According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)’s report, Internet advertising revenue increased 26% in 2007 over 2006. Advertising to consumers leads spending, and search still leads display, classifieds and lead generation. See the full report at the IAB.
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Adobe Flex – sitting with the cool kids
In the web’s earlier days the cool kids were the Macromedia Flash Developers. They had that mystical quality to them; a special blend of tech voodoo and creative style. A great Flash artists could bring any early browser screaming to its knees, but inbetween dropped frames and hung processors you swore you were looking at the future of the web. Flash Developers were the Rock Star developers of the web a decade back.
Now we try to use Flash in moderation as if it were a controlled substance. Most business websites have a pinch of flash to spice up the bullet points and mission statements, but it all seems perfunctory and subdued. In the business world, Flash has been relegated to bit parts like tie-ins or transitions, back seat functions to the AJAX revolution. Sure, the media industry is still addicted to their Flash applications as is the online gaming and advertising sectors. For most development houses, however, Flash became an unfamiliar tool used sparingly.
Adobe buying Macromedia has successfully righted that ship, in my opinion. They’re first all Adobe take on the Flash franchise was to relicense a little thing called Flex. Flex was originally a Macromedia product targeted for upper echelon corporations. Flex was and is Flash for programmers. Plain and simple, Flex lets your code slingers write decent Flash applications using tools they understand, namely programing languages. When Adobe got ahold of the property, they wisely saw the potential for curious geeks to adopt this new shiny thing, promote it within their communities, and build it up to a viable web solution. Flex 3 SDK (Software Development Kit) is free to to download and licensed under a open-source friendly Mozilla Public License. Adoption of the Flex 3 platform has been impressive, thanks in no small part to adobe’s marketing of the tools as they have.
N ow the geeks are sitting side by side with the cool kids at the web table. I would say we now have to work on the Jocks (DBAs), but that just might be a bridge too far.
In upcoming posts I will review Adobe Flex and Adobe Air.
Technorati Tags: adobe, adobe flex, adobe air, B2B, B2C, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting, B2C internet consulting, business internet consulting
Interview with Lance Walley, CEO of Engine Yard
I have mentioned before that hosting Rails applications is one of those great opportunities to avail yourself of assistance. The guys behind Engine Yard saw their chance to help the community and build out a solid foundation for a business. I had a chance to talk with Lance Walley, CEO of the San Francisco based hosting company about Ruby, Rails and their business model.
Sazbean: What problem is Engine Yard solving?
Lance: We make deployment and scaling of Ruby on Rails applications easy and largely hands-off. Our customers pay for great infrastructure and excellent people running it, all focused on Rails apps. In the end, they see us as inexpensive payroll on top of great hosting infrastructure. Some of the basic technologies (Ruby and Rails) can be improved or augmented our support of Rubinius and Merb are helping both move forward and grow to answer customer needs. We are hosting + expertise + software development to make Ruby and Rails better for all!
Sazbean: So how can EY help the average B2B company?
Lance: B2B companies will certainly want to develop web apps to support internal needs and external needs (customers). Ruby on Rails is great for fast development of those apps. Engine Yard is great for no-thinking, just-get-it-done-without-me deployment and management of those apps once they’re developed.
Sazbean: Obie Fernandez wrote in a January 2008 article that there was a waiting list for new customers. Is this still true?
Lacnce: We massively built up our support organization, which includes sys admins, Rails experts, and database admins. That solved the waiting list issue. We now have a queue of about 5 days, mostly because customers take time getting info to our guys that our guys need to deploy customers’ apps.
Sazbean: Does EY consider itself a silicon valley startup?
Lance: We’re a Sacramento / San Francisco startup. We modeled this business to be profitable and not need VC [Venture Capital ~ed]. We later took VC to pursue areas that represent a huge opportunity, and which we could not pursue quickly without VC and we’re about 2 years old and didn’t take VC until we were 1.5 years old so I’m not sure if that all adds up to traditional valley startup.
Sazbean: Unlike startups with a software product, hosting solutions like EY have a large barrier to entry. You need hardware, you need specialized skills and you need capital. So, why hosting?
Lance: It was a natural outgrowth of a previous business. We have an older company that does consulting; we saw that clients didn’t want to do this stuff, but they wanted really good solutions run by top-notch people. We created Engine Yard. while it did take some capital up front, we knew from the experience of others that it’s a quick cash generator vs. some other businesses. We literally saw it as a pretty quick path to cash generation and profitability. We’re now doing a lot of stuff that goes beyond that original idea, but we always saw hosting as a good business in which to start in a new market like Rails.
Sazbean: Many B2B companies are untrusting of startups and of new ventures. It means something that you are profitable and stable and up front about it.
Lance: Yeah, we experienced some of that back when we started in 2006. People had to get to trust us and our financial footing also helps when they know that we founders are all small business guys in the past… never huge companies, but real, profitable, decade or more companies each Now, of course, with pretty big VCs involved, that’s also a good thing, but I suppose VC makes some people suspicious, too. We have still kept our basic business philosophies of running a tight ship, not burning cash without need, etc.
Sazbean: You mentioned your people a few times tonight. Do you consider your people the distinguishing part of the equation?
Lance: There are 3 distinguishing parts.
- The infrastructure we designed is extremely solid, very redundant, etc. We’ve been at it for 2 years and the architects are incredible people. Customers are buying that.
- The staff that supports our customers directly is top-notch. There are between 35-40 people in Support now, spread from CA to NY to UK to Australia. Customers are paying for the ability to get help and wisdom from this staff 24/7. As well as stuff like database tuning, etc. The people component is very important to customers.
- We have some of the best people working on those open-source projects that promise to improve Ruby and Rails for everyone. Our customers are indirectly buying into those people, too. There is a general feeling by customers that they get all this expertise for a relatively low price in terms of human costs.
Sazbean: Any well known Rails websites using EY that you can disclose?
Lance: Sure If you check out http://rails100.pbwiki.com/ we are literally involved thru Engine Yard or Quality Humans, Inc with 33-50% of those sites. Hulu (#3) for instance is NBC + Fox we helped them build that site back in 2006 or 2007. Seeking Alpha is a cool financial info site, they provide data to Yahoo Finance. Kongregate was a VERY early EY customer. I think they just took an investment from Jeff Bezos, who does not invest lightly.
Sazbean: Impressive.
Lance: It’s not yahoo or google, but they’re coming.
Technorati Tags: engine yard, rails, rails hosting, internet consulting