Most of the time

BizSpark 201 – how it’s implemented

Yesterday’s post, BizSpark 101, discussed why we developed BizSpark, what’s in it, how to get it and the key BizSpark roles: Microsoft Champs, Network Partners, and Startups.  Today I’ll go into a little more detail on how it works, why we designed it that way and what we’ll change in the near future.

The roles and rules are simple: BizSpark Champs can enroll Network Partners or startups; Network Partners can enroll startups. So far, two and a half months after launch, about 70% of startups have been enrolled by Network Partners, and that percentage is increasing.

Anyone who works with startups can become a Network Partner by enrolling here and signing this agreement. There are now about 1,000 BizSpark Network Partners worldwide. They vary in in size, scope and business set of organizations, including university incubators, government agencies, investors, consultants, influential bloggers and banks. Most choose to publish their profile on the BizSpark site, and you can see them by selecting a country name here. Some examples:  TiE, IFJ Institut für Jungunternehmen (Switzerland), Suzhou  International Science and Technology Software Park (China), Lgilab (Israel) and the Association of Shareware Professionals.

We chose to work with such a wide range of organizations simply because they work with startups directly, and they represent the complex elements of each local software economy. In many cases we already have working relationships with those organizations, so why not strengthen them?  Where we didn’t already have a relationship, this is a way to build one.

Startups can enroll in BizSpark by contacting a Network Partner or a Champ. In either case, the process is the same: the Champ or Network Partner provides the startup an invitation which includes a a link to the enrollment site and a unique code. The startup signs the agreement, and provides basic contact information, and gets a code to access to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) download site.

It can take a couple of hours for the registration to show up in MSDN, but when it does, the software is available for download.

We tried to make the process as simple as possible and also to engage the community.  I’ve uploaded a more detailed workflow here. The system works well, and we are  getting very good comments from users.  It’s not perfect though.  After a couple of months of operation, we’ve found some areas we want to improve.The  workflow connects three roles -- startup, a Champ, and a Network Partner -- with two systems -- BizSpark and MSDN -- and most errors occur when one of those elements is unresponsive. It doesn’t happen often, but Champs or Network Partners occasionally overlook enrolment requests, leaving startups frustrated. The registration delay between BizSpark and MSDN can also be confusing. An upcoming release will bring a lot of improvements in the user experience, including fixes to both these workflow problems.

BizSpark 101

For the past year or so I’ve been working with a team at Microsoft on a project named BizSpark, which we launched worldwide starting on Nov 5th, 2008.  BizSpark is the second in a family of programs designed for early-stage developers. The first program, DreamSpark, provides students with professional-level design and development tools. BizSpark takes that idea and expands it for high-tech startups.

There’s plenty of information about BizSpark on the sites I linked to above, and in the press. but as I haven’t posted at all for about nine months, I’ll use this post to get started again with some background and a less formal description of the program. I may add a couple more posts to  answer some of the questions I’ve heard.

Why startups? We built a special program for technology-based startups because they foretell the future of technology in business.  Thousands of new technology-based companies are started every year. While few achieve long-term success, every one provides us with a view of technology’s role in the context of a novel business opportunity.

What do they get? BizSpark gives startups software, support and visibility. There’s a detailed description here, but in short:  software means all the Microsoft products they need to build, test and deploy their product, for three years; support includes 1:1 developer-level assistance with technical problems, as well as the community support provided by the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN); visibility is via the BizSpark DB on Microsoft’s StartupZone site.

The software offer is as comprehensive as we could make it. Startups get a MSDN premium subscription for three years, for each of their developers. Each subscription includes all of Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Expressions Studio developer tools, and all the platform software (Windows, Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange, etc) that they need to build and test the application. The majority of startups are also building web-based applications, which they’ll host themselves or though a hosting service provider like YouSaaS,  OpSource or Peer1, so BizSpark also provides free server licenses to put those applications into production. The production license allow unlimited use of Windows Server, SQL Server, BizTalk Server, SharePoint Server and Systems Center during the three-year membership. We’ll be adding Windows CRM to that list soon.

