One last post today and then back to work. Alexander Muse has announced the creation of the Dallas Startup Happy Hour with the inaugural event taking place on July 7, 2008, with subsequent events every other week thereafter). Here is what he sent me and a link to his original blog post.

I am hosting a regular 'startup happy hour' every other week (starting July 7th) and would love for you to attend. The idea is fairly simple, get entrepreneurial people together on a regular basis to facilitate the creation of a vibrant 'startup community' here in Dallas.

The event is completely free (i.e. no one is going to make money, EVER) and is being sponsored by SpringStage (the startup blog network that owns the Texas Startup Blog). If you can't attend, please help me get the word out.

We held the first event at the Ritz last week (between 16-25 people attended), but we have decided to move the happy hour to The High Tech Bar in the INFOMART (I35 and Oaklawn). Here are the details:

Event: Startup Happy Hour
Place: High Tech Bar at the INFOMART (I-35 and Oaklawn)
Date: Monday, July 7, 2008
Time: 5PM - 8PM (drinks are free from 5PM-6PM)
Host: Alexander Muse, Scott Ryan and Brad Merritt

For more information or to RSVP:
http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2008/06/23/announcing-springstage-startup-happy-hour-dallas/

Make sure you check out his entire thread on the Dallas Startup scene and how we can improve it. Note the "we"... this isn't all on Alex, its on all of us. Either help or stop complaining!

Labels: dallas, entrepreneurship, networking, startup, technology, venture capital

I have been so busy working at Morph I have neglected my blog. Unfortunately, don't look for that to change anytime soon. I'm going to post a couple of items, but that is it for now. If you absolutely must keep track of me, you can do so on my LinkedIn profile and on Twitter.

Labels: linkedin, morph, twitter

I just posted a lengthy article about the Morph Application Platform, Ruby on Rails, and Amazon Web Services at the Morph Labs USA Blog. Basically, there is a lot of confusion about how developers interact with the Amazon Web Services when deploying their Rails applications on the Morph Application Platform.

The takeaway from the article is simple. When you deploy your application using Morph AppSpaces, you do not interact directly with Amazon Web Services unless you want to. You will never work directly with EC2, but you could leverage S3 or SQS if you want to for centralized storage; but you don't have to. Morph completely abstracts developers from the underlying technology so developers are free to focus on development of the core product.

Check it out if you had any questions about how Ruby on Rails developers work with Amazon Web Services when leveraging the Morph Application Platform.

Labels: amazon, aws, ec2, paas, platform-as-a-service, rails, ruby, rubyonrails, SaaS

I have been actively blogging over at the Morph Labs USA blog. I will probably post something here very so often, but for now, if you want to know what is going on with me or Morph Labs, check out our USA blog or grab the feed.

My main focus at Morph is bringing the concept of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to the Ruby on Rails community. The idea of a PaaS for your Rails applications is quite compelling, but is also difficult to wrap your brain around for those with a server-centric background. With a PaaS, you no longer think about servers or infrastructure. Obviously the benefits of PaaS to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or web start-up are great, the least of which is the reduction of infrastructure investment. The greatest gains come in the form of improved productivity by allowing developers to focus on the core product and not the underlying system administration and scalability functions.

The productivity gains from a PaaS such as the Morph Application Platform and Morph AppSpaces, that allow you to use standard development and deployment tools (such as Git, Capistrano, etc.), along with a standard language and framework (Ruby and Rails respectively) are significant. Where in the past you might have pushed features to version 2.0 (or higher) because you needed to spend time on scalability, security, and administration features or spend money on infrastructure and not developers, with Morph AppSpaces, you can pull those features back into the 1.0 release!

Developers can try out the Morph eXchange, Morph Application Platform, and Morph AppSpaces for FREE, too. Simply signup and you can start deploying your applications to show off to your friends or potential clients. If your application gains traction and you want to move into production, you can simply change the "type" of AppSpace from developer to production. You can "move" to production without actually "moving" anything. All of the pricing is detailed on the site, but the "smallest" production account, which gives you an elastically scalable, redundant system, that is load balanced, highly-available, backed-up, monitored, etc. is about US$1.00 per day!

