http://www.matrixpartners.com/index.php en tsgadmin@matrixpartners.com Copyright 2013 2013-06-14T21:40:23+00:00 http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/kalido_named_a_top_100_information_management_company http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/kalido_named_a_top_100_information_management_company#When:21:40:23Z Kalido Named a "Top 100" Information Management Company Kalido, the leading independent provider of agile information management software today announced it has been named to "DBTA 100: The Companies That Matter Most in Data." The company is being recognized for its presence, execution, vision, and innovation in delivering products and services to the marketplace. Joining an impressive group of products and solutions vendors, Kalido is the only company in the "Top 100" to deliver a fully integrated MDM and Data Warehouse solution. Increasingly, companies strive to create high performance businesses driven by agile business processes and optimized with analytic-driven insights. High quality information that is readily accessible and time relevant is a critical requirement. Some of the most recognized brands in the world trust the Kalido Information Engine to ensure a data foundation for processes and analytics that is accurate, available, and accessible and adapts easily to change. With Kalido, companies can: Speed data integration through model-driven automation Reduce IT overhead while improving data efficiency Deliver business value faster than any integrated Warehouse / MDM solution on the planet "Our solutions have shown time and time again that companies should take a complete and comprehensive approach to managing data," said Bill Hewitt, President and CEO, Kalido. "To achieve real business value, our customers include data integrity as a core part of their business process. Tools that offer point solutions only provide short-term value but in the long run do nothing but add more work for the data team. Kalido delivers the only solution that improves the business process while lowering the TCO of managing information." About Kalido Kalido is the leading provider of agile information management software. Kalido enables companies to manage data as a shared enterprise asset by supporting the business process of data management. Kalido software has been deployed at more than 300 locations in over 100 countries, including 20 percent of the world's most profitable companies as determined by Fortune Magazine. More information about Kalido can be found at kalido.com. 2013-06-14T21:40:23+00:00 http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/hubspots_mike_volpe_on_why_you_need_context_and_content_in_marketing http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/hubspots_mike_volpe_on_why_you_need_context_and_content_in_marketing#When:21:38:11Z HubSpot’s Mike Volpe on Why You Need Context AND Content In Marketing When you think of marketing today, the first word that typically comes to mind is content – whether it be blog posts, images or video. But the one thing that may be keeping your marketing content from reaching its intended audience is context, or lack thereof. Mike Volpe, chief marketing officer for inbound marketing platform provider HubSpot, talks about the importance of understanding context in order to create content that builds long-term relationships. Below is a portion of our conversation from the exhibition floor at Dreamforce 2012. * * * * * Small Business Trends: What does inbound marketing really mean to a small business person trying to make their mark building relationships with customers? Mike Volpe: Inbound marketing is really the ability to attract more people into your business…. It is really about creating content with context, so it is connected with the right people at the right time, using those two concepts together to attract more people into your business. I actually think for small businesses this is even more critical than larger ones because small businesses have smaller budgets and less time. Making small changes in their lead generation and their sales can make a huge, huge impact. Small Business Trends: So you hit on that whole context thing. You hear the term content is king, but is it really now? Isn’t context and content about the same today? Mike Volpe: I think content and context need to work together. We are getting better at having personalized messages on email, and I think even to some degree on social. But why is your website home page the same for every single person visiting it, the same for your customers, the same for people who have already or already in your sales pipeline? You should be able to display personalized context on your website and have personalized relationships there just like you do on email and just like you do on social. So it is really figuring out what ways you can bring all that stuff together and have those good contextually based conversations. Small Business Trends: How has inbound marketing changed over the years with the entry of all of these social networks, mobile tools and the Cloud? Mike Volpe: I feel like the theory of inbound marketing hasn’t changed at all, but the actual tactics used have. I think in 2006 and 2007, a lot of inbound was really SEO and blogging and that was when we first connected. You were starting to blog and you were a big podcaster and doing all of those things. It has gone from that to Twitter and Facebook and mobile has become more important over time with tons of proliferation of smart phones. All of those things have become more and more important. But I think that those are all tactics