In addition, startups get access to a number of “cloud services” from Windows Live, and they are guaranteed access to the Windows Azure Community Technology Preview.

What is a startup? Startup businesses must be less than three years old, earning less than $1M/year (the revenue limit is lower in some countries), and not yet publicly held, at the time they enter the program. They must be building a software-based product which directly serves their customers, rather than doing work for hire.

How do I get it? Startups can enroll on http://microsoft.com/BizSpark. There they’ll see a list of organizations (BizSpark Network Partners) any of whom can enroll them in their own country, or they can contact Microsoft directly. Here are some of the Network Partners a UK-based startup would see:

 

There are well over 900 BizSpark Network Partners worldwide so far. They represent the entrepreneurial ecosystem: organizations or individuals  who help startups and have offered to make BizSpark available to the startups they work with.

If a startup would like help selecting a Network Partner, or does not wish to work with one, the site will connect them directly with a local Microsoft employee  (a BizSpark Champ) who can recommend a Network Partner or can enroll the startup directly.

BizSpark Champs are Microsoft employees who are passionate about startups and so can enroll both Network Partners and startups. There are over 200 Champs worldwide.  BizSpark is part of the job for some (Julien Codorniou, for example, runs the BizSpark program worldwide,  Anand Iyer is a Champ in the Silicon Valley) and a wholly voluntary activity for others  (Bill Staples, a GM in the Server and Tools Business, is an avid blogger and volunteer Champ)

How much does it cost? $100 payable at the end of three years membership.

More  to follow in BizSpark 201

Just a flesh wound …

The debate over IBM vs Microsoft collaboration market share flared up again. IBM issued a press release ahead of Lotusphere that claims significant market share gains for Notes and Domino.

Early versions of the press release also included this statement: "While marketshare estimates vary, Gartner Dataquest's most recent report from 2008 indicates a 40 percent share worldwide for Lotus Notes , compared to Microsoft's 48 percent for Exchange, a narrowing gap."

Tom Austin at Gartner rebutted that conclusion and IBM removed it. Tom was quoted in Network World:

I don't believe that in either revenue or user seat share, that IBM is closing the gap [with Microsoft]," Tom Austin, a Gartner analyst, told Computerworld today. "The gap is getting bigger and bigger."

IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

…

Early versions of the press release also included this statement: "While market share estimates vary, Gartner Dataquest's most recent report from 2008 indicates a 40% share worldwide for Lotus Notes, compared to Microsoft's 48% for Exchange, a narrowing gap."

Austin, a Gartner group vice president and research fellow who conducted that research, said the statistic was for 2007 shipments of Notes vs. Exchange only. It is far different than the percentage of people actually using either software today, the installed base.

Based on that measurement, "Microsoft Exchange has at least three times the users of Notes with enterprises with 500 or more users," Austin said. IBM may be adding Notes users, but its share of the installed base "is getting smaller," he said.

Later versions of the IBM press release have that statement and the Gartner statistic deleted.

I really did think this debate was over, not least because the key research organizations show Lotus well behind. eWeek reported on Thursday 15th Jan:

IDC's annual market share analysis of collaborative environments puts Microsoft's market share at 52 percent, with IBM's market share slipping 5 percent to 37.7 percent. A Ferris Research survey of 917 organizations worldwide found Exchange in 65 percent of those shops.

I regularly look at UK’s IT Jobs Watch as a  decent indicator of technology vitality and share. The story is here in the jobs data for Lotus Notes and Domino and their key competitors: Exchange and Sharepoint. The charts are directly comparable, as they cover the same time periods and are measured against the same pool of job postings.

Lotus Notes (all versions):

Lotus Domino (all versions)

Exchange (version not specified)

Exchange 2007

Sharepoint (version not specified)

Sharepoint 2007

Will Sharepoint Suffer the Same Fate as Lotus Notes?

There was a thought-provoking and balanced post on this subject on ChannelWeb Tuesday. It makes the point that Sharepoint's growth and adoption mirrors that of Lotus Notes in the nineties. Like Notes, Sharepoint provides  an easily-accessible application platform, and that accessibility can lead to problems of scaling, maintenance and management.

