We’ve all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs. Sponsor Tuesday I had the opportunity to chat with Harry Lin, CEO of Lottay , an online gifting service that has spent a large portion of its short history coworking with outside developers and entrepreneurs. Starting in October of last year, the company spent six weeks working in the offices of San Francisco-based Ruby on Rails development house Pivotal Labs . In December they moved into a space at the Ventura Ventures Technology Center where they work alongside other consumer Internet startups, sharing ideas and resources. “The thing about a startup is that you’re always under resourced; you never have enough people,” Lin told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. “So the more you can make out of less, the better off your are, the faster you can go, and a startup is all about speed.” Lin, formerly the Vice President of ABC.com and General Manager of Evite , was brought on board at Lottay after the company received Series A funding in the summer of 2009. Below are some highlights from my discussion with Lin on the benefits of coworking environments for startups. How did Lottay benefit from the Pivotal Labs experience? We camped out at the Pivotal Labs office for the entire six weeks. We were in San Francisco and sitting in their office everyday with the two developers that were on our contract. The reason this worked better is that it was very intense and very concentrated; you had no other distractions. The other reason it was fantastic is that its a room full of 25 top notch Ruby on Rails developers. We were only paying for two of them in our engagement, but there were the other 23 sitting in that room working on various things. We would come up with a problem or a hurdle we couldn’t get over and we would just shout out, “Hey has anyone ever done this with a library?” and some guy would jump up and say, “Yeah, I’ve done that!” Voila! Problem solved. And that would happen all the time. So we were getting the benefit of this very open, huge brain trust that Pivotal had even though, technically speaking, we were just paying for the two guys. The third other thing I’d say was great about the environment is that they had other clients in there. So we got to meet, talk to, and get to know some other Internet companies, and that was really cool.” What is the experience like now in Ventura? There are 12 of us in this incubator here in the city of Ventura; it’s a very deliberate ecosystem the city is trying to push, and we’re part of that ecosystem. We all speak the same language, the same jargon, the same shorthand. If one of us comes up with a brilliant idea or an interesting strategic question, we’ll grab each other, white board it, sit in a room, chat in the hall way – the kind of random things that happen when you’re all physically located in the same place. The other thing that we benefit from is that because this is run by the city, we get a lot of support in the form of a fantastic rate on rent, free wifi, marketing and public relations, and they’ve helped us find recruits when we have openings to hire people. The city is more than just a landlord, they’re trying to jump-start this ecosystem. So you would suggest that early stage startups try to find coworking space? If possible, I would not do the “in your basement” or “in your garage by yourself”. Those are the legendary stories we like to hear about, but I think the majority of successful startups has had some kind of coworking environment. I worked for nine years in the Bay area and I know that while there are official incubators, there are also these offices where nine out of the ten companies there are high-tech companies. Being with other people who are doing the same thing is hugely beneficial. In the consumer Internet space, especially with how the Web has evolved over the last decade, everything is getting more social and more open, both in terms of the consumer behavior and in terms of the development and how things are produced. So it just stands to reason that in launching and trying to grow these types of businesses, you should be more social as well. I s there anything startups should avoid when in a coworking environment? It is tempting to do a lot of partnerships with other startups because you’re there, you know each other, you understand each other’s pains and trials and tribulations. Resist the temptation unless is makes a lot of sense. Usually what a startup needs by way of partnership is a large established company. What is your advice to the young startups out there looking to launch or grow their business? There will be 100 problems to solve every week. I can guarantee you that at least 75 of those problems have already been experienced and solved by someone else. That’s the problem with being in a garage or a bedroom by yourself; you’ll probably end up trying to solve those 75 problems yourself. When you’re colocated and coworking with other entrepreneurs, you can share. “Oh, you’ve got that problem? I’ve got that problem, and here’s the solution.” You can benefit from their learnings and not have to reinvent the wheel, which saves you a lot of time. Discuss

