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Adobe will soon introduce its Creative Suite 5 to the public. A tool in the new suite will allow for easy import of Flash animations into HTML5 Canvas code. Once IE9 launches, all major browsers will support Canvas. At that point, any Flash creation can be viewable by just about anyone without downloading the Flash plugin. It also means, clearly, that devices that cannot accept the plugin can nonetheless run the animations built on it. Those who are excited about this probably think of Flash is a space hog. As ReadWriteWeb has discovered, it sometimes is, though not always. Sponsor One of the points of interest regarding this development is the fact that Apple products block flash from "access to the required APIs." HTML5 may prove a way around for Flash users and the users of Apple devices, like the iPhone and iPad who wish to use the content. On the video below, "Adobe Flash Platform Evangelist" Michael Chaize compares performance of Flash 10.1 and HTML5 on mobile devices. Comparison of performance of Flash Player 10.1 and HTML 5 on Mobile Devices from michael chaize on Vimeo . Discuss
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Flash Now Importable to HTML5 Canvas
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adobe,
adobe-flash,
animations,
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Canvas,
chaize,
creative-suite,
development,
flash,
flash player 10,
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space hog,
video
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The semantic web is one of the leading trends we track here at ReadWriteWeb, so it was big news to us earlier this month when Evri announced it was acquiring Twine creators Radar Networks . Following the announcement, Twine CEO Nova Spivack wrote an inspiring and lengthy farewell blog post detailing the acquisition, and the story behind the development and growth of Twine. Towards the end of the post, Spivack outlined some lessons for budding entrepreneurs based on what he learned through his startup experience. Sponsor The number one piece of advice he suggests is to raise as little funding as possible from venture capitalists, and to stick with revenue funds, bootstrapping or angel funding to get by. Based on Spivack's experiences with raising VC funding, he believes the conditions and strings that are attached to it aren't worth it if the company can get by without raising any funding, especially in the current economic situation. "It is no easy task to get a startup funded and launched in this economy," he writes. "The odds are not in your favor -- so play defense, not offense, until conditions improve (years from now)." Part of playing defense, he says, is to curtail spending as much as possible - a suggestion that goes hand-in-hand with the modesty of raising as little venture capital as necessary. Spivack urges startups to avoid quickly spending and expanding upon bloating their bank account with investor dollars; instead, he argues for responsible saving and planning for unexpected downturns and crashes. "Assume the market will crash -- downturns are more frequent and last longer than they used to. Expect that. Plan on it," writes Spivack. "And make sure you keep enough capital in reserve to spend 9 to 12 months raising your next round, because that is how long it takes in this economy to get a round done." One of the things we hear VCs look for in potential investments is traction, but Spivack, interestingly enough, says traction is not always a sure-fire bet for funding and success. He says VCs are more concerned with finding a company that is producing revenues preferably at a break-even level - something he attributes to an evolving VC landscape. "Venture capital investing has changed dramatically -- early stage and late stage deals are the only deals that are getting real funding," writes Spivack. "Mid-stage companies are simply left to die, unless they are profitable or will soon be profitable." Spivack provides a number of other lessons he learned from his time with Twine, and be sure to read his entire post for a touching story behind his company. For now, note his most important lessons regarding modest spending and modest fund raising. A lot of startups enter the scene looking to become as flush with cash as possible, but in some cases, with some entrepreneurs, having too much money can be a bad thing. Discuss
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Twine CEO to Startups: Be Modest With Your Money
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acquisition,
announcement,
become-as-flush,
conditions,
development,
enter-the-scene,
networks,
radar networks,
raise-as-little,
spivack,
startup,
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Tips,
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twine-towards
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Today, we drop another another segment in the Rulers of the Cloud series, focusing on SalesForce.com, the cloud innovator that re-invented the rules of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). SalesForce is growing into a big company, recently announcing over a $1 billion in revenue annual run rate . Yet, the company is still an agile organization focusing on upheaval of the enterprise through cloud services. The newest release brought a major new services focus, SalesForce Chatter . We took a look and found that this product may be the service that brings the company further into the enterprise as a dominant enterprise cloud and collaboration vendor. Sponsor Chatter is an industrial-grade collaboration framework that is designed for mixing following and deal flow, and finding the place where communication drives sales. Chatter feels like Twitter for the enterprise, with the advantage that its multi-tenant approach can be hosted and segmented for your organization. The toolkit was recently opened for select developers as part of the company release, dubbed LadyBug. We'll take a look at the core business and how this product may inspire IT leaders to create real-time