fiveclouds » business

Charlotte 2.0.1 Podcast

Philip — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:13:02 +0000

The past few months have been incredibly busy, a large part of that was finishing off work for 2009 and starting to prepare things for 2010. After spending a year floating around doing a few side projects here and there I really wanted to start 2010 in the right way.

Since coming to Charlotte several years ago I have tried several paths to connecting with the tech scene in the city, restarting the Charlotte Java User Group and then helping organize two Barcamps. I’m met up with some great people in the city – but I still have felt like I haven’t really met the start-up elements, those individuals who are driven to creating new technology companies and working in environments which foster innovation.

After the last Barcamp I was chatting with some of the guys from CLTBlog and Area15 and we started talking about doing a set of podcasts to explore that side of Charlotte and hopefully bring more of these activities to the surface. After that there was the usual lull of getting back to daily work and filtering out enough time – then I decided to get together with Justin from CLTBlog and the Netphase guys and very quickly (within a few days) we had our first podcast at Area15. One of the big hits was meeting up with Josh from Charlotte 2.0 – he is a man on a mission to help bring more start-ups to Charlotte and I’m sure I’m going to be listening and helping him with it all I can.

Charlotte 2.0.1 from Justin Ruckman on Vimeo.

We are working to produce another podcast in mid January. Hopefully it will establish the conversation – something that needs to start if we are going to build some new tech start-ups here in Charlotte. It all makes me feel much more excited about 2010 – and I’m looking forward to sharing more about what I’m going to be doing too!

The Cloud Market is Live!

Philip — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:07:45 +0000

We have opened the doors on The Cloud Market! We have a lot more features yet to release, so do keep checking up on progress and you can also follow us on twitter.

We are hoping over time to build up more and more functionality to help people find the AWS images they need quickly and effectively and also allowing them to track the evolution of images (both paid and free). Also we have already just added support for EU images!

I’m sure I’ll have more to blog on it in the future – right now its back to cooking up business ideas.

PaaS growing all the time

Philip — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:49:34 +0000

Well these are certainly the days of Platform As A Service (PAAS), and imagine we are just really seeing the beginning of the compute cloud. Though the definition of what is really a Platform is probably up for grabs, and Google are in the game now. Though what is really exciting is the speed at with which we are seeing adoption and effect are now reflection of an Enterprise 2.0 world (maybe this is now Adoption 2.0 – a new world where we can see adoption of a technology realtime).

The really exciting thing here is the number of players (Morph, Bungee, Heroku, RightScale) since the more the minds converge the more we see the benefits broaden. At Exist we have been using Morph as a platform for our clients, it allows us to immediately deploy client sites and then collaborate in a kinda UAT environment which is both easy and quick. This kind of Infrastructure-on-demand is really a huge benefit – the virtual nature plays so easily in the hands of a collaboration based development company.

What is also important is it fits with out Web 2.0 tooling – as a company we actually choose the environment with the client (it can be anything from BaseCamp or JIRA and our dev teams are up on lots of tools). The approach is always agile and that usually means a number of environments – Suddenly we are switching up from lots of servers to leveraging the cloud where it is a real blessing. Real-time development without the hassle of deployment and administration, giving our sys-admins the chance to work on strategic plans rather than operational needs.

With Morph getting ready to IPO in the Philippines it will be an exciting time to Rails developers looking to push products to market faster than ever.

Innovation Forum in Manila

Philip — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 11:58:00 +0000

I just got back from a talk by Dr. Paco Sandejas on what VC’s are looking for in 2008. While the topic for the meeting was quite high level it did bring forward a lot of thought provoking discussion. The meeting was full and I was surprised at the mix of VC’s, government and university representatives and aspiring young people looking to tap into the answer of starting a business. There was a lot of discussion around the opportunities that were in place, such as facilities and grants, as well guidance on the types of company that would peak interest in those with the money.

I think that while this type of meeting is great – one of the problems faced was that many of the young technology entrepreneurs lack keen business and vision-leading experience. Paco made note of this as he discussed the difficult subject of supporting application development companies – often seen as nothing more than BPO’s.

The truth is that application development companies like Exist (my employer) and Stratpoint (Paco’s investment) provide a bridge between many types of company leveraging software, including VC backed start-ups and large scale enterprises. It is more important than ever that teams working in the Philippines grow to see there connection with these companies as more than being a hired-development shop – and understand the partnership that is commonly in place. Understanding that will help Filipino developers and architects connect with experience in places like the San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York – learning from them, understanding how they are building companies out off the back of technical innovation (commonly being done in the Philippines). I remember working as an architect and first understanding the workings of companies – and it was a valuable time when you start to examine the creativity you have in the light of how it will endure a business environment.