and channels that will continue to change over time. I think what is not going away is that consumers don’t want to consume advertising, they want to consume content that is useful and interesting to them. That needs to be the cornerstone of your marketing and that is why we talk so much about inbound. Small Business Trends: Can you talk about the power of LinkedIn and what it can offer small businesses? Mike Volpe: I think that for small businesses, especially if you are a B2B small business … selling to other businesses. The data we look at for Web traffic – LinkedIn vs. other social networks – if you are a B2B company the conversion rate can be three to four times higher of that traffic converting into leads and then the conversion rate of revenue is much higher. We found with B2B companies, LinkedIn can be a fantastic community. There are some great ways for small businesses to get involved with LinkedIn. You have company pages and LinkedIn just launched functionality in companies for segmentation of your audience company pages. There … are groups you can form. So there a lot of ways to get involved there. I think that LinkedIn, especially if you are a  B2B company, should not to be overlooked. Small Business Trends: How does Pinterest fit in to how a small business can actually leverage inbound marketing? Mike Volpe: I think the key to Pinterest is visual context because it is such a visually based medium. So a lot of consumer B to C companies have made really, really good use of Pinterest by posting pictures of cool, innovative, interesting products and being active within those communities. There are a lot of consumer retailers that have done well branding products on Pinterest. Even within B2B we have a Pinterest account because we do all of these things ourselves. We have found that photos, images, pictures of charts and graphs of data, are interesting to our audience and have performed well. Images of the covers of our ebooks and then linking out to where you can get the ebooks, things like that have performed well for us. Small Business Trends: How important is video to a small business? Mike Volpe: Video is one of the things that is both easy and hard. I say that video is easy to create but it is really hard to do well. You do a lot of podcasting and you do a bunch of videos as well and you have a huge background in radio, which helped you become good a doing those things. For many small businesses, video is not the place that I would necessarily start first. You can do it and it can be effective, but I would start with many of these other things. Blogging, creating content, ebooks, webinars – all of these things I would do before I really worked my way up to video. Small Business Trends: We talked a lot about inbound marketing, content and the top of the funnel? l know that you guys are really getting into the middle-of-the-funnel, or as you call it ‘MOFU.’ Can you talk about ‘MOFU’ and where automation fits in and how that can help a small business? Mike Volpe: What is interesting about the middle-of-the-funnel, or further down in the sales marketing process is that, as you learn more about people, context becomes more important and brings us back to the beginning part of the conversation. As you learn more, you need to really respect that. When you’re communicating, show them that you still know a lot about them. It is annoying when you have interactions with the company and then someone else calls you and they don‘t even remember or recognize any of the things that they have been talking to you about. With email communications you are sending out there are ways to automate that stuff. But make sure you are segmenting and personalizing those so that you’re recognizing the context of the conversation. The same thing with social and the content of your website. Again someone is already talking with your sales rep and then maybe a meeting is setup for the next day. You should be showing something that is relevant to that type of conversation on the home page or other pages of your website. The middle-of-the-funnel is really about context. Yes, you can do a bunch of automation, whether it is automating emails or other work flows or other content that is appearing on your site. So automation can help there. But make sure that you use the automation in a smart way to respect the context of what’s happening within that portion of the conversation. Small Business Trends: So we know that content is really important for marketing, branding and promotion, but what about customer service? Retaining customers, not just looking for new ones? Mike Volpe: We all know companies drive a lot of ongoing value from their customers. More and more of the companies are moving to a subscription model, or keeping customers for a long time becomes more and more important; so continuous marketing to your customer base is a really smart thing to do because it helps to drive the top line and the bottom line. One aspect of it is to continue to understand the context of the relationship of the customers. But there is also a lot of content. If you have a customer community or customer feedback, you can take that content and use it for marketing to your customers. You can also use it for marketing to your prospects. Sales people can take customers stories and things like that from the customer community and use that and use social for marketing at the top of the funnel and getting new prospects in, as well as communicating with people at the middle-of-the-funnel. After that, your customers use all of the content from all of the stages to help you. A lot of people