ServePath Blog

ServePath engineers have been working hard on providing a newly redesigned, more efficient and effective Customer Portal. The new portal was quietly released to all ServePath customers recently so I wanted to take a bit of time to point out a few of the notable changes that can be found there.

First, both portals are currently available (old here and new here), but this won’t be true forever. Once the new portal is finalized, the old one will be gone…forever! There is also a direct link to the new portal on the old login page currently.

Once you log in to the new Customer Portal, you will immediately see a redesigned interface with new sections. Note, your login information works on both portals. For posterity’s sake, I will be including screenshots of both versions.

New ServePath Customer Portal:

Old ServePath Customer Portal:

For starters, the Dashboard has been drastically redesigned to group pertinent information together, namely:

• Products/Services - Call-outs at the top of the page to critical or new product or service offerings (e.g., Services & Hardware upgrades and the ProActive Management Suite)
• Support information – who your account manager is, phone numbers for support and billing and a Live Chat button
• Quick Links – these are links that many of our customers frequent, carefully compiled to streamline the experience
• Network Status – current RSS feeds from the ServePath Status blog
• ServePath Blog feed – quickly scan recent ServePath blog entries
• Survey – answer a few questions and be entered in a monthly drawing for Amazon gift cards (HINT: it takes about 30 seconds to fill out the survey!)

Also live with the new portal is a revamped Support Section. With the new Portal, you can choose the “Create a Case” Quick Link and within one click, be able to enter a support ticket immediately:

Most notable is that you can, on the same screen, drill down to the exact server(s) or other hardware that you need help with. Once you select a particular server or set of servers, for example, you will also be able to select their associated IP addresses as well.

Also, when a Case is entered, after the form is submitted and the Case is created, the user is presented with a list of Knowledge Base (KB) articles that may be relevant to the Case. Users can potentially resolve their issues based on the suggested articles, however, if the solution is not present, the user’s Case is already in the system. If a particular KB article solved the issue, the user can attach that article to the Case and close the Case themselves.

On the old portal, the process of entering a ticket took a bit longer and did not offer the user the ability to resolve their own case. An example of the same type of ticket entry as shown in the previous image is listed below:

There are other numerous changes in the new ServePath portal. If you are a current ServePath customer, I encourage you to compare the different versions. We are currently working on the next revision to the new portal as well, so if you have suggestions, comments or, gasp, criticism, feel free to leave a comment on this post and I will share it with the Engineering team. We will also have a feedback form within the new portal as well soon.

Hope you like the changes! We certainly do.

Once again it’s time for SF New Tech, a meetup in San Francisco for technologists, VCs, geeks, social media pundits and other interested peoples. To quote: “Come on down to Mighty, grab a drink, meet cool people, see live demos from great companies, ask questions, grab the mic, have fun… and geek out!”

GoGrid and ServePath are sponsors of this event. Be sure to come by our table and learn about Cloud Computing. With all the recent hype around Windows in the Cloud…it’s important to remember that GoGrid has been providing Windows in the Cloud (both Windows Server 2003 & 2008) for over 1/2 year now and that we are a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Drop by our table and get $100 off your next GoGrid server!

The format has not changed. Each of the companies below get 5 minutes to showcase their product or service. Be the first person in the audience to ask the famous questions “How are your monetizing?” This question is especially important in these trying times. If you are a struggling startup, I recommend reading this post for some tips and tricks on how to survive this recession.

Demo Companies

Apture
Tristan Harris, CEO
Apture helps bloggers and publishers turn flat web pages into rich, multimedia experiences by empowering them with a point & click interface to create deep links to media from a wealth of different sources.
http://www.apture.com

Lefora
Vincent Lauria, Co-Founder & Product Guy
Lefora is forums made easy and has been called the “Blogger for forums”.
http://www.lefora.com

chi.mp
Anthony Eden, Co-Founder & CTO
chi.mp gives you ownership and control of your digital life on your very own domain.
http://chi.mp

Reframe It
Brian McKinney, Founder & CTO
Reframe It lets you comment in the margins of the web as easily as you can write in the margins of a book.
http://reframeit.com