They quote a CMSWatch Report on Sharepoint, that says:

We have a lot of things to say about SharePoint, but for starters, we observe that it has become "the new Lotus Notes," repeating history as it mimics Notes' allure and pitfalls

The ChannelWeb article goes on to say:

CMS Watch's view is that with both Lotus Notes and SharePoint, flexibility is a double edged sword, and the ease with which custom applications can be built on the platform poses challenges for IT staff.

SharePoint also suffers from shortcomings with regard to its collaboration capabilities and lacks the scalability and administrative controls necessary to make it viable for enterprise deployments, according to CMS Watch.

The article quotes a couple of Sharepoint-savvy partners who agree that uncontrolled development can lead companies into trouble.

I think the article makes reasonable observations, but the most insightful point is made (or hinted at) towards the end:

But Ric Opal, vice president of Peters & Associates, an Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based solution provider, discounts comparisons between SharePoint and Lotus Notes. "We're in a different era, and the entire industry is different now than it was then," he said.

"With the applications being deployed on Sharepoint, the back end is SQL Server, which is robust and used by tons of applications. It's an industry standard database that just about anyone can write to," said Opal.

As for SharePoint's scalability limitations, Opal said "that's going to hold true with any technology if you don't properly architect a solution sitting on top of a database."

The real difference between Lotus Notes and Sharepoint is the underlying platform each was built on. Sharepoint is built on .NET and SQL and it's a first class element of the Microsoft application platform.

That was never the case for Lotus Notes. Notes was built on a set of unique technologies, none of which ever made it into the mainstream of IBM's application platform:

• The Notes database
• The Notes Directory and certificate structure
• The Notes application platform: programming model, document model, and language

IBM is clearly committed to DB2 as it's database, Tivoli for security and Websphere as its application platform. The fact that Lotus supported none of these drove IBM's disastrous migration of Notes to a new "Workplace" platform, which they announced at Lotusphere in 2002. That approach, recently and quietly abandoned, demonstrated clear IBM's ambivalence toward the product and created a five-year period of unrest for customers and partners.

As the Channelweb article concludes:

Recent indications that Microsoft is working to add new functionality to SharePoint suggest that the vendor isn't planning to rest on its laurels with SharePoint, says Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at twentysix New York, a New York-based IT consultancy.

Correct. The biggest differences between Notes and Sharepoint are in their underlying technology bases and  the confidence and investment that their respective builders place in them.

Early Prediction on Office Open XML Vote

CNet reported just a few hours ago (09:30 PDT Sunday) on the International Standards Organization vote on approving the Office Open XML specification as ISO standard DIS 29500:

Early reports Sunday indicate that Office Open XML (OOXML) appears to have enough votes to be certified an ISO standard. An official tally is not expected until Monday.

The article quotes the OpenMalaysia blog: "... group of individual bloggers working to build openness in Malaysia's ICT culture. Most of us have day jobs and a couple of us are students. Those with a job work for companies ranging from large international enterprises to self-run Malaysian start-ups."

The voting ended at midnight Saturday, CET. The OpenMalaysia post, two and a half hours later, predicts that OO XML will pass the ballot. There are two criteria for approval, and OpenMalaysia summarised the criteria and predicted the result as follows:

Voting Criteria (JTC1 Directives, page 49):

• At least two-thirds of the P-members voting shall have approved;
• Not more than one-quarter of the total number of votes cast are negative.

Prediction:

• Criteria 1: 22/32 = 68.75% (PASS)
• Criteria 2: 14/69 = 20.29% (PASS)
• Overall Result: PASS

A good post spoiled ...

The ISO vote on OOXML closes at midnight CET tonight. It's been a divisive topic, and while browsing for the last-minute volleys on the subject, I happened on this debate. It is mostly a one-sided set of rants about how much IBM will or won't support OOXML and what"support" really means.

