First CoffeeSM’s very first ad…
By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor,
Op. 132:
Kintera Inc. specializes in fund-raising
and customer management tools for nonprofits, which right now is a good
description of the company itself. Late yesterday afternoon the Associated
Press reported that Kintera “will
restate first-quarter earnings to reclassify the way it accounts for
development costs, a move that is seen increasing its losses during the
period.”
Kintera won’t release their Q2 results until the restatement
comes out. It won’t be good news for the software maker, whose shares fell 16
cents to $3.83 in electronic trading after the announcement. It’s not like
their originally-stated results, a loss of $7 million on revenues of $9.5
million were that great to begin with.
…
Had a good talk with RightNow president and founder Greg
Gianforte yesterday. First CoffeeSM’s known Greg for
years, has stayed at his house in Bozeman and over the years has a lot of
respect for the high level of quality and rock-solid integrity with which he
runs his CRM business.
The call was business, he’s contacting journalists for a
product announcement RightNow has coming out tomorrow – watch this space, as
the cliché goes – but catching up beforehand Greg said “hey, I’m an author now.”
Yes, First CoffeeSM had heard of his book to be
released this September 1 but currently orderable from Amazon, Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow
A Successful Company With Almost No Money. Like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard,
Dell…
“Yeah, those all started bootstrapped,” Greg said,
explaining that the book covers more, well, real-life examples. A guy who starts
a grocery, someone with a good software idea or Greg himself, who bootstrapped
RightNow.
Boiled down, the
secret, if there is one, to bootstrapping, starting a business without really
having much in the way of start-up funding, seems to be to go around and sell
first. Greg tells of a guy who wanted to start a grocery store, he didn’t
have the money to do that so what he did was go around and sell orders to
people, and then fill the orders.
He delivered on his bike, did it long and well enough that he
made enough money to buy an old station wagon, which expanded his range so his
business grew a little more to where he could hire someone to drive the
deliveries, the extra help allowed business to increase to where he could rent
an old warehouse to stock his groceries, which let him expand his operation
even more, next thing he knows he’s running a chain of grocery stores.
“I go speak at places like Harvard, they love it, the
students give me standing ovations, and the professors never invite me back,” Greg
said, noting that the business schools are so fixated on investment banking and
venture funding and things like that, they don’t teach bootstrapping. But it
strikes a chord with entrepreneurs.
First CoffeeSM observed that bootstrapping seems
particularly good for things like high tech, where all you need is a computer,
modem and a good idea, where you’re selling software code instead of
Chevrolets. Greg said yeah, there’s less infrastructure and start-up cost with
something like that, but really the model can work almost anywhere.
He himself bootstrapped RightNow. In his early 30s he sold a
high-tech company for a few million dollars and moved his wife and family to his
favorite vacation spot as a kid, Montana, where he was thinking of retiring to fly-fish
the rest of his life, but after a while thought nah, he wanted more on his
tombstone than Caught A Really Big Fish.
So he went around to lots of companies and found out what
sort of customer service software they’d want, went home, spent a month writing
the code and sold it to those companies who had said they wanted it, listened
to what added features they wanted, what the bugs were, fixed that, hired
people only when he needed them and could afford them – it was two guys working
out of a spare bedroom in his house at first.
Bootstrapping isn’t the fast way to success, but it’s the
one you can control. Get venture capital in at the start, you’ve got some
venture capitalist breathing down your neck to go public as soon as possible so
he can get his profit out. You give up a lot of control that way. Bootstrapping’s
the way to do it the way you want to do it.
Good man, good company, good idea, here’s betting it’s a
good book, too.
…
Evolving
Solutions, which describes itself as a “data on demand and
server consolidation expert,” has issued
a press release this morning describing server
virtualization and “how it paves the way for autonomic computing.”
IT would love server environments capable of doing things like processing
weekly payroll, end of month commissions and end of year accounting while
running all the ERP, CRM and e-mail systems at the same time.
Jaime Gmach, president of Evolving Solutions notes that “tapping into
under-utilized servers that rarely surpass ten percent utilization rate, will
allow [companies] to access additional processing power.”
Basically server virtualization is overloaded servers finding idle servers and
borrowing the capacity they need. “Then, without human prompting, these
virtualized servers return the capacity when it is no longer needed,” Gmach
says. He calls the process “a complete leap into autonomic computing,” or capacity
on demand.
Gmach gives three steps to “virtualizing” an organization’s IT environment and
driving it towards autonomic computing:
Step 1- Assess & Validate. Conduct an environmental assessment to define
each department’s server processing needs. Resource/environmental auditing
agents can poll all servers to identify current totals of CPU, memory,
adaptors, and file/system capacity and total used and unallocated disk space.
Step 2 – Rationalize and Critique. Critique the current server environment to identify
and consolidate processing-compatible applications to single servers, or
virtualize existing multi-server environment to share processing attributes
from a common pool.
Step 3 – Increase ROI on Current IT Infrastructure. Tap into an existing
hardware pool and reduce the need to purchase additional servers in order to
increase on-demand processing capacity.
…
Asia
Pulse is reporting on a cool idea
for using call centers to increase agricultural efficiency and output in
the Philippines.
Usually the only time you read about the Philippine call
centers in tech columns is when somebody wants to bash outsourcing. But First
Coffee’s impressed with the projects headed up by program director Roger
Barroga of the Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture designed to increase
access of farmers to agricultural data.
“We are drawing up plans for a mobile Internet bus that will
roam the countryside,” Barroga said, explaining that the bus “will serve as
roadshow of the Pinoy Farmers’ Internet e-extension services, which farmers can
tap to gain information relevant to their farming concerns,” in Asia Pulse’s
words.
Barroga said to help farmers correctly diagnose conditions
of their crops, authorities are setting up a system where camera-equipped
cellular phones, which farmers and agricultural extension workers nationwide
are increasingly using, can transmit pictures showing conditions of crops to a
farmers’ call center.
“This center will then forward the images and corresponding
queries to experts who can diagnose the conditions and send possible
recommended solutions,” Asia Pulse says.
The government is also building a database of commonly-asked
questions for farmers to access via cell phone, which can also push information
on queries to the farmers.
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for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