tools for the enterprise. A Critical Asset: The Business Forecast To plot out the company's future, we want to highlight the past and present briefly. The company competes with big enterprise vendors such as SAP and Oracle for CRM. From day one, SalesForce has had a "No Software" mantra focus on the power of cloud platform approach. The lightweight, easy-to-install platform has lots of tools for the management of hardcore customer information including the scenario shown here. A Critical Asset: Developer Tools SalesForce's offerings for the enterprise are evolving. Key updates to the platform continue to roll out, as these shown for the Spring 2010 Ladybird release. In our recent briefing of SalesForce Chatter the thing that impressed us most is how the development community can use all of the SalesForce platform APIs in concert with the new Chatter services. In this case, a developer of "Chatter Bubbles" has taken chatter experience back to the future with a closer parity with Twitter. This demonstration peaked our interest, seeing how the Chatter experience could easily tug the "I could build a better Twitter" emotion. Now, each enterprise team that deploys Chatter can customize microblogging for the company or salesteam on top of the SalesForce collaboration cloud. A Critical Asset: Platform as a Service We noticed that SalesForce.com has a deep set of partners and relationships to technology companies. For this reivew, we took a look at the SalesForce and Adobe partnership as an example of where the company has, like its relationship with Google, created a partnership that brings the organizations' developers together. In the announcement here, the we see that Adobe AIR and the Flash platform are being enabled to consume SalesForce objects and to create persistent rich client applications. AIR has seen a lot of exposure in the Twitter application space, with very popular applications living on its client technology. Killer Enterprise Apps are Right Here, Right Now If we put all those things together, we see a new class of application emerging in the enterprise, literally a Tweetdeck -like, keyword-filter powered command center for each facet of the organization. We think enterprise software is headed there, and with the pieces SalesForce has put together, it could be built. This Tweetdeck screenshot sparked our imagination of how we could build a rich client for the enterprise. In the example shown, we can see the streams flowing further together to cross the enterprise to social bridge. In this perfect world, we see @GigaOM as our CIO, and @TechCrunch as head of marketing. Demi Moore is our CEO and wants to know your deal is flowing. In this not-so-distant future, we see the threads of decisions, meetings, and key concepts fly by in real time, and simple, user-controlled filtering could give personalized views to any stream. The Cloud Opportunity is Still Evolving In a way, SalesForce's biggest challenge is opportunity. The platform works; it has an obvious opportunity to chip away at the CRM market and adjacent markets through the dynamics it has been founded on. We wonder how platforms bind themselves to SalesForce and how the enterprise cloud might evolve. Here's a few we'll be interested in learning more about. Should the company go much further in building a developer community, or should it integrate the communities within other platforms (Google, Adobe, Microsoft). As a platform company, will SalesForce.com also be able to build the killer app for Chatter? Is it addictive? From our view, the question isn't will Chatter beat other tools, but instead, will it be a dominant form of communication? We wonder, could chatter beat email? From what we've heard so far, it has promise, but we'd like to see it. How does the Force.com cloud map to cloud efforts at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and VMware? Will there emerge a deeper integration between online and offline cloud resources, or a peering of services between SalesForce and Amazon, SalesForce and VMware? What is SalesForce.com's trajectory with core services like compute, storage, and other things that are getting clouded in the enterprise? Do multi-vendor collaboration platforms work? Should we expect that both Buzz and Chatter will be at our fingertips, or will in the end, one application win? We see the advantage of being "the message bus", like Twitter, and enabling smart clients to define experience, similar to TweetDeck's relationship with Twitter. In this case, it is the application (Tweetdeck) that decided to support other social apps (social clouds) such as Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Perhaps we'll see the same in enterprise collaboration. Will SalesForce.com update its brand to show off the breadth of the opportunity? As an example, Apple Computer became Apple, Inc. to represent itself. Could SalesForce.com become Force? Does it need to? Personalities Matter: Are you Social with Your Boss? A lot of organizations are awaking to enterprise social opportunity, including the small and growing Yammer and Jive . These companies are bringing next-generation communications to the enterprise. There seems to be a communication landscape change, where the boundaries of "water cooler" and "board meeting" will meet. It will be interesting to see how these tools promote themselves and how social etiquette will evolve. Will our CEO send us an inspirational quote of the day, like so many others do on Twitter? Or, instead, next time you log on, will there be a direct message: "Come to my office"? This brings us back to SalesForce.com. For many in the enterprise, the question isn't only "What's happening", like it is on Twitter , but instead "Did you close?". This is where we think SalesForce's core premise of building a strong core business from CRM, along with its well-formed APIs give it a path to meet its ambition for delivering on leaderships thirst for knowledge. We wonder, will SalesForce.com power your CEO's real time view of your organization? Discuss