But, buried down towards the end is a long-ish and mostly well-written comment from Doug Heintzman, "Director of Strategy for IBM Collaboration Technologies," which includes this paragraph:

Let's be clear. IBM believes that the monopolistic domination of the office productivity market has inhibited investment and innovation. We believe that XML based file formats have tremendous potential to improve workflow, activities, and team collaboration. We believe that a modern XML based file format will allow customers to perform business analytics, generate automated semantic information, improved searchability, and make the information contained in documents much more socially and process aware and increase its overall value to the customer. We think that documents will become much more seamlessly integrated into business applications and processes.

I was struck by how little the topic sentence:

"IBM believes that monopolistic domination of the office productivity market has inhibited investment and innovation"

had to do with what followed:

"We believe that XML based file formats have tremendous potential to improve workflow, activities, and team collaboration ...."

From his job title, I suspect Doug knows something about collaboration, and is credible in the main part of the paragraph. I believe he is right in that part and I think most people in the industry (including those at Microsoft) would agree. See this from http://www.microsoft.com/interop/letters/choice.mspx 

Microsoft has long believed in the power of XML-based file formats to unlock data in documents and to help integrate front and back office processes – while providing significant opportunities for independent software vendors to create high-value applications

But why the disconnected opening sentence about monopolistic domination? Well, IBM cast the only "no" vote for ECMA approval of OOXML, and has done the same in the ISO Technical group. From ZDNet yesterday

A technical group formed to make a recommendation to the BSI's policy panel has voted five-to-one in favour of OOXML being accepted as an international standard, a source close to the process has told ZDNet.co.uk. There was intense lobbying by interested parties before a meeting on Tuesday, in which IBM was apparently the one remaining dissident. IBM uses the competing OpenDocument Format (ODF), which is already an international standard.

Given the trend in IBM's share of the collaboration market, I can understand a certain peevishness in Doug's opinion. But, for the same reason, he might do better to focus less on the economics of business, and a whole lot more on IBM's strategy for Collaboration Technologies.

"Spite as a Business Strategy"

Interesting article on the OOXML saga on Internet.com yesterday, but the piece that caught my eye was this one from Patrick Durusau, who is chairperson of the technical committee advising the U.S. governing board.

Interestingly, Durusau may be an ODF backer, but he's pragmatic too, and had some direct words for opponents of OOXML on his blog:

"What is puzzling in this day and age of quarterly reports and returns that any corporate governance structure would long tolerate spite as a business strategy. Or that investors would stay with companies that follow such strategies.

"OpenDocument supporters should be wishing that [OOXML] will be approved along with a new work item to amend it to fix the problems found at the BRM ... Any other wish is a walk in a cold rain with a Russian peasant wishing his neighbor's cow would die,"

IBM 4Q 2007 Financials: Software

IBM Announced 10% revenue growth in the 4th quarter of 20007. 6% of the growth came from currency fluctuations (as the value of overseas income rose in dollar terms due to the dollar's decline). In other words, 4% is a better measure of business growth.

Software revenues grew 12% in dollar terms in the 4th quarter; 6% in constant currency terms. The interesting news is in the software segments:

- Websphere (application platform and portal) grew 23% in dollar terms

- Information Management (Database, the biggest segment by far) -- 11%

- Tivoli (Systems Management) -- 19%

- Lotus (Collaboration) -- 7%

Lotus significantly lagged the other IBM software businesses, and  after accounting for currency fluctuations, showed no growth in the fourth quarter of 2007.

It's only one quarter. It's possible these results reflect customers postponing purchases until the new Eclipse-based Notes/Domino 8 (which launched in August last year) is proven out.

<updated with supplemental segment information from IBM>

Collaboration Platform Jobs Comparisons: from UK IT Jobs Watch

An update on earlier posts comparing jobs for the two leading enterprise collaboration platforms: IBM's Notes, Domino and Workplace products vs Microsoft's Sharepoint and Exchange.

Comments and caveats:

• It's only one country, so doesn't necessarily reflect the situation outside the UK.
• Here's an alternative view of the job market
• The ITJobsWatch site appears to provide high quality, normalised and de-duped data, so it shouldn't be compared with keyword  job search sites in which:
  • a query for, Notes, may return jobs ".. taking notes ..." or Exchange may return jobs in a " ... stock exchange ..."
  • a single position will appear many times from different sources.

