My Internet Notebook

SAP debuts hosted CRM service | News.com to go | CNET News.com

The initial service costs about $75 per user per month, but only has the Sales management functionality. On-demand Marketing and Call center etc would come later this year.

So by now, every major software companies (including Microsoft, Oracle) already has an On-Demand CRM offering. By some estimates, the total market for on-demand CRM was $600 million in 2005. But it is a market that is expected to grow 30% for the next five years. No other software segment can match this level of projected growth. No wonder everyone wants to get onto the on-demand CRM train.

In its last issue, Business 2.0 profiled a hosted CRM startup called Entellium, which has some interesting features and low prices.

The latest issue of Business 2.o again has a good article on startup – Startup Last, Finish First.

The concept of second mover advantage isn’t that intriguing. But the mentioning of a startup called PeerFlix is pretty interesting. They basically took the business models that work, at ebay and netflix respectively, to come up with the idea for a DVD exchange site. That in essence is the mash-up of working business models. (we have seen enough mash-up from the media content, technology side.)

So I guess everyone needs to take a harder look at the business models of established players, there might be something you can learn and mashup from the big guys.

I was trying to login to one of my online brokerage account but got the dreaded ‘invalid password’ error. Did I become the latest victim of identity theft – someone stole my login and changed my password without my knowing? Out of panic, I started dialing the 800 service number. After 5 minutes on the phone with a rep, I figured out that they changed the password security policy in the last couple of weeks during which I never logged in. My original password was only 6 digits long, but now they require minimum of 7. Ouch!

As a professional in software testing, I think there are a couple of lessons learned here.

First and foremost, communication failure. I don’t recall there were any communication that eluded to the new policy and asked me to login and change my password. This is one of the biggest online broker and just went thru a merger. I can see how this failure could happen in such a situation.

Secondly, their web development / testing team should have tested this scenario where logging in with an old password should be allowed and prompted to change the password to abide by the new policy.

With either of the above implemented, they could have saved the 5 minutes of their reps’s time and avoided a valued customer’s frustration.

As the enterprise software also moves to the SaaS (Software as a Service) model, I can see how we could run into these similar issues again and again.

Web 2.0 of the Consumer Internet

Monte Jade January Meeting

Date: January 18, 2006(Wednesday) 6:30pm
Place: Hong Fu Restaurant, Tel: (408) 252-2200
20588 Stevens Creek Blvd., Cupertino, CA
Speaker: Mr. Ram Shriram
Founding Board Member, Google Inc.
Founder, Sherpalo
Host: Mr. Chih-Kai Cheng
General Partner, Harbinger Venture Management Corp.blockquote

I have been wondering what sets Google apart from its competitors. Especially of interest to me is how Baidu stacks up against Google. There are obvisouly many aspects from which I can compare this two search engines. But reliability is going to be the first aspect I am going to comment on, in light of recent reports of all those Web 2.0 outages associated with del.icio.us and Moveable Type.

I was searching for some real estate definition in Chinese which both Google and Baidu gave me satisfactory results (more in another post). But when I clicked on one of Baidu’s sponsored links, I got a connection timeout on sf.baidu.com. Ouch! This may not indicate an outage with Baidu’s servers in the US, but it does mean Baidu probably just lost a revenue opportunity. Not good!

To be fair to Baidu, I am located in the US, which is not their major focus at this point. Further, I can’t do a similar research in China w.r.t. Google’s performance. But still, being listed on Nasdaq, there is just no execuse for Baidu to be a ‘slacker’ on its service’s reliability.

Below is the traceroute info for sf.baidu.com and google.com:

C:\>tracert sf.baidu.com

Tracing route to sf.a.shifen.com [202.108.22.189]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms homeportal.gateway.2wire.net [172.16.0.1]
2 21 ms 15 ms 17 ms 69.106.51.254
3 21 ms 17 ms 17 ms dist2-vlan50.pltn13.pbi.net [64.164.97.67]
4 53 ms 19 ms 17 ms bb2-g3-0.pltnca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.43.56]
5 51 ms 23 ms 27 ms bb1-p5-0.crscca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.240.137]
6 41 ms 15 ms 18 ms core1-p4-0.crscca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.40.57]
7 35 ms 31 ms 29 ms core1-p3-0.cranca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.242.186]
8 34 ms 30 ms 29 ms bb1-p8-0.cranca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.40.94]
9 37 ms 31 ms 58 ms ex1-p15-0.eqlaca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.41.29]
10 32 ms 29 ms 29 ms ex2-p9-0.eqlaca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.40.162]
11 49 ms 36 ms 43 ms 151.164.248.194
12 45 ms 39 ms 40 ms 217.239.40.22
13 366 ms 338 ms 329 ms 212.184.26.234
14 332 ms 334 ms 334 ms 219.158.25.117
15 336 ms 354 ms 332 ms 219.158.3.69
16 248 ms 242 ms 245 ms 219.158.4.49
17 * 240 ms 255 ms 202.96.12.14
18 243 ms 244 ms 275 ms 61.148.3.58
19 * 244 ms 250 ms xd-22-239-a8.bta.net.cn [202.108.22.239]
20 229 ms 252 ms 228 ms xd-22-189-a8.bta.net.cn [202.108.22.189]

Trace complete.

C:\>tracert google.com

Tracing route to google.com [64.233.187.99]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 4 ms 2 ms 3 ms homeportal.gateway.2wire.net [172.16.0.1]
2 16 ms 17 ms 15 ms 69.106.51.254
3 15 ms 15 ms 15 ms dist1-vlan50.pltn13.pbi.net [64.164.97.66]
4 20 ms 16 ms 17 ms bb1-g3-0.pltnca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.43.54]
5 21 ms 15 ms 19 ms bb1-p4-0.crsfca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.41.5]
6 17 ms 19 ms 19 ms ex1-p9-0.pxpaca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.240.17]
7 23 ms 19 ms 19 ms asn15169-google-2.pxpaca.sbcglobal.net [151.164.250.134]
8 23 ms 19 ms 17 ms 66.249.94.14
9 17 ms 17 ms 17 ms 66.249.94.227
10 25 ms 76 ms 21 ms 72.14.236.11
11 115 ms 76 ms 80 ms 66.249.95.125
12 204 ms 74 ms 80 ms 216.239.49.222
13 77 ms 78 ms 76 ms 72.14.236.15
14 82 ms 74 ms 82 ms 216.239.49.222
15 82 ms 78 ms 76 ms 64.233.187.99

Trace complete.