know if you can get content from your customers in front of your prospects, then more than likely, you can convert. Because they’re going to trust what your customers are saying more than your sales people. So those types of things can be really, really effective. Small Business Trends: That’s cool to see because we are used to seeing integration with services like HubSpot, with the front for marketing and promotion. So it is nice to see that integration is starting to carry through to the service side. Mike Volpe: Absolutely. We talk about the notion of a funnel more because there is not another great model out there to really understand the process. But it is not something that ends. There are so many opportunities. I think there are a lot of synergies between what’s happening between customer support and marketing, because social is what ties it all together. 2013-06-14T21:38:11+00:00 http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/cloudbees_paas_supports_java_ee_7_development http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/cloudbees_paas_supports_java_ee_7_development#When:21:39:30Z CloudBees PaaS Supports Java EE 7 Development CloudBees, provider of a Java platform as a service (PaaS), announced upgraded support for GlassFish v3 while also making Java EE 7 immediately available to developers. Oracle announced the availability of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7) and GlassFish 4 on June 12. CloudBees claims to be the first PaaS provider to offer the new Java distribution on its platform. Java EE 7 features higher productivity and HTML5 support in the form of WebSocket and JSON. GlassFish is the reference implementation of Java EE and as such supports Enterprise JavaBeans, Java Persistence API (JPA), JavaServer Faces, Java Message Service (JMS), JavaServer Pages, servlets and more. This enables developers to create enterprise applications that are portable and scalable, and that integrate with legacy technologies. CloudBees is offering access to Java EE 7 through its support of GlassFish v4, the latest version of Oracle's open-source application server project that serves as the Reference Implementation (RI) for Java EE 7. The RI provides a complete implementation of the new specification. Developers can now use it as a tool to explore new EE 7 features, to take advantage of them in new applications and to understand how their existing applications are impacted. Along with GlassFish v4, CloudBees also announced that it is upgrading its support of GlassFish v3 to a supported stack on the CloudBees platform. CloudBees had previously provided support for GlassFish v3 on a community-supported basis only; now developers can use GlassFish v3 for application development and deployment. CloudBees' support of GlassFish is similar to its support for Tomcat and JBoss, including automatic setup of data sources for database access, scale-out, security realms, session affinity and integration with partner services like New Relic and Papertrail. "Java EE 7 Web Profile brings new functionalities that allow you to develop modern web applications using, for example, RESTful Web Services, Web Sockets or JSON Processing, along with richer features such as asynchronous session bean invocation or non-persistent EJB Timer Service," said Antonio Goncalves, a member of the Java EE 7 Expert Group, in a statement. "With the EE 7 Web Profile already available on CloudBees, it is the first time in hosting history that a Java EE reference implementation—GlassFish v4—is available for developers just when the specification is out." By providing the Java platform as a hosted service, CloudBees says it has been able to deliver the new Java EE version to developers in the fastest possible time frame. Using CloudBees, Java developers can get up and going with GlassFish, Java EE 7 and Continuous Cloud Delivery simply by clicking on either the GlassFish v3 ClickStart or v4 ClickStart. "While GlassFish always leads the way on implementation of the Java EE specification, it also has a passionate customer base," said Steven G. Harris, senior vice president of products at CloudBees, in a statement. "Our GlassFish support on CloudBees puts the power of GlassFish v3 in developers' hands, along with the newest features of Java EE 7 in GlassFish v4." CloudBees announced Continuous Cloud Delivery (CCD) in March as a new approach to accelerate application delivery and meet high-frequency update requirements necessary for Web and mobile applications. CCD represents the fastest way for development teams to push application changes and deploy the resulting code to production, all via the cloud, CloudBees said. With CCD, enterprises, mobile application developers and software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors are able to deliver incremental software features and updates quickly to keep up with rapidly changing markets. Rather than following traditional, lengthy software release cycles, software teams must deliver software in a more agile manner. CCD addresses this need by automating the development and testing processes, ensuring that software applications are always in a ready-to-deploy state. "Our customers have made it very clear to us, time-to-market is their most pressing business challenge," said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees. "Leveraging the CloudBees Platform, Continuous Cloud Delivery provides the quickest way to deliver applications and ensure the highest levels of quality." 