Application Platforms: UK Permanent and Contract IT Positions for 3 months ended Jan 16th 2008

Source ITJobsWatch 16th January, 2008

Note: this site breaks out the MSFT products by release (Exchange2003, Exchange 2007, etc), so I added together the individual results. The Lotus releases are combined (i.e. one entry for Notes, one for Domino).

12-month Trend: Lotus Notes Permanent positions trend is shown in the chart below

Additional 12-month trend lines for each company's leading entries are below:

Domino Permanent Positions

Notes Contract Positions

Domino Contract Positions

MS Exchange Permanent Positions

MS Exchange Contract Positions

Sharepoint Permanent Positions

Sharepoint Contract Positions

Team Ski Day

Let's go skiing! The snow is incredible in the Cascades this year.

 

Crystal Mt received over 10 ft of new snow in the past two weeks

Outshouts and the changing face of, well, everything …

Two friends of mine (Michelle and John) recently launched a new service called Outshouts. While it’s early days yet (the site’s only been up a couple of weeks), it shows a lot of interesting potential. Outshouts lets you record a voice message, combine it with a song or some other pre-recorderd content, and send the whole thing out to your friends (or enemies, I imagine, depending on your mood and your choice of message and song). The service is easy and fun to use, and I’m a fan. However, beyond that, Outshouts seems to me a poster child for some of the more interesting aspects of software on the web.

A new example of emerging  “big ideas”

I recently used Outshouts to create a series of “Originals: better or worse than the covers?” as a sort of discussion and showcase of original versions of songs that may have been eclipsed by better-known covers, like Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl” for example, or Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.”

My topic and choices may not be original but a few folks commented, and I’ve also enjoyed some of the other member selections and discussions. This seems to me another sign that media will be increasingly personal. I don’t mean in the sense of user-created content. Rather that recommendations from friends and “people who like what I like” will eventually combine into one or more “radio stations” I tune into regularly. As John wrote in a recent email exchange on this topic:

The micro-blogging aspect of sending a single musical mash-up provides a new context for music discovery and recommendation -- when someone you know sends you a song that means something to them, you suddenly hear that song, and maybe even the artist, the band, and/or the genre, in a whole new way. First-generation Web radio was simply traditional radio broadcast over IP – I could listen to KFOG streamed on-line. The next generation of Web radio, pioneered by services like Pandora.com, replaced those general broadcast streams with individual streams of music customized to the taste and interests of an individual listener - KFOG Radio becomes CliffReeves Radio. The next generation? Maybe we disaggregate the streams into individual ‘atoms’ of content, pointcast from one individual to another or to a small group. It's a sort of "rifle shot radio.”

I’m not arguing that one generation will replace another – television didn’t replace radio, and I don't expect Pandora to replace KFOG, or Outshouts to replace Pandora. But innovations like Outshouts do have the potential to experience profoundly different business economics. Web broadcasters are extremely concerned about the magnitude of the fees to be levied by SoundExchange for the streaming of copyright material; broadcasters believe that the proposed rates make Internet radio uneconomic (see, for example, http://www.kurthanson.com/dos/) Outshouts is subject to those same fees, but rather than sending out a continuous stream of songs for background listening, it’s sending out single songs with a personalized cover message that demands attention. Assuming traditional revenue models of advertising and music sales, then that model may give them much more bang for their copyright-fee buck. We shall see.

Multi-modal

My phone is the only device I have with me almost all the time, so it’s vital I can receive and send Outshouts from it. Outshouts have done a neat job on this. I can send an outshout to a mobile phone; it’s delivered as an SMS and played over the phone. No PC – or even SmartPhone – required. I can even send an Outshout from my mobile phone – a simple voice menu lets me select the song, record my message, and send it along.

This lets Outshouts leverage the same back-end systems, marketing, and alliances for both the Web and the phone – with all of the device ubiquity that delivers.