Goldmail
Tom Hakel, Co-founder
Goldmail lets you create powerful messages in just minutes, combining audio and visuals.
http://www.goldmail.com

Snappr.net
Philip Stehlik, CEO
Snappr.net allows mobile interaction with 1D and 2D Barcodes.
http://www.snappr.net

PBwiki
Brian Klug, Director of Engineering
PBwiki is the world’s largest provider of hosted business and educational wikis.
http://www.pbwiki.com

After the demos …

• Grab the microphone and speak to the room on the famous 60-Second Soapbox. Express that need, want or desire in 60 seconds — GO! (Each one is logged online so people can find you later!)
• Stick around to see who won the solar powered cell phone charger from Sun Startup Essentials. (Register online or at the door!) All attendees are eligible to win — but you must be there to claim your prize.
• Hang out and keep the conversation going… meet you at the bar for shots!

Tickets:

$15.00 online here and now
$20.00 at the door, if not sold out

Mighty is a 21+ venue.

Schedule:
6:30 pm - Doors open
6:30 -7:30 pm - Schmooze
7:30 - 9:00 pm - Demos
9:00 - 11:00 pm Schmooze

“Don’t Panic!” These are two words (made popular by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) that every day become more appropriate and valid. Credit has dried up as has funding by Venture Capitalists, Angel Funders and the like. If you are a bootstrapped company, a startup or a company in “stealth mode,” right now you might be wishing that you had taken a more stable job at a large corporation (hopefully not in the Financial sector) or that you had planned better for another bubble to burst. Well fear not…there is always a way to survive, through careful planning and management.

I would like to offer the following “Guide” of my own to those small companies or startups that are struggling now, on the verge of closing shop or just ready to give up. First, let me restate Adams’ words: “Don’t Panic!” There are methods to keep your company and vision moving forward, maybe in a different direction or perhaps a bit more slowly.

Here are a few things that you may want to consider as you re-architect your survival strategy:

1. Start Now – don’t take a “wait and see” attitude. If you have a great idea, keep moving forward, but DO start your cash conservation immediately. The mere fact that you are searching for information and reading this post is a great sign that you are being active!
2. Outsource – sure, doing things in-house can save you some cash, but only part of the time. Truly evaluate what makes sense (cents) in your day-to-day operations. If it takes your developer a week to do something and an outside “specialist” a day or two, evaluate the costs of both actions. If you aren’t paying your employees and they are doing work in their free time, try to factor in the time-to-market of that approach. While you may save money in up-front costs, you may lose it in terms of beating your competitors to market. Here are a couple factors within “outsourcing” to consider:
   • Human Capital – frequently small boutiques who are experts in a particular field can do things faster and better than you can in-house. They, too, might be effected by the economic downturn and may be willing to cut some of their costs just to have your business.
   • Operations – this can be both on the technical or just the basic company operations side. If you are providing healthcare benefits, see if you can change your plans or even ask your employees if they have other means to get healthcare (e.g., through a spouse).
3. Avoid Capital Expenditures (CapEx) – hardware costs money, lots of it. Of course this all depends on what stage your company is at. If you are just starting, you may be able to get away with repurposing old computers and sharing bandwidth, but as you grow and get closer to having to “prove your value proposition” to investors or even end-users, you do need some sort of infrastructure. Consider using Cloud Computing (e.g., GoGrid) to host your infrastructure, whether it be a development environment or eventually your production infrastructure. By using “the Cloud” you have zero CapEx, no monthly/yearly contracts and are billed by your usage. This is a great way to control your costs and scale only on-demand. You can easily control your capacity, and avoid having your infrastructure sitting around unused or idle.
4. Simplify/Set Realistic Goals – The more complex you make things, the harder they are to undo. Figure out what you really want to do with your business. Is it a hobby or your life work? Do you want to be the next Google? If so, you probably want to rethink that. While it is good to have lofty goals, keep them closer to earth. Did you hire someone who sold you on reaching something unattainable? You may want to reconsider that, hard as it may be, and let those people go. Re-architect your strategies. Clearly identify the most fundamental and basic goals you want to achieve. Sometimes through simplification, you can find a niche that others haven’t. That makes you more viable and attractive. If you are doing something that everyone else is gunning for, and you are struggling, it probably isn’t worth it. You don’t need to throw it all away, but you might want to evaluate what you want to do and choose 1-2 things that are (somewhat) unique. Remember K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple, Stupid).
5. Remain Flexible – the worst thing that you can do in these trying times is not move or be rigid. Being a startup or small company has definite advantages. You have the ability to move much more quickly than larger companies. Look to be flexibility in many areas: strategic direction, product or service feature set, tools and infrastructures and even work ethic. Keep your employees happy by finding out what works best for them. I’m reminded of a story I heard about a hair dresser who was looking for a change. After some soul searching and help from some personality profiles, they became a landscape architect: similar ideas of grooming but in a completely different field (literally). So stay flexible in your own thinking as well.
6. Network & Socialize – as you start to panic, the worst thing you can do is do it alone. Trust me, there are many people and business who are sharing your same concerns. Some may be further down the process of recovery or re-architecting and may be willing to share with you their experiences and what to or not to do. There are so many ways to connect with people nowadays. There is the obvious Social Media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.) and I’m a big proponent of these methods. However, in this case, you may really need to just “get out” and talk to people face-to-face. If you live near a big metropolitan area, there is most likely some sort of meetup (check MeetUp.com for example – their video really is great!) or event that meets your needs. Go to them. Start talking to people. (If you are in San Francisco, check out an event I host called StartUpSF.) You may be surprised as to how many great ideas you may get and even how many people really want to help. New strategic partnerships are frequently started at events like this. It’s important to listen to new ideas and see how they apply to your own. Some of the things you hear may influence how you attack other points on this list. Remember too that you can socialize your Public Relations very easily now. Read some experts’ tips and you may save costs and time there too.
7. Conserve Expenses – this is obvious enough. Watch your energy expenditure especially. I mentioned the Cloud before; by outsourcing your IT infrastructure, you can save tremendous costs, especially if you are doing it yourself through your own server rack in your closet. Don’t travel if you don’t need to. With large bandwidth pipes, it’s easy to have video conferencing with almost the same result as a face-to-face. Save the face-to-face for closing the deal. Oh, and pack your own lunch.
8. Don’t Ignore the Rest of the World – the US economy may be seeing some hard times, but there are other markets out there that may want to spend their money with you. Invest some time in reviewing these other markets. Their currency may be a lot stronger than the US dollar, so they may be more willing to pay for your product or service, or even invest in your business. Don’t ignore the fact that with advances in technologies, the world is a much smaller place than we actually realize.
9. Cash Flow Management - this is true on both billables and receivables. If you have existing vendor contracts and they are part of your lifeblood, see if you can renegotiate them. As I mentioned before, you are not alone in this economic crunch and many vendors (and even lenders) would rather renegotiate than lose your business. If your own business model is not getting the traction that you desired, you might want to try to tweak it a bit. Consider offering pre-payment discounts (e.g., have people commit for a longer amount of time but discount it against a monthly or smaller cycle rate). ServePath does this type of thing with managed hosting, by offering “server specials” at a lower cost. Old inventory may be sitting around so leverage it through discounts as well.
10. Keep your Day Job – I had to end with some humor. If your startup is your life-long passion, it is your day job so take these tips to heart. If it isn’t, remember you have to pay your bills somehow.

Do you have any other ideas, tips or suggestions? If so, I would love to hear them. And remember, “Don’t Panic!”

[This was originally posted on the GoGrid blog.]

With hacker and network attacks commonplace within the computer industry, ServePath, has taken further measures to combat security threats through an on-going partnership with Fortinet. Offering a variety of managed security products and services, ServePath continues its desire to provide its customers the most robust threat management packages available in the managed hosting industry.