2013-06-13T21:39:30+00:00 http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/ge_grabcad_open_aircraft_component_design_competition http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/ge_grabcad_open_aircraft_component_design_competition#When:19:14:49Z GE & GrabCAD Open Aircraft Component Design Competition Recently, GE has been popping up everywhere in the world of 3D printing. As the world’s largest manufacturer of jet engines, GE is using 3D Printing to make the fuel nozzles on its next generation LEAP jet engines. Earlier this week GE announce that it going one step further in its investment into 3D Printing by launching two global design challenges. The first challenge invites entrepreneurs, companies, designers and institutions to leverage 3D printing in the development of high speed additive manufacturing techniques. The second, and more straightforward challenge, enlists this same global group in an effort to redesign an aircraft engine bracket. With their already sizable investment into 3D Printing, GE has shown the design community that it’s serious about the technology. According to Michael Idelchik, lead of GE’s advanced technologies division, the company’s next step is to “develop an ecosystem of designers, engineers, materials scientists, and other partners who can learn with us. We have a number of products that we are going to be launching and we want to challenge people to get into business with us. If the ecosystem grows, the entire industry will grow." For the first competition GE is asking companies and institutions to optimize the 3D printing process -- creating methods for delivering high-speed, high fidelity precision products that use advance materials. The second competition looks to help GE’s mission to making aircraft lighter by redesigning an aircraft engine bracket. “Today's design engineers aren't constrained by conventional manufacturing processes. Additive manufacturing has created the ability to produce items of all shapes and sizes from the ground up, enabling engineers to design increasingly complex products that were previously impossible.” Said GE. Both competitions are already open. If you’d like to participate head over here for more details. 2013-06-13T19:14:49+00:00 http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/conductor_hires_new_cfo_to_meet_global_demand_for_its_seo_platform http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/conductor_hires_new_cfo_to_meet_global_demand_for_its_seo_platform#When:23:09:14Z Conductor Hires New CFO to Meet Global Demand for Its SEO Platform Conductor, the first choice in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technology, today announced the appointment of Jim Caci as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Mr. Caci will lead Conductor's finance, accounting, human resource and administration from the company's corporate headquarters in New York City. He joins Conductor at a time of accelerated growth and unprecedented demand for its enterprise SEO platform, Conductor Searchlight™, used by major brands and the agencies that support them. The hire of Mr. Caci will ensure the company continues to apply the $32 million in venture capital financing toward the people, partnerships and product innovations that make Conductor the market leader in natural search technology -- a market projected to reach $500 million by 2016. Mr. Caci has held a variety of roles and positions during his 25-year career running the finance and operation functions at both public and private companies. Most recently as the CFO of AvePoint, the world's largest provider of enterprise-class governance, compliance and management solutions for social enterprise collaboration platforms, Mr. Caci oversaw all of the company's global entities, including 25 wholly owned operational centers on six continents. "Jim Caci brings the right experience and enthusiasm to the role of CFO, and we're excited to have him join the company at this rapid-growth stage," said Seth Besmertnik, CEO and Founder of Conductor Inc. "I look forward to working alongside Jim as we execute on our long-term vision of transforming SEO and providing the world's biggest brands with the best technology platform available to optimize natural search, acquire customers and convert online searches into dollars." Conductor has raised more than $32 million in funding from investors Investor Growth Capital, FirstMark Capital and Matrix Partners. In addition to its historic $20 million funding round in October 2012, 2012 saw more than 150 new customer engagements bringing the total number of brands under management to nearly four thousand, representing $6.5 billion in SEO revenue and more than five million keywords under management. "I'm delighted to join the Conductor leadership team to help build on the tremendous success the company has experienced as the first and most widely adopted, cloud-based SEO platform within a half-billion dollar market," said Jim Caci. Conductor Searchlight has quickly risen to be the industry standard for enterprise SEO. The top four big agency holding companies, more than half of the top 20 Internet Retailers and more than 100 of the Fortune 500 use Conductor Searchlight to measure search market share, protect search revenue, and leverage cutting-edge technology to grow their businesses. With its market-leading vision, unrivaled technology and world-class customer success teams, Conductor continues to be the first-choice for organizations serious about online visibility and competitive edge. Companies like FedEx, BestBuy, Siemens and General Electric (GE), report up to six times more traffic and 15 times more conversions from natural search. About Conductor Conductor is the global leader in