A realistic Perspective on Community

Outshouts is based on the premise of sharing with friends and developing communities of shared interest, but it work well with other communities than its own. I belong to a number of communities and I have several web personas (all, by the way under may own name and my real age and gender J).  Outshouts has their own simple community functionality which works fine, but more importantly, in my view, they make it easy to embed my Outshout into my blog or community site. You can add a standalone widget to your Facebook profile, or a number of other popular sites, or just copy and paste the script in a blog or other personal site. They're using Gigya for that – a nice, simple, and outsourced approach to the problem:

Rapid, Outsourced, Component-based development

Just as interesting as the service itself is how it was developed. The concept was Michelle’s and she did much of the basic functional and user design.

Most of the development, though was done by a team of professionals from all over the U.S., communicating by the Web, phone, etc. A truly virtual team. There's a lot of specialization required for high-end graphics design, Flash, PHP and Java; rather than building a small local team of generalists, Michelle has built a virtual team of specialists. Michelle has worked in traditional development teams before, but this is her first experience with this kind of structure. Her view: it’s made a dramatic difference to the speed and the quality of the product. A structure like this depends on powerful, well-understood development frameworks and interfaces; as you'd expect, Outshouts makes extensive use of open source components and existing web services, including Asterisk for IVR, VoicePulse SIP gateway, ClickaTel’s SMS gateway..

Quite apart from Outshouts itself, the big message for me is how much the software development landscape has changed: there’s the web of course, but the attendant services, components and communities have subordinated traditional development challenges to the “big idea.” This brings to mind another example I read in the Seattle PI in October

This is a signal all of us in the existing software industry need to heed.

Lots and lots of cool Israeli companies. Part 5 -- Pitango companies: Redbend, WeFi and Axis Mobile

Redbend http://www.redbend.com/ … Redbend provides tools for remote management of mobile software on mass market handsets, specializing in firmware: FOTA (firmware over the air). This is a highly specialized and demanding area due to stringent requirements for the user experience and restrictions on the use of bandwidth. They have agreements with Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and estimate that they are now managing approximately 200M phones.

 

WeFi http://www.wefi.com/ …. Software to help users connect quickly and easily to WiFi anywhere and upload the information to a central server which creates .  They do more analysis than most connection managers by analyzing the connectivity and helping the user connect more effectively. 150,000 access points. Aprrox 6,000 current users, currently in beta with no marketing. Users can enter their own spots and allow access to a limited user base.

 

Axis Mobile http://www.axismobile.com/ …. Delivering email and attachments via push to almost any phone. The MNO runs an Axis Mobile server which collects the users’ mail from any service: Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc. For each user, the Axis Mobile server detects what device the user is holding at the time, and performs real-time transcoding of the email and the attachments, They can support a number of formats: MMS, XHTML, WAP, etc. Axis Mobile has contracts covering 200M subscribers via 15 operators in Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Poland).  Axis Mobile is currently listed on London’s AIM  which is technically a $30M IPO (investors hold common stock) , but operates like a VC (the investment are corporations).

Axis has recently introduced MMBox, which allow non-MMS users to enjoy MMS services (with transcoding at the server) and allows the operator to bill where they often cannot with MMS that is sent to unknown recipients. PhotoSync enables management and sharing of mobile photos on the service provider’s servers. This runs in the background, synching at off-peak times allowing the phone to be used for other functions.

Lots and lots of cool Israeli companies. Part 4 -- Gemini companies: Starhome and Olista

Starhome http://www.starhome.com/ … Starhome is a mature (established late 1999) and very-well funded firm with over 120 MNO customers worldwide., and a very close relationship with Vodaphone. They are attempting to bridge the divides between mobile networks and between mobile and fixed-line environments. Starhome allows carriers to “wrap their users in a bubble of value-added services” that remain available to them when they roam. It also allows visitors access to the carrier’s services. In addition to roaming services they provide services across network types. For example, they can provide PBX-like services like videoconferencing (usually available via an enterprise service) that allow the user to continue on a cell network,  a videoconference begun on a corporate network.