Built using features within Fortinet’s FortiGate appliance, ServePath now offers its customers a Unified Threat Management suite though Fortinet’s virtual chassis-based firewall. ServePath recently launched an updated, more feature-rich yet less expensive combined threat prevention package with the following services:

• ServePath Internet Security Package (using Fortinet technology) includes:
  • Fortinet ASIC accelerated firewall
  • Unlimited IP addresses in a trusted interface
  • 100 Mpbs Internet traffic throughput
  • 100,000 concurrent sessions
  • Intrusion Prevention Services (ISP)
  • AntiVirus/AntiSpyware/AntiMalware Protection

Originally priced at $449.99 per month with a $299.99 setup charge, the ServePath Internet Security Package has been reduced in price to $99.99 per month with a $99.99 setup charge. This drastic reduction in price reflects ServePath’s desire and commitment to ensuring its users have the latest and most advanced threat prevention package available.

If you have questions or would like to order this for your managed hosting solution at ServePath, please contact a ServePath Sales representative at: 1-866-321-PATH (7284). International callers should call: +1-415-869-7000. Or you can fill out the contact form.

Perhaps that subject was not strong enough. The Financial Sector is currently weathering a hurricane, recently suffering the largest drop since 9/11. Merrill Lynch fell into the hands of Bank of America. Lehman Brothers is in bankruptcy and looking for a buyer with Barclays buying some of their assets. The Airline industry is failing. AIG and other financial companies are looking for some sort of an economic bailout. HP is eliminating 24,600 jobs. And this was all over just a few days. If one extends the look a bit further, the perspective is just a grim: gas prices going up, the dollar losing value and housing going down. One simply cannot be surprised by any of this.

The Tech Sector is getting hammered as well, but this time, it isn’t “our fault.” The Dot Com bust managed to drag down the other sectors last time, but we learned our lesson. Long gone are unproven businesses and their associated models. Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors are taking long looks at business, not just getting in the car for a drive but doing a full check under the hood, looking at the road both ahead and behind and fully vetting the drivers and passengers. To get money as a start-up is truly an accomplishment nowadays. You have to have a proven business model, installed user base, and a clear direction of where your company and your industry will go.

I recently attended TechCrunch 50 which showcases 50 startups and allows them to present their business or service to a panel of experts. I saw about 1/2 of the companies’ presentations and I noticed that the companies where they couldn’t articulate or prove their monetization strategy, these companies got an earful of criticism from the experts. Similarly, at a meetup in San Francisco, the question asked every presenter is “How are you making or going to make money?” It’s a very simple question, but one that must be answered or the company loses credibility.

Perhaps we should apply these same simple questions to the Financial, Housing and Airline Industries? I guess the markets are already doing that.

It will take a long time before all of these markets start to recover, and corporations and businesses are currently challenged to prevent the hemorrhage of money and capital expenditures within their IT infrastructure. I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal called “Cutting Tech’s Energy Bill” by William M. Bulkeley that discusses how large companies are looking at ways to cut electricity usage within the Enterprise. With energy costs directly and indirectly rising, it’s critical for the embattled IT manager or director to make fiscally sound and environmentally responsible decisions to keep their business moving forward will simultaneously ensuring that their technology progresses.

Bulkeley gives several examples:

• IBM has launched a “Green Data-Center Services” business line to help customer redesign their datacenters
• HP purchased a company that specializes in designing datacenters with a focus on energy-efficiency
• EMC has worked to eliminate unneeded equipment and use their cooling infrastructure more efficiently
• Hartford Financial Services Group has shut down 6 of 7 datacenters and host within a “green” IBM facility
• IBM and HP has introduced water-cooled servers and others are hard-selling blade computers that use significantly less power than traditional servers

Outsourcing one’s infrastructure is a core way to tighten your belt of your IT Budget. If you can allow for a managed hosting provider to run your IT infrastructure, you save on capital expenditures as well as human capital running it. Colocation and dedicated hosting were all the rage a few years ago and, while it may be losing its sex appeal nowadays, there are still plenty of IT traditionalists who demand it.

