My Internet Notebook

a journal on software, mobile, marketing

Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

Listen and Win

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I rarely post on political issues on this blog. But Mrs. Hillary Clinton’s recent win in New Hampshire primary warrants some very interesting mentioning. Not because of this win’s importance one way or the other, but because of how she attributed her success and I quote:

"over the last week, I listened to you, and in the process, I found my own voice. I felt like we all spoke from our hearts, and I am so gratified that you responded."

This can’t be more true in software business as well. If you, whether you are CEO, CTO, product marketing or product manager, listen to your customers and markets, you will eventually win. 

Written by Y.

January 9th, 2008 at 11:35 am

Posted in Business,Software

Salesforce.com Release Chinese SaaS and Special Pricing

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To capitalize a growing industry (i.e software as service) in Asia in general and China in particular, Salesforce.com is putting more efforts into its China venture, announcing a 10 user subscription plan costing $115 each per year.

Although Saleforece.com had an office in China region since 2003, I have not heard much about SFDC from my friends in China’s IT industry. What I heard many times though, is that selling service in China is very hard. At this stage of IT development in China, purchasing of hardware and OS/RDBMS still rules. But I certainly hope that SFDC can crack the market and introduce a new mentality in the IT purchasing circle. Good for everyone.

Salesforce.com has announced a Chinese edition of its on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) software targeted at small companies in China.

Source: Salesforce.com speaks Chinese – Software – News – ZDNet Asia

Written by Y.

April 25th, 2007 at 4:26 pm

Posted in China,Software

Paul Graham on Finding Startup Ideas

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Quick quote of the day:

Let me repeat that recipe: finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it. Simple as it seems, that’s the recipe for a lot of startup ideas.

From: Paul Graham on startup ideas.

Written by Y.

March 19th, 2007 at 11:55 pm

Posted in Business,Software

What Is Enterprise Software 2.0

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An informative interview of SocialText CEO Ross Mayfield by SandHill.com. SandHill.com | Management | The Next Wave of Enterprise 2.0. Some interesting tidbits of information:

HBS professor Andrew McAfee defines Enterprise 2.0 like this: “The use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

In classic enterprise 1.0, 75% of enterprise knowledge are communicated thru and buried in email messages.

Intel-backed integrated Enterprise 2.0 solution, called SuiteTwo combines “best-of-breed” offerings in wikis, blogs and RSS from Socialtext, SixApart and Newsgator, bundled them on an Intel-based appliance and offers service and maintenance through SpikeSource. The market reception has been phenomenal.

My thinking on this is that Suite Two is missing an important web 2.0 aspect, which is social networking / community building. Teams, groups , divisions within a large corporation are just natural elements of a ‘social network’. I can imagine more communication and active knowledge sharing will happen with this model.

Cisco’s recent acquisition of tribe.net makes me think that Cisco may be onto something that’s going to be big in the next few years. Adding Cisco’s communication solutions (VoIP etc) on top of all the communities you can build with tribe.net, this starts to make more sense to me.

Written by Y.

March 6th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

Posted in Business,Software

PHP curl with Windows IIS

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Enabling the curl extension on my PHP IIS installation is simpler than I thought.

After some googling and finding some good posts (such as this one http://www.tonyspencer.com/mt/archives/2003/10/curl_with_php_a.htm), I realized that since I manually installed my PHP5.0 with the windows zip package I already have php_curl.dll in my php/ext directory. All I had to do to run curl is just two steps:

  1. uncomment the line that has extension=php_curl.dll
  2. restart IIS web server

You can use phpinfo() to verify before and after you enabled curl.

Btw, if you are relatively comfortable with IIS and web server in general, you should always use the manual installation of PHP (http://us2.php.net/downloads.php).

Written by Y.

March 12th, 2006 at 12:50 pm

Posted in Internet,Software