 

Olista http://www.olista.com/ … Olista, a three-year old company, targets mobile carriers with a service adoption management (SAM) platform. There is  a modest professional services effort to customize the SAM platform to the carrier’s environment, but once in place, the SAM platform monitors the experience (eg data from WAP gateways) of each user.  Olista analyses performance issues (multiple duplicate downloads, slow downloads, etc) and alerts the carrier. Over time, the SAM platform can implement rules which will automatically handle (similar to MOMs agents) recognizable situation.  In addition, Olista can analyze the usage of the carrier’s portal, identifying areas of low use, and where trials are not pursued. Individual user performance can be analyzed. For example a heavy user whose usage has recently  declined can trigger an alert. If a customer downloads content more than once, the carrier can notify the user and void charges, perhaps directing the customer to better training on downloads. Olista can also identify  group of users who ccommunicate with each other and use, say, MMS,  and can then ensure that they receive promotional material and pricing that encourages and supports their use. Olista can be licensed on a traditional basis or via a shared risk (increase in ARPU) model. Olista  has a particularly strong customer base.

Lots and lots of cool Israeli startups. Part 3 -- Vertex companies: Asocs, Nexperience, and Flash Networks

Asocs http://www.asocstech.com/ … fab-less semiconductor … software-reconfigurable chip targeting multi-protocol, multi-technology convergence handsets. The chip is re-purposed dynamically to work in the most effective way with different kinds of communication: Cellular and wireless, for example. This dynamic configuration allows the chip to exploit different syles of parallelism for the different kinds of communication, resulting in  improved  battery life and better performance of tasks such as viewing video.

 

Nexperience http://www.nexperience.com/ … remote access and automatic testing of user experience on handsets. This is targeted at mobile operators, handset vendors, and ISVs who need to test a number of phone types in a number of different networks and countries. Nexperience provodes a cradle and rack system in which multiple phones can be loaded and tested in on one mobile environment, while being monitored centrally. The video and voice interaction with the test script is controlled centrally and all interaction (the image is captured by a camera) is transmitted back to a monitoring server. The test script can evaluate take action based on responses and QoS. Nexperience’s currently targets mobile carriers and the people who build apps for them.

 

Flash Networks http://www.flashnetworks.com/asp/main.asp .... mobile data quality of experience. Another company (like Amobee) addressing the issue of providing users  access to more content across more mobile networks. On handsets, Flash optimizes the viewing experience (ensuring, for example that a YouTube FLV can be viewed on a particular handset, and converting  it to another form, if necessary) as well as providing content control. Content can also be customized by the carrier to adapt to the user’s profile. A businessman, for example, may have a BMW ad placed in the stream. Detailed knowledge of the handset (they support about 3,00 user agents today) and the user (inferred from behavioral analysis) is a central element of Flash’s value.

Lots and lots of cool Israeli startups. Part 2 -- Sequioa companies

Jajah. http://www.jajah.com/ …. Server-centered VoIP plus PSTN for consumers. You make a phone request from your PC or mobile phone, providing the two endpoint numbers. Jajah makes the call over VoIP and PSTN and handles all billing and payment. Jajah integrates with  a number of address books and also Outlook. Jajah has also added convenient buttons that can be added, for example. The recipient clicks the button to call the sender. Jajah is also one of the EBT Accelerator companies.

Amobee http://www.amobee.com/main/hp.htm … Amobee is both a software company and a business development and sales service. They provide a  comprehensive set of offerings for mobile operators, application developers and agencies. For mobile operators, Amobee provides a telco-grade ad serving platform. For developers they provide an SDK which allows the application to be subsidized by contextual ads and access to agencies and advertisers who will place them. For agencies, the platform provides campaign management services and a catalog of mobile inventory

Silent Communications. http://www.silentcom.com/ … Silent communications provides features likely to be attractive to carriers who want to increase call completion by providing   multiple ways to respond to unanswerable voice calls. For example, if you receive a call while in a meeting you can silently send a voice reply that suggests you begin a SMS session. You can also carry on a silent voice conversation using a set of predefined responses or statements.  The opportunities here are endless :-)