Towards the end of the WSJ article, Bulkeley starts to discuss virtualization as a Green technology that can help cut costs. This is where I pick up the thread and run with it. Virtualization is a key component to helping Corporations reduce their IT expenditures significantly. The ability to consolidate multiple low-end servers onto one or handful of higher-end servers is an obvious and logical cost and energy-savings option. The heavier adoption of virtualization technologies such as Xen or VMware or even Hyper-V is giving corporations or even those self-same outsourced data center and dedicated hosting providers a way to stretch their money and efficiencies even further. To over simplify, reduce the number of servers through virtualization and your datacenter space demands go down, your dependency on IT staff to manage those locations reduces and your CapEx shrinks, giving you efficiencies immediately.

This is where the Technology Sector is starting to get “Cloudy.” I’ve used this metric before to illustrate my point, simply look at the Google (Insights for Search) chart comparing “cloud computing” against “dedicated hosting” keyword searches:

Dedicated hosting will not go away. It’s a viable outsourced technology option that companies depend on. It makes fare more sense (cents?) than doing it yourself within your corporation. There are only a niche of companies that can afford to make the technology and capital investment to support large-scale IT infrastructures, and even those (as exemplified in the WSJ article) are looking to re-architect their infrastructure.

Could “Cloud Computing” be the silver bullet to help corporations survive the financial hurricane? I think so. But there are challenges ahead for both the providers of the Clouds (and even traditional dedicated hosting providers) as well as corporations.

• For Cloud Providers, education of the “Cloud” concept and overcoming the “this technology is only for early adopters” status will be critical. However this can be achieved through collaboration with other Cloud Providers and Enablers as well as standardization of protocols and APIs, for starters.
• For the Enterprise to view the Cloud as a viable alternative to traditional or even self-hosted infrastructures and datacenters, the challenge is larger. While Cloud Computing may be obvious to many  in terms of “green-ness” and cost savings through zero CapEx, IT managers of the Enterprise tend to not quickly jump on board with the latest technology. Some might say they are a bit gun-shy and would rather someone else test the waters and learn from their mistakes. This wait-and-see attitude will be the end of many. Given the current financial weather and outlook, the Enterprise should be looking at the non-traditional and emerging technologies just as hard as within traditional practices.

While I may be sticking my head in the sand by saying that this financial storm will pass soon, I also  have my head in the “clouds” by stating that dedicated/outsourced hosting and Cloud Computing are viable alternatives to “doing it yourself” that all businesses should seriously consider and get on their short term strategic plans. To jump back into the car metaphor, it’s time to dump the old 1970’s Plymouth and get the 2008 Hybrid!

StartUp SF, an event organized and hosted by GoGrid, ServePath and Orrick, is back after a short summer vacation and raring to go with the THIRD meetup of the year. The Topic of v1.3 will be “Design for Startups” and the guest speaker is Scott Nazarian from frog design.

First the event details:

Date: Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
Time: 6-9pm
Location: 8th Floor Cafe of Orrick, Herrinton & Sutcliffe (@ 405 Howard St in San Francisco)
Price: $10 online in advance / $20 at the door
Note: You must be 21 years or older to attend

Now, a bit more about StartUp SF v1.3.

ABOUT

StartUp SF brings together technologists, entrepreneurs, developers, technologies, services and solutions in an environment designed to further your learning, meet like-minded professionals and promote networking in order to make you successful.

StartUp SF is a not-for-profit event with all proceeds going to charity. All proceeds from this event will be going to Doctors without Borders. StartUp SF has raised $400 for Habitat for Humanity and $480 for Inveneo.

SPEAKER

StartUp SF is pleased to welcome Scott Nazarian, Principal Designer for frog design, inc., as this event’s guest speaker. A bit about Scott:

In his role as Principal Designer, Scott Nazarian meets projects with a blend of modal futurism and contemporary pragmatism, generating designs that are at once familiar and fantastic. Drawing upon a background that ranges from film, editing, and advertising to graphic and visual design, Scott works always to improve the human experience of digital technology. Recent clients include HP and OpenTV – a new paradigm in television watching.

Before coming to frog design, Scott served as a Principal Investigator for the User Experience Design Group of Sun Labs in Menlo Park, California, where he focused on the user experience within environmental, digital, and systems design. He has also worked as a creative director and designer for design firms in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. Throughout these positions, his designs have centered upon conceptual and brand-centric web-based media and interface environments.

