We have been looking at Amazon EC2, and we like it. A lot. The economics are simple and compelling for us. A single rack with 20 amps of power at our datacenter costs us about $1,000/month. With Amazon, for $1,000, I can get a nice database server class machine (about... View Article
Wow! Talk about product placement! And we had no idea this was even coming! I opened the paper this morning and was flabbergasted to find a *huge* screenshot of Act-On in the Marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal (September 24 2008 print edition, Marketplace section page B3, the article is entitled Cisco... View Article
We have built a platform that can serve enterprise customers as well as SMB customers. The reason is that we are going after the Fortune 5,000,000 rather than just the Fortune 500. Google search has altered the balance of power between big companies and small ones, since the all-knowing Google... View Article
When I started this company, I set out to build a small and efficient team right here in Portland, Oregon. Outsourcing was the last thing on my mind. I have never believed in outsourcing development, especially in a startup environment where the requirements are fluid and the need to move... View Article
I cannot speak about the pros and cons of corporate funding vs. venture capital in general, but having Cisco as our A Round investor has worked well for us. It took forever to get the deal done. In addition to the bureaucratic nature of the process, we had to fend... View Article
Software 2008, a key part of the Interop Expo, was help April 29-30, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. I was on a panel on Tuesday, April 29, 3:45–4:45 pm entitled The New SaaS Model: Designing, Distributing and Monetizing Applications that was moderated by Shankar Iyer from... View Article
I’ll be at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco, April 22-24 2008 at Moscone West. WebEx has selected Act-On Software to showcase what ISV’s can achieve within the WebEx Connect platform. I may be a bit biased but I think we have developed some of the most sophisticated Connect widgets. Our... View Article
This blog-centric Bay area event helped us, along with some 30 other barely-visible companies, gain a little attention. Under the Radar‘s Shay Nowick wrote: “However, their solution seemed to be a little of everything.” She was paraphrasing the comment by WSJ’s Kara Swisher about the Ginsu knife coming to mind... View Article
