Today’s roundtable overlapped with the Italy – Slovakia World Cup soccer game, which from what I can tell was quite exciting, albeit very disappointing for the reigning champions! Michael Jastram started off by presenting ProR , an open-source platform to manage the RFQ process for automotive parts manufacturers and suppliers. Michael has an European Union grant for the next 18 months to build this platform, and intends to offer integration services and premium functionality on top of it to monetize it. His presentation was clear and concise, and he has good connections into the automotive industry, through which he expects to be able to scope out the functionality of the system relatively easily. Sponsor There are about 6 major manufacturers and 600 smaller parts manufacturers who feed into these companies. We discussed average deal sizes for the integration projects, which Michael estimates between €10,000-50,000. This would be a very reasonable way to monetize the platform and build a several million dollars a year business over the next three years. I found Michael’s strategy robust and well thought through. He used me as a sounding board to verify his assumptions. Michael came to the session with a good deal of homework done, which made it a smooth discussion with a very clear execution roadmap. I gave him several pointers to open source case studies, including SugarCRM , CollabNet , SpringSource , and DimDim , which, of course, is our host for the 1M/1M roundtables. Norton Scientific Then Bryan Webb pitched Norton Scientific , which is a protein aggregation monitoring system that helps with drug discovery. Bryan’s target market is the 3,500 chemistry labs worldwide, adding up to a TAM of about $250 million. The product is 12 weeks from being ready, and will be sold through distributors at $8,000 per unit. Bryan seems to have identified a well-defined niche, and has designed a product that costs $1,000 to build. Distributors will be paying $6,000 per unit, making $5,000 profit per unit. There are some short-term cash flow issues with this business, but clearly, there is a business here that can get to break-even relatively quickly. With some seed capital, the business will scale just fine. I plan to invite Bryan to be featured on my Incubation Radar series, and introduce him to some angel investors. Relationships Matter Now Next, Denise Barreto started off by introducing Relationships Matter Now, a Web portal for wellness programs that want to offer relationship advice to employees of corporations. I’m afraid I did not find the value proposition convincing, and advised her to go talk to at least 50 corporate HR managers in charge of wellness programs to validate her idea before she quits her day job. Giant Media Up last was David Segura with Giant Media , discussing his viral video marketing company which did $90,000 last month in services revenue. David is exploring ways to manage his cash-flow challenges so that he can invest some money in building a widget or two that transforms Giant Media to more of a technology company, as opposed to a pure services company. I tend to really like services businesses that achieve deep customer intimacy and build products based on that knowledge and experience. I am curious to see what kind of widgets David comes up with over the next few months, and again, as this business develops, we will feature the company in my Incubation Radar and expose it to seed investors. While I am not sure about Denise’s venture, the others three businesses – ProR, Norton Scientific, and Giant Media – I am reasonably sure have the potential to reach the $1 million mark with good execution and intelligent maneuvering. I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million ( 1M