Scott regularly teaches design courses at the graduate level, with past engagements at both Parsons and the Art Institute of Los Angeles. He received his MFA in Media Design from the Art Center College of Design in 2004.

DEMO COMPANIES

Demo companies at StartUp SF get 5 minutes of “open mic” time to give their company’s elevator pitch, as well as demo tables where they can showcase their product or service. Demo companies for this event are:

StartUpAgents - Lee Diamond, Founder & CEO
http://www.StartupAgents.com

About StartupAgents - StartupAgents is a matching service dedicated to helping startup companies worldwide find the talent they need to build next generation products and services. Our service provides both companies and individuals the ability to create detailed profiles that allow for a faster more successful matchmaking process.

<splunk> - Kord Campbell, Splunk Evangelist and Director, Splunk Developer’s Program
http://www.splunk.com

About <splunk> - Splunk is a Silicon Valley company inventing large-scale, high-speed indexing and search technology for IT infrastructures. The freely downloadable software indexes, searches and navigates data from any application, server or network device in real time. More than 750 enterprises, government organizations, and service providers and more than 200,000 users achieve higher availability, investigate security incidents in record time, and meet compliance requirements at lower costs.

Clearspring - Mike Harkey, Director of Business Development
http://www.clearspring.com

About Clearspring - Clearspring is the leading provider of widget creation, distribution, tracking and monetization services, used by the world’s largest media companies, advertisers, and widget developers. We help publishers and marketers extend their reach to the leading social networks, start pages and blogs and to respond to growing consumer demand for a more personalized desktop, Web, and mobile experience.

MORE ABOUT THE EVENT

At the event, you will hear some tips and tricks from a successful startup, find a good crowd, demos of some thought-provoking leading-edge products and drinks and light snacks.

You will leave better connected and educated AND with the following gifts from us:

• $100 GoGrid service credit which enables you to deploy, scale and load balance Cloud server networks instantaneously - More info about GoGrid
• Orrick’s Startup Kit CD which includes legal documents critical to every startup Venture - More info about Orrick

Bring yourself and your technology friends to meet likeminded, future-looking folks who may become your next colleague, customer, vendor or competitor.

The judges at the 2008 LinuxWorld Convention peered through the clouds and found something truly noteworthy of recognition, namely ServePath’s Cloud Computing offering, GoGrid, and gave it the Linux World Best of Show Award! The Product Excellence Award is given out to various categories (GoGrid was a finalist in the Best Virtualization Solution for this year), and a Best of Show award is granted to those who rise up above the rest (like the clouds).

The Product Excellence Awards represent “major areas of innovation in the Linux and open source community,” according to an IDG World Expo press release. ServePath won a LinuxWorld Product Excellence Award for “Best Grid Solution” in 2007.

What really makes this Best of Show Award stand out is by simply looking at some of the past winners of Best of Show which include Mozilla FireFox and SUSE Linux.

Among the past Best of Show winners are:

• 2001 - IBM eServer iSeries
• 2002 - Borland Kylix 3
• 2003 - SGI Altix 3000
• 2004 - Mozilla Foundation for Mozilla Firefox
• 2005 - Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP)
• 2006 - OpenSUSE
• 2007 - Unicon Systems’ System-on-Display (SoD)
• 2008 - ServePath’s GoGrid

Be sure to sign up for an Award-winning GoGrid account today! We offer Windows 2003/2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS Linux as well as free f5 load balancing, free static public IPs, private and public VLANs, Free Support and several pre-configured images to help you deploy a GoGrid Cloud Computing environment in minutes without any up-front costs to you.

Robert Sher, principal of CEO to CEO, a firm specializing in assisting CEO’s and business leaders in business strategies, wrote an interesting article on John Keagy, CEO of ServePath. Sher summarizes the article: “A high growth CEO builds value by being first to the market with hot new products and technologies.  But that means moving faster than is comfortable for all his teams as his organization grows.  The case talks about minimizing risk on new product introductions and managing the teams that must do the work.”