Obviously I'm pretty excited about what Morph is doing. The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market is heating up, and Morph is right there with the first PaaS offering for Ruby on Rails applications. If you are a Rails developer, you owe it to yourself and your clients to take a look at what we have to offer.

Labels: morph, paas, platform-as-a-service, rails, ruby, rubyonrails, SaaS

On December 31, 2007 I wrote a post about what 2008 will hold for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In that article I stated that 2008 will be the year the small ISV enters the SaaS market in a big way. It was, and is, my opinion that in order for this to happen, certain barriers to entry had to be removed. For instance, it is one thing to build an application, and it is yet another altogether to architect that system properly for scalability and business continuity.

Additionally, existing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, especially those that resemble RAD tools in deployed software, require developers to learn and program around proprietary APIs or even worse, learn an entire, also proprietary, programming language. Finally, pricing is generally such that an entrepreneur or start-up that builds a SaaS product and wants to launch into a production-ready environment must shell out a lot of money for dedicated systems at a host or "virtual" systems at a SaaS enabler or other "clustered" type of host.

What if there was a system that SaaS application developers could leverage without changing the way they build their software, that would allow them to rapidly deploy their SaaS or Web 2.0 solution on a platform that can grow with them (elastic) and provide the business continuity that their clients require?

What if the pricing structure was such that you can start for free, deploy a prototype, expand and contract your available resources on-demand, allowing you to instantly scale to handle whatever load is required, always paying only for what you use and nothing more. If this type of system existed, this would be the key to lowering those barriers to entry for small ISVs and would allow that large influx of vertically focused and tight horizontal niche SaaS to come to market as I predicted.

Guess what? It does exist and I've decided to put my money where my mouth is! I've joined Morph Labs, the creators of the Morph Application Platform. Morph Application Platform allows Ruby on Rails developers to quickly (it takes 6 minutes... see this video) deploy an application that leverages grid computing technology (currently using Amazon S3 and EC2) and provides the afore mentioned benefits.

My role with Morph Labs is Business Development Manager and I am going to be building out the user community and affiliate network in the United States. If you are a Ruby on Rails developer, ISV that builds applications in Rails, an offshore/near shore development company, or anyone else that would like to participate in our Beta program, please sign up here. This is your chance to test the system and tell us what you think, request features that don't exist, and generally have a hand in building something necessary for the industry.

Also, if you have a Ruby on Rails or SaaS group and would like us to come show you what the Morph Application Platform is all about and how we believe it can help your developers and entrepreneurs, please give me a shout at lincoln //at// morphlabs //dot// com.

Labels: development, entrepreneurship, SaaS, software, web

Back in December 2007 I wrote a post about saving Starbucks from its impending doom. As it turns out, they took my advice and are going to begin offering free Wireless Internet access. Hopefully this will stop the bleeding.

Labels: marketing, starbucks

I've been monitoring my web statistics and have noticed some interesting things, and have also made some changes.

First, I've noticed a handful of clicks on my email address, which is behind a "mailhide" feature I wrote about here. I've noticed that these clicks came from people that found my site via a search for something to do with SaaS or they came from my LinkedIn profile. Either way, I can see that they weren't robots. The problem is that I never received an email from them.

Either the system failed (thy couldn't read the captcha, the popup was blocked, etc.) or they simply got irritated and moved on. Either way, that cost me a valuable contact so I have removed it. You can now contact me directly via email at lincoln@lincolnmurphy.com.

Second, aside from SaaS traffic, which makes up the majority of my traffic, thankfully, I've also noticed a lot of traffic coming on older articles. Some are links from other blogs that linked to my article when it was first posted. Others are coming in from Google searches (almost exclusively). Many keyword searches include the term Mapsco and end up at my lengthy article about the mapping company. In fact, I've had a handful of searches internally via my Lijit widget with the term Mapsco. The other non-SaaS traffic is coming from northwest Arkansas (Wal-Mart territory) to my article published early in 2007 about Wal-Mart's customer segmentation plan.

I'm have an pipeline of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Product Marketing articles that I'm going to try to bring online in the next couple of weeks. Also, I'm experimenting with Squidoo as a platform for aggregating SaaS Product Marketing news and articles.

Labels: actionable, intelligence, marketing, SaaS