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Rulers of the Cloud: Your CEO has a SalesForce.com-Powered TweetDeck, and She's Following You
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apple,
Business,
cloud providers,
development,
enterprise,
management,
Microsoft,
power,
spring,
tools
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We've talked a lot on ReadWriteStart about how design is an important facet of the development of a web applications for startups. Last week we provided some advice on how to deal with irate customers who hate your design changes, and earlier this month we talked about how small design tweaks can have big impacts of the use of your site. Sponsor The main theme of these posts is that good design is worth the time and effort because it goes a long way in attracting and maintaining users, but really, who is to say what "good design" is? A recent entry on the blog ignore the code by Swiss software engineer Lukas Mathis raises an interesting point about user interfaces and how some users prefer that they maintain their complexity . They like complicated user interfaces? It seems strange, but Mathis argues that mastering a cluttered interface gives users a sense of superiority. One example of this that Mathis points out is the Bloomberg Terminal, a complexly designed business interface whose users might revolt if it were simplified, as some studies have shown. "Some complex user interfaces may also give people the perception of having more control," writes Mathis. "Another reason why people sometimes avoid simple devices is that they perceive them as being made specifically for children, or for 'stupid' people." So how does this apply to Web startup culture? What it says is that not all users are the same. Not everyone is looking for the cleanest and simplest design; some want more features and more complexity. The thing to remember is there is a difference between having a complex interface and having a complicated interface. Even the simplest of interfaces, Twitter , has begun to add more complexity with new retweet features, lists, trending topics, and more. Aesthetically, "good design" means design that is appealing to the eye, and is easily navigated visually. With this idea, it is important that complex interfaces are well designed so that the users who prefer simplicity do not feel overwhelmed. So "good design" may be simply design that is both aesthetically refined, and that also serves to aid both novices and power users in easily finding the features they want without feeling over or underwhelmed - balanced, and right in the sweet spot. I would love to hear what people think of this idea, so please let me know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss
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Finding the Balance of Design and Functionality
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bloomberg terminal,
business interface,
design,
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how to deal with irate customers,
ignore-the-code,
interface,
Lukas Mathis,
perception,
startup-culture,
thoughts,
time,
Tips,
trending-topics,
user
•
Lest we forget what is at stake with the situation involving Google and China, the Washington Post has published today a list of directions from the Chinese government sent out to all media outlets on how they are allowed to cover the incident. The rules are a stark reminder of why, no matter how long Google kowtowed to government demands there, the search engine's actions are important for the development of a free society. Obtained and translated by China Digital Times , the instructions specifically outline how traditional and new media may or may not approach the topic. Sponsor The instructions start out highlighting how important Google's actions are and how this importance is not to be emphasized to the public: Google has officially announced its withdrawal from the China market. This is a high-impact incident. It has triggered netizens' discussions which are not limited to a commercial level. Therefore please pay strict attention to the following content requirements during this period: The first instruction really says it all: "Only use Central Government main media (website) content; do not use content from other sources." The Chinese government wants to stay on top of forming the message about Google and its place in China, as we saw with stories this past week about Google colluding with U.S. spies and being an agent of the U.S. government, not an agent of free thought, speech or change. The instructions go on from there, directing media to use the government assigned title, refer only to government main media websites and control any and all discussion. The section on Internet media is particularly informative. B. Forums, blogs and other interactive media sections: 1. It is not permitted to hold discussions or investigations on the Google topic. 2. Interactive sections do not recommend this topic, do not place this topic and related comments at the top. 3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event. 4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy. 5. On topics related to Google, carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions. Not only are websites required to closely follow the governmental opinion on the subject, but they are to keep conversation in check. No "conversations" or "investigations" are to be held and all related content is not to be placed in a prominent position. In case you're wondering through all of this what the Chinese government's take on Google is, exactly, it's that " Google Is Not God ". And according to these instructions, this sentiment is something that needs to be repeated by all Chinese media alike. And you thought U.S. media could be a mouthpiece for corporate and governmental interests. Discuss
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China To Media: Toe the Government Line on Google
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China,
chinese,
development,
government,
governmental,
interactive,
internet,
media sections,
search,
stark reminder,
state government agencies,
topic