web servers in less than a minute!

I also spoke with a few people who have already signed up for GoGrid trial accounts, including one user who had successfully deployed 5 servers. The general consensus was that the service was “great” and the user interface and ease-of-use “fantastic!”

After the successful demonstration of GoGrid, Surf Canyon, a ServePath customer, showcased their powerful search-engine “enhancer.” Surf Canyon creates a “tiny browser extension that is installed in the user’s browser - either FireFox or Internet Explorer.” When a search is initiated on either Google, Yahoo! or MSN, much more targeted and relevant results are presented to the user, enabling them to truly see the results that they wanted, significantly accelerating the search process.

There were several photographers on hand for this event. My photos can be found on ServePath’s Flickr photostream.

The 6th Annual UC Technology Exposition was held on March 3rd, 2008 at the UC Berkeley campus. ServePath was among the notable companies participating in this event.

As described from the event site:

“The annual technology exposition is a chance for students to discover the latest technologies, as companies unveil and showcase their latest innovations. Representing diverse industries and products ranging from databases to video games, the Technology Exposition provides an accurate cross-section of the computing industry and everyone is sure to find something of personal interest to them.”

The companies participating were: Apple Computer, Cnet Networks, Dell, Discovery Engine, FotoFlexer, Hooja, JAJAH, LinkedIn, Livescribe, Meebo, Merchanized Propulsion Systems, Perforce, ServePath, SongBird, Thompson, The Scholar’s Workstation, Vyew, WooMe and Xerox.

ServePath Table

JaJah Table

FotoFlexer Table

LinkedIn Table

Meebo Table

WooMe Table

More photos from the event have been posted to the ServePath Flickr account.

SF New Tech is right around the corner, and this time it is fortified with a demo of our very own NEW product, GoGrid! The theme for this month’s meetup is “Geek Out!” which will hopefully resonate with many of you techies out there.

This should be a really action-packed event. Obviously, showcasing GoGrid is our main mission, however, many ServePath “geeks” will be on-site to answer questions about GoGrid or any of the other products and services we offer.

This Meetup is at the Mighty (located at 119 Utah @ 15th Street in San Francisco). Date & Time: Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 @ 6:30pm.

To plagiarize from the SF New Tech site, here are the companies doing the 5-minute demos for the night:

GoGrid
Paul Lancaster, Business Development Manager
Paul Lappas, Vice President of Engineering
GoGrid is the world’s first multi-server control panel that enables you to deploy and manage on demand server hosting, allowing you to scale your server hosting quickly and easily from any web browser. Come see the “world premier” of GoGrid (at least within a public audience)!

Surf Canyon
Mark Kramer, CEO / Founder
“Using next-generation semantic personalization, Surf Canyon is developing Queryless Discovery for Search. The patent-pending post-query disambiguation technology sits atop virtually any third-party search engine and assists users in finding relevant information buried within the often overwhelming results.” Surf Canyon is a customer of ServePath.

Buddy Fetch
Craig Stadler, CEO / Founder
BuddyFetch is a search engine that allows people to search for fellow IM, social networking, and Internet dating users. BuddyFetch was created because there was no central directory that allowed searches for IM/Social Networking/Dating users across multiple providers (AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Skype, Paltalk, Myspace, etc.) in conjunction with the fact that some directories would only allow you to search for screen names of IM users that were only presently online.

Xeequa
Axel Schultze, CEO / Founder
Xeequa is a social network for business that allows business people to create a partner network and collaborate immediately without any of the time-consuming implementation processes common to traditional enterprise software.

Askpedia
Yong Su Kim, CEO / Founder
Askpedia is an online knowledge marketplace powered by Questions and Answers. Instead of searching for static published information, users can ask questions to benefit from the collective knowledge and experience of real people. We also provide a knowledge marketplace where users with knowledge get recognized and earn money by answering questions with monetary rewards.

Don’t forget about the 60-Second Soapbox where you have a chance to talk for 60 seconds about just about anything!

Apart from the GoGrid demo, ServePath will also have a table so come by and chat.

Yesterday ServePath released a new feature for the Grid Series product called “Snapshot & Restore.” More information can be found on the feature page. If you are familiar with other Virtualization technologies (e.g., Parallels or VMWare), you will know that one of the important features is the ability to take a snapshot of your current environment or server in order to be able to “roll back” or restore from that image should you need to. This ability is now available as a paid feature for our Grid Series product.

Some of the feature highlights:

• “Snapshot” or image of the server’s logical disk
• Remote storage of the image included with price (up to 2 images)
• Ability to restore from an image or snapshot upon request
• Unlimited snapshot and restore requests per month

What are the costs? This feature is a $19.99/month charge and includes storage of up to 2 snapshots. For additional snapshots, there is a monthly charge of $9.99 for each image.

When might you use this feature?

• If you regularly do hard-core development work where you might run the risk of corrupting or mis-configuring your server or environment
• If you server become compromised or hacked in some way
• If you want to test different server configurations
• If you want to protect core data or a particular instance of your environment

Some important notes. A server reboot is required in order to perform a backup. Reboots can typically take up to 5 minutes.

How do I order and use? Follow these easy steps:

1. Contact your Sales representative at: 1-866-321-PATH (1-866-321-7284) and ask for the monthly feature to be added to your Grid Series account.
2. Once enabled, you can request snapshots through your Grid Series portal (https://gridseries.servepath.com) by opening a Case.
3. Snapshot is taken by Support Engineers within 24 hours of the request. Upon completion, you are notified.

You can make unlimited requests for snapshots and restores once you have signed up for the service. Note, ServePath only stores 2 snapshots (unless you pay for more). On your 3rd snapshot, the 1st one will be deleted.

Go ahead, break your server! If you have a snapshot to restore to, we got you covered!