Some highlights:

• “CEO’s must understand their key advantage. This is a critical and essential step.”
• “The biggest risk in innovation is market acceptance. Too many entrepreneurs focus on execution, which is a controllable risk, where market acceptance is an uncontrollable risk that must be tested to be managed.”
• “The high frequency but low cost experimentation with the marketplace is what allows [for] more chances at bat while preserving enough resources to invest heavily in proven winners.”
• “The CEO must be clear about the value creation strategy and stick with it, even in the face of resistance.”

This article contains some great insight for any business owner or entrepreneur into what it takes for a CEO to get a business down the path of success. The full version of the article appears here.

IDG World Expo today announced the finalists for the 2008 LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards. These awards will be presented at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo next week in San Francisco. The LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards recognizes product and services innovations. GoGrid is a Finalist for Best Virtualization Solution. (I would think that next year’s Awards would include a Best Cloud Computing Solution, but alas, this year’s did not. We probably would have won that one hands down!)

ServePath won the 2007 LinuxWorld Product Excellence award for Best Grid Computing Solution, and given the tremendous press and public uptake of our Cloud Infrastructure product, GoGrid, is well on the way toward winning other awards in the future.

A full list of companies and product nominated for the various 2008 LinuxWorld Product Excellence awards can be found here.

GoGrid (ServePath) is an exhibitor at 2008 LinuxWorld and can be found at Booth #900 which is located directly inside one of the entrances of the Expo. The Conference runs from August 4th through August 7th 2008 (Exhibit Hall is open August 5th-7th from 10am to 5pm) in Moscone Center North.

If you would like a complimentary LinuxWorld 2008 Exhibit Hall Pass, please contact us via the GoGrid blog with your contact information.

SFBeta 2.5 is tomorrow (7/22/08). Dubbed as the Midsummer Night’s Bash, SFBeta is a great place to socialize, compare tech stories, have a drink with friends and generally unwind after a long day doing Tech.

SFBeta takes place at 111 Mina Gallery (located at 111 Minna Street in San Francisco) from 5:00pm to 9:00pm (PT) - note the earlier start time! Tickets are $15.00 in advance online or $25.00 at the door.

As always, GoGrid & ServePath will be there giving out $100 off promotion codes to get a GoGrid Cloud Infrastructure environment up and running for no cost. Come talk to us about this revolutionary technology that everyone seems to be talking about.

According to the SFBeta Wiki, the demo companies are:

Table 1 (Front Room - Table)
5:00-7:00: BooRah
BooRah is the ultimate, personalized review guide providing consumers a smarter way to find great restaurants. BooRah’s patent-pending natural language processing technology automatically summarizes a collection of online reviews from bloggers, professional critics and consumers, and allows consumers to search based on their personal preferences. By capturing the community vibe and social essence of existing online groups, and comparing the results to an individual’s search criteria, BooRah delivers unsurpassed relevance with the broadest community reach.
7:00-9:00: Speeqe
Speeqe is group chat, simplified. Talk to friends or co-workers in real time, or search past conversations to see what you missed

Table 2 (Front Room - Table)
5:00-7:00: Dapper
Dapper aims to make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website. By doing so, we hope to allow others to realize their creativity and implement new and exciting services and applications.
7:00-9:00: OpenFace Project
The Openface Project is a PHP framework (Ruby in process) used for building applications that run on Facebook and OpenSocial platforms. Openface is a set of libraries that you add into your PHP application that enables the same codebase to run within Facebook, Bebo and OpenSocial containers like MySpace, Hi5 & Orkut.

Table 3 (Back Room - Table)
5:00-7:00: Spongecell
Spongecell helps advertisers create display advertising with measurable results. Bring more people to retail sales, entertainment events, trade shows, political rallies, sporting events, or a TV show.
7:00-9:00: Notifixio.us

Table 4 (Back Room - Table)
5:00-7:00: Rofo.com
Find space and read reviews (office, retail, warehouse, subleases, co-working & shared). Post your space needs (its anonymous) & be found. Connect with professionals and get advice
7:00-9:00: Searchme
Searchme lets you see what you’re search for. As you start typing, categories appear that relate to your query. Choose a category, and you’ll see pictures of web pages that answer your search.

Hope to see you there!