SEO technology. Thousands of brands and enterprise marketers use its cloud-based SEO platform, Conductor Searchlight™ to measure, improve and manage their natural search efforts to stay ahead of the competition, increase site traffic and boost revenues. The powerful, highly scalable platform processes massive amounts of data quickly to give users real-time information for better, more informed decision making and to identifying new ways to increase share-of-search that will propel their businesses forward. Offering the most robust performance reporting and measurement tools available in the industry, Conductor arms marketers with the intelligence needed to tie SEO success to business objectives and demonstrate the value of SEO across the organization. One of New York City's fastest growing and most admired technology companies, Conductor is routinely recognized for excellence in business and corporate culture. To learn more, go to www.conductor.com or follow Conductor on Twitter @conductor. 2013-06-12T23:09:14+00:00 http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/carbon_expands_reach_of_model_swap_technology http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/carbon_expands_reach_of_model_swap_technology#When:23:08:50Z Carbon Expands Reach of Model Swap Technology Carbon Design Systems®, the leading supplier of virtual prototype and secure model solutions, announced today that its latest release of SoCDesigner™ Plus has expanded the models eligible to be used with Swap & Play™. The Swap & Play technology enables a virtual prototype to boot an operating system, such as Linux or Android, in seconds and then debug or optimize performance with 100% implementation accuracy. The latest release of SoCDesigner Plus enables designers a way to use fabric components and DDRx memory controllers from any vendor or internal source in a virtual prototype capable of Swap & Play. These components compliment the Fast Model™ component library from ARM® and allow users to quickly configure a complete Swap & Play virtual prototype system. "Now that we automatically support all fabric and DDRx memory controller components, many more design teams can boot an operating system in seconds and then debug with 100% accuracy using Swap & Play," remarks Joe Tatham, Carbon's vice president of engineering. Previously, numerous design teams made use of the Swap & Play implementation, while many were unable to take advantage of the capability because it supported a limited number of fabric and memory controller components. Carbon Model Studio, the industry's trusted source for implementation-accurate models, is used to drive the fabric and memory controller features. By using design knowledge gained during the compilation process, the compiler automatically generates a high-speed functional model for each component. This component is capable of executing at 100s of MIPS and then being swapped with the original Carbonized register transfer level (RTL) model at any breakpoint. Existing Performance Analysis Kits (CPAKs) on Carbon's IP Exchange web portal (www.carbonipexchange.com) containing fabric components from Arteris and memory controllers from Cadence have been updated with the new Swap & Play technology. "Using the Swap & Play technology from Carbon, we can boot an OS in SoCDesigner in seconds and then continue running with a 100% accurate model of our FlexNoC interconnect components," states Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris. "This unleashes a much larger area of design challenges which can be addressed in a virtual prototype instead of waiting for emulation or FPGA prototypes." Availability Carbon's newly enhanced Swap & Play support and updated CPAKs are available now for all SoCDesigner Plus users. Pricing is available upon request. About Carbon Design Systems Carbon Design Systems offers the industry's only unified virtual prototype solution along with the leading solution for accurate IP model creation. Carbon virtual prototypes can execute at hundreds of MIPS and with 100% accuracy to enable application software development, detailed architectural analysis and secure IP model distribution. Carbon's customers are systems, semiconductor, and IP companies that focus on wireless, networking, and consumer electronics. Carbon investors include Samsung Venture Investment Corporation and ARM Holdings. Carbon is headquartered at 125 Nagog Park, Acton, Mass., 01720. Telephone: (978) 264-7300. Facsimile: (978) 264-9990. Email: info@carbondesignsystems.com. Website: www.carbondesignsystems.com. 2013-06-12T23:08:50+00:00 http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/cloudbees_is_first_paas_to_enable_java_ee_7_development_in_the_cloud http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/cloudbees_is_first_paas_to_enable_java_ee_7_development_in_the_cloud#When:23:07:46Z CloudBees is First PaaS to Enable Java EE 7 Development in the Cloud CloudBees, Inc., the Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovation leader, today announced support for GlassFish v3 while also making Java EE 7 immediately available to developers. CloudBees is the first PaaS provider to offer the new Java distribution on its platform. Java EE 7 features higher productivity and HTML5 support in the form of WebSocket and JSON CloudBees is offering access to Java EE 7 through its support of GlassFish v4, the latest version of Oracle’s open-source application server project that serves as the Reference Implementation (RI) for Java EE 7. The RI provides a complete implementation of the new specification. Developers can now use it as a tool to explore new