Hats off to Microsoft

This is a blog post I kind over never thought I'd write, as I thought of MS being stuck in the old world with Office products, Sharepoint and struggling even with the latest Windows versions. As an example I was testing Azure two years ago and it was very clunky and not really a serious contender to Amazon's AWS feature-wise.

Fast forward to today. Nadella's MS seems to be very real about being on all kinds of devices and Azure is elegant and efficient - I'd say very close to being on-par with AWS (which I also love, by the way), even for us that is basically mainly a Linux-based shop on the server side. And locally we see a quite new humbleness in the organization of the giant and a willingness to work with and help startups.

So hats off to Microsoft. Well done. Be sure to keep on improving.

Full disclosure: My firm has received some free usage of Azure via MS's Bizspark Plus program and this is the way I got to use Azure more again, but the sense of radical improvement is very real.

Happy Last Year

OK, two things first before writing the post: First and foremost, happy new year and best of luck for your projects, people, products and passions (the less known 4Ps?) in 2013! Then, if you have even a hint of allergy towards self-promotion, stop reading. Really.

Still there? I am going to share two great things happening to our product and team at the tail end of 2012. First, we got external recognition when we won an entrepreneurship price from a leading Norwegian legal firm. Apart from nice flowers and even nicer honors, this gives us some free legal advice which will be very useful when getting our first international customers.

Below are myself and partner at Wikborg Rein, Torleif P. Dahl - as well as those mentioned flowers.

Second, we landed two leading Norwegian publishing houses as new customers for our tool, making the total number of customers reach the great number of four (!). I am not joking, but I am also not joking about it being great. With these lighthouse customers secured, we are looking very much forward to demoing for smaller publisher as well as international ones. If you happen to be a potential user of the tool reading this, drop me a line to book a meeting.

Looking forward to a great year in 2013 as well - on our part we have lot of exciting things up our sleeve for the TapBookAuthor / ePekebok tool (push messages and Windows 8 apps prototype support are two items in the Q1 list of new functionality, with unlimited undo across sessions and interactive graphs and questions/tests on the list of autumn 2012 highlights). Happy last year. Happy new year!

WeVideo got the time to succeed - and boy they seem to use it

WeVideo just raised $19M from a venture capital firm. Knowing these VC guys are not playing the 50% increase game, this certainly raised the bar for WeVideo - I guess to be a real success now by their definitions, we are talking $250M+ valuation or so... Crazy. And crazy exciting. I do of course know that the reason for such multiples is that the likelihood of going to a $0 valuation is also very real. Any way you put it, this is a huge compliment to the team lead by Bjørn and Jostein and a great opportunity to take a real shot at being and staying number one video editor in the cloud.

Just after the news about the funding, WeVideo announced their extended partnership with Google (they are already on YouTube.com/create) and that WeVideo was compatible with Google Drive from launch day. And this week, Disney launched their Avengers Remix campaign powered by WeVideo. And not long before that, WeVideo launched their first mobile app that seemlessly let you add clips from a mobile device into a collaborative video project. Busy bees indeed.

And a last quick note: This week a book co-authored by Andreas Goeldi, who I went to MIT Sloan with, came out; Video Marketing for Dummies. Reportedly he says about WeVideo that it is "Likely the closest thing to a full-blown video editing application in the cloud". Couldn't agree more!

Full disclosure: I am not exactly neutral to WeVideo. I am a member of the board of Inspera, the company that developed the technology in WeVideo and spun it off as a separate company. That being said, my very tiny stock ownership in Inspera (that is now a minority shareholder in WeVideo) is not likely to make me truly rich, even if the ball flies totally out of the park. But rich on experiences for sure! Through my company Innovation Consulting I am playing a modest role in making WeVideo tick and appreciate both the forward looking days and the more firefighting-style we might have from time to time in the run-up to a big launch.

Internet as an application platform - even for HD movie editing?

I have read a lot and also written a bit about web based applications of different sorts and how business models in the software industry are changing. The move to Internet-based applications has been promised for maybe too long, but from my point of view it seems to be going more mainstream lately - which for instance a front page of the Economist in October 2009 indicated.

In addition to moving more mainstream in terms of users, I think web based applications are wideing the scope also in terms of types of applications that move online. The last weeks and months I have been lucky enough to be involved in a project taking this somewhat to the extreme - trying to do HD video editing online in the browser.

With the launch of Flash Player 10.1, Adobe brings hardware accelerated mp4 support to browsers on several operating systems - and based on technology from the Creaza movie editor a preview of a upcoming version of online video editing with HD video support has been made in record time by a dedicated team of developers in Norway and Romania. You can do a test drive yourself, by getting the new flash plugin and following this link to the online video editing application preview. Make sure to use the commenting function to tell us what you think.

The technology preview version does not have a save or export functionality, but you can render the movies live and watch them to test the quality. In the screenshot below I am changing a text about 10 seconds into the example movie. You can also add transitions and effects, and to be honest I was amazed how the results look. You can have multiple layers of effects, sound and video (including multiple videos playing in different parts at the same time) and it all renders on-the-fly.

Full disclosure: I am a member of the board at Inspera, who owns a majority stake in Creaza AS and has the IPR to much of the technology used in the preview application.

Development in software business models – and the power of hindsight

When I recently was selecting a mail solution for my new company, I went for Google Apps. I did this after also considering a small business edition of Exchange, as well as just continuing to use the built in email service from my domain hosting provider that I already had up and running. Also my current client, i.e. my previous employer Inspera, has moved to Google Apps from an in-house Exchange solution, they just finished the transition last weekend.

These two decisions made me think back to what I wrote in my thesis on software business models in 2007 (part of my MTM degree, an MBA in technology management from NTNU, MIT Sloan and NHH - link to full foreword/abstract is provided for anyone interested):

…[even if] there is no “one size fits all” for business models in the software industry, if I had to place one bet on which business model innovation that will have most impact based on my findings, my decision would be clear: My money would be put on SaaS – on-demand subscription based software. Predicting paradigm shifts is a risky business, and especially so with shifts that have been predicted similarly without really happening before. Nevertheless, my take is that enough enabling factors have changed so even if it will not replace the traditional license, it may radically change the way software is sold, distributed and developed the coming years.

So the million dollar question is: Is this actually happening for mainstream applications for mainstream companies as we speak?

Extrapolating from the two samples (yep, two years since I last touched academia and reading the daily Dilbert since...) the conclusion has to be: “Sure”. On the other hand, I have also worked for some big companies over the last year that just wouldn't even start to consider Google Apps. But still, major changes in buying patterns often start with smaller companies and over time becomes an option also for the larger enterprises requiring time-tested and mature solutions.

Even if I feel the last two years have added support to my hypothesis of a possible “disruption from below” ala Christensen, I think the jury is still out on the question if SaaS will replace the traditional license based model as the dominant model at any point – or just be a supplement. (And to me financing a traditional license – making it look somewhat like a subscription – does not make it SaaS, by the way.) Cynics might also add that the predictions of net-PCs given in 1998 are not much different from the SaaS and “everything in the cloud” visions of today, they might argue that it has been coming in large scale “real soon now” for over ten years...

Reading the abstract two years after also drew my attention to another thing I wrote, that ...lines between data, applications, software and services can sometimes be blurry. This I at least think is even truer today than it was in 2007 – or to ask rhetorically: Is Twitter worth a zillion because of its software?