Click here to read more

To keep up with the growth of cloud computing and virtualization, networks keep evolving. But unlike Twitter’s Trending Topics, IT budgets don’t scale up. In fact one of the major initiatives in many IT shops is creatively reduce their own expense. To get to a scalable cloud infrastructure where costs are contained, it sounds like the network industry is going to see a time where a “Linux” arrives on the scene. An open source alternative to building networks may disrupt the networking landscape and give network admins an open source network operating system. Sponsor Virtualization: It’s in the Network Too Distributing workload across machines, storage, and environments has required networks to be smarter than ever. Now, the network needs to be intelligent enough to not only route traffic both a bridge and a toll-gate, but to also provision and de-provision all aspects of the environment at a moments notice. Providers like Rackspace are in the business of using the network to optimize the performance of the entire data center. To be effective in keeping up with dynamic system provisioning, technical teams need access to all tiers of the computing environment to reduce operations overhead. In their innovation for efficiency, hosting providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace start to create new patterns – including ones in the core of the network – to get their job done. Network operating systems that are open, like Extreme XOS enable large scale hosting providers to look deeper into networking gear and start to tune it themselves. And enterprises may follow this trend. Servers Don’t Sleep at Night, but Applications and Admins Do For a long time, networks have been used to detect the peers and devices. Many of us use the nearly ubiquitous DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), which is the the thing that automatically assigns IP addresses to a PC when plugging into the network. In an analogy, there is a need for a “super DHCP” is needed that can keep up with the highly virtualized cloud infrastructure per virtual instance. To do this, engineers look deeper to find efficiencies in how the network talks to the hardware and software for the virtual machines. A good example of benefit for this is where a resource has peak loads during the day. Due to natural usage, the applications compute power is not utilized during the night. Using monitoring and provisioning tools, the network can de-provision the extra hardware and offer it to another service. This “freeing up” allocation saves power and money. This is a simple example of where virtual data center solutions are being innovated in the industry to figure out how to further timeshare the computing resources. The network has the ability to help manage the scale down to the moment is enabled by it’s reach to everything over IP (Internet Protocol). The Open Network Wins, Developers Rule Extreme Networks is betting IT leaders that have become very familiar with Linux and open source Hypervisors like XEN want to tweak the network. For the data center manager that wants to go into the core network engines innovate, there comes a need for APIs, SDKS, and open access libraries. Extreme’s openness is in the form of web services, many offered that are offered as XML or CLI scripting that allow integrate tools into the core of the network via XML, and configure edge ports for security and VOIP access as dynamic provisioning. The company offers a code workbench of its own to download widgets to plug into the network. Designed for the open source developer, it shares the familiar pattern that presides in open source community for application frameworks and operating systems code sharing. Shown in the diagram, Extreme’s network offers real-time provisioning of code widgets in the network. Play Nice: the Networks Worse Enemy May be Success Will the network evolve to see an open source player that drives change in pricing and value? In the rush to enable new efficiencies we wonder if this is an Apple A-HA moment in the making. The question seems to be can the giants in the space balance the fine line of better end-to-end experience of managing the environment and whether vendors do it best. If we follow the Apple example of industry success, and end-to-end play for the network may be in the cards. Last month, Juniper announced it has created a new business group and commitment to an Junos ecosystem. Juniper has made a big move towards open source innovation in it’s recent re-branding and at least to one analyst, John Furrier from Silicon Angle, seems to be suggesting that Juniper Judo’sing Cisco, like Google did with Open and Microsoft . That probably doesn’t feel the least bit nice to the market leader, especially when Cisco is priming it’s engines for changing the Internet forever. Cisco Open IOS in 2007 a model towards compartmentalizing and opening IOS, as part of it’s overall movement into a more software based organization.With the complex series of network enhancements and feature sets, it will be interesting to see how Cisco views “open” vs. “customizable” and where the control lives for network management and up-time. When visiting the Cisco IOS website today, we see the standard license and no clear mention of open source licensing. Cisco strikes the balance between open and controlled in it’s a approach to defining what an open network is and where networks will be encapsulated as services. We wonder if Cisco deliver the capabilities to pull more traffic into it’s end-to-end range, while open networking APIs rise as part of the network service stack. With this market, it’s likely both. At very least, open networking has a role in determining the fate of the network and where territories are being defined. The Cloud is a Network of Services The cloud is defining a world where service orientation rules – both the software and physical layers. And, it is breaking the rules of workload distribution, where network topologies are changing. The requirements of connecting the layer 2 and layer 3 networks, as well as IT leaders that are building solutions for mass scaling (enterprises or service providers) are evolving and being driven by an ability to be efficient at the workload level. Extreme Networks Technical Brief, Dynamic Network Virtualization Overview , explains the value of plug and play network components in today’s topology. “By leveraging Extreme Networks® ExtremeXOS®, a modular, edge-to-core operating system, and our extensibility frame-work including Universal Port Scripting and an XML interface, Extreme Networks is able to tightly integrate the switching network with the virtualization environment to create a virtualization-aware network fabric that automates the network-level virtualization required in next generation data center and cloud computing environments. This unique functionality enables Extreme Networks to provide seamless support of virtualization capabilities across the various hypervisor platforms, including Citrix ZEN, Microsoft and VMware. The highly integrated solution allows the Extreme Networks solutions to trigger responses to virtualization moves as they happen in the network by virtue of a tightly integrated XML-based network management framework.” Extreme, and now Juniper, are moving in the direction of offering IT administrators control points in networks and protocols to optimize it opens the market. It looks promising to give administrators vendor leverage in buying services without vendor lock, or waiting for feature releases from the vendor. And, it mirrors the open-source movement in bringing communities together to solve problems and build compatible services. Open APIs may define the cloud’s network of the future for large hosting providers. We wonder if for the enterprise. Photo credit: opensourceway Discuss

Click here to read more

Get rid of that guilt of taking all of those plastic and paper bags whenever you go to the store. Instead, try a reusable green bag. Though the canvas ones that all of the major stores offer can look a bit gaudy, there are plenty of sources where you can get a bag that is [...]

Click here to read more