EE 7 features, to take advantage of them in new applications, and to understand how their existing applications are impacted. Along with GlassFish v4, CloudBees is also announcing that it is upgrading its support of GlassFish v3 to a supported stack on the CloudBees platform. CloudBees had previously provided support for GlassFish v3 on a community-supported basis only; now developers can use GlassFish v3 for application development and deployment. CloudBees’ support of GlassFish is similar to its support for Tomcat and JBoss, including automatic setup of data sources for database access, scale-out, security realms, session affinity and integration with partner services like New Relic and Papertrail. “Java EE 7 Web Profile brings new functionalities that allow you to develop modern web applications using, for example, RESTful Web Services, Web Sockets or JSON Processing, along with richer features such as asynchronous session bean invocation or non-persistent EJB Timer Service,” said Antonio Goncalves, book author and member of the Java EE 7 Expert Group. “With the EE 7 Web Profile already available on CloudBees, it is the first time in hosting history that a Java EE reference implementation − GlassFish v4 − is available for developers just when the specification is out.” By providing the Java platform as a hosted service, CloudBees has been able to deliver the new Java EE version to developers in the fastest possible time frame. Using CloudBees, Java developers can get up and going with GlassFish, Java EE 7 and Continuous Cloud Delivery simply by clicking on either the GlassFish v3 ClickStart or v4 ClickStart. “While GlassFish always leads the way on implementation of the Java EE specification, it also has a passionate customer base,” said Steven G. Harris, senior vice president of products, CloudBees. “Our GlassFish support on CloudBees puts the power of GlassFish v3 in developers’ hands, along with the newest features of Java EE 7 in GlassFish v4.” About CloudBees CloudBees (www.cloudbees.com) provides a Java Platform as a Service that enables Continuous Cloud Delivery, accelerating the development and deployment of web and mobile applications. With Continuous Cloud Delivery, development teams can quickly deploy applications and make frequent incremental updates to them. By eliminating the friction caused by provisioning, maintaining and administering complex hardware and software infrastructure, CloudBees allows developers to do what they do best: develop cool applications. The CloudBees Platform provides a set of services, instantly activated with a click, that allow developers to rapidly build and run new business applications with zero IT administrative overhead. CloudBees serves the needs of a wide range of businesses from small startups that need to quickly create new on-line businesses, to large IT organizations that need to rapidly respond to dynamic market opportunities. Follow CloudBees on Twitter (@CloudBees) and on Facebook. You can also try CloudBees for free. Backed by Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, CloudBees was founded in 2010 by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey and an elite team of middleware and open source technology professionals. 2013-06-12T23:07:46+00:00 http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/opera_rises_as_skyfire_deal_signals_strategy_success_oslo_mover http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/opera_rises_as_skyfire_deal_signals_strategy_success_oslo_mover#When:23:06:28Z Opera Rises as Skyfire Deal Signals Strategy Success: Oslo Mover Opera Software ASA (OPERA), the Norwegian maker of Internet browsers, rose the most in almost seven months as a deal to supply its Skyfire software to an unidentified mobile operator signals that its strategy is working. Shares in the Oslo-based company rose as much as 6.4 percent, the biggest intraday increase since Nov. 20, and were up 4.3 percent at 43.9 kroner as of 3:13 p.m. in the Norwegian capital. About 437,000 shares have traded so far today, more than 60 percent above the three-month daily average. “Operators are starting to use cloud solution technology, instead of just hardware,” Andre Holo Adolfsen, an analyst at Nordea Securities, said by telephone from Oslo. This is proof that the concept of Skyfire works and that operators are willing to install the software and technology in their networks, he said. Opera, which competes with Apple Inc. (AAPL), Google Inc. (GOOG) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) browsers, is seeking to boost sales by targeting the growing mobile-phone data market for its cross-platform Internet browser. It plans to increase revenue this year by as much as 37 percent from $216 million last year. Opera signed a three-year global frame agreement with an unidentified “major international mobile operator” to supply Skyfire’s Rocket Optimizer cloud technology across the operator’s network, the company said in a statement. “Skyfire was a smart and cheap acquisition,” said Holo Adolfsen, who recommends that clients buy the stock. “The upside is tremendous.” 2013-06-12T23:06:28+00:00 http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/the_post_http_era_real_time_web_apps_with_meteor http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/the_post_http_era_real_time_web_apps_with_meteor#When:19:12:48Z The Post-HTTP Era: Real-Time Web Apps With Meteor During the HTML5 Track at QCon New York 2013 Matt DeBergalis gave a talk on Meteor, the open-source real-time web application framework that Debergalis co-founded. According to DeBergalis, the client versus server-side pendulum has swung many times: from the mainframe (server-side) to the desktop (client-side) to the web (server-side) and now to the modern web where clients get increasingly capable and more and more work happens in the client again. However, the tools to build these modern web applications, DeBergalis argues, have not caught up. The goal of Meteor is to provide the developer with the tools to build these types of real-time web applications more easily and consistently.Today's modern web applications consist of two disparate parts: The server-side may be built using e.g. PHP, Java or Ruby, using specific server-side APIs, and tools for building software and managing dependencies. The client-side uses one or many JavaScript libraries, HTML, CSS and is built using its own build too, for instance Google Closure Compiler. The two communicate using essentially a custom wire protocol, usually encoded using JSON over HTTP or Websockets sending commands: send me this piece of data, persist this new piece of data, render this piece of data etc.Meteor is rethinking this approach and aims to make everything real-time. For this purpose it does not deem HTTP a good fit, instead, communication (beyond delivering the web resources) happens via websockets using its DDP (Distributed Data) protocol. The DDP protocol is a generic protocol (encoded using JSON) that supports three core operations: Subscribe: using the protocol a client logs on and says: "I'm interested in data collection X, send me an initial snapshot of all its data, then keep sending me deltas so that I can keep my cache up to date." Publish: "property X of entity Y has changed its value to Z." Remote-procedure call: these are used to execute a remote procedure and to return the result in a fault-tolerant way. Meteor comes with a DDP implementation for server and client written in JavaScript (Node.js with Fibers on the server). However, the protocol is implementation-agnostic, so alternative implementations can be written. For instance, there is a .NET client library already.The second component of Meteor is its view engine, automatically keeping the DOM up-to-date with underlying data, similar to what AngularJS and Web Components support.The third component of Meteor is packaging. Since Meteor components are not just server-side or just client-side, current package systems are not suitable. Meteor's packaging system distributes both the server and client-side components.Meteor itself decides what parts of your code base need to run in the browser and what parts will run on the server. DeBergalis says that there is currently work underway to use static source code analysis techniques to better partition code, so that only the code that the client absolutely needs is pushed.Real-time pushing of data is not the only real-time aspect of Meteor. One of the most striking elements of the demo was hot code pushes: whenever the developer saves a file, Meteor not only automatically reloads the code on the server, it also automatically packages up the code and pushes it all the clients, ensuring that all clients are running the latest and greatest version of the client-side code compatible with the server-side code.Meteor is an interesting full-stack approach to real-time web application development. To learn more about it, consider reading the documentation and look at examples at its website, there is also a book written on Meteor, which we reviewed here on InfoQ. 2013-06-12T19:12:48+00:00 http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/sagecloud_is_cold_storage_hot_again http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/sagecloud_is_cold_storage_hot_again#When:22:59:13Z SageCloud: Is Cold Storage Hot Again? Cold storage is gaining momentum, and a recent research report from IDC and SageCloud’s fresh round of funding validate this trend. Boston-based cold data storage startup SageCloud announced today that it completed $10 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Braemar Energy Ventures, with participation from its existing investor, Matrix Partners. Dr. Jiong Ma, a partner at Braemar Energy Venture, will also sit on SageCloud’s board as part of the new arrangement. SageCloud provides reliable, cost-effective solutions to enterprises for cold storage, which is the storing of petabytes of data that, while important, aren’t frequently accessed. Data center professionals can now enjoy storage on disks at prices similar to storage on tapes. “SageCloud has developed powerful system software that leverages open-standards enclosures and economical commodity drives to optimize energy efficiency and drive sustainability and long-term data preservation for customers’ data centers,” said Jeff Flowers, SageCloud’s founder and chief executive, in a statement. “In this way, we are revolutionizing the economics of data storage.” Flowers previously cofounded the online backup company Carbonite. With the new funding, SageCloud will accelerate the deployment of company’s products with initial customers and further expand its operations. “We’re seeing the potential for a big disruption to the storage industry coming from the disaggregation of software and hardware. Hardware prices are being driven down by open standard hardware, referred to as Infrastructure 2.0, and commoditized components,” said David Skok, general partner at Matrix Partners, of SageCloud’s initiative. The recent IDC report cites power management as a critical data center need, and it forecasts that the market for solutions to address energy-efficient data storage will exceed $25 billion by 2016. 2013-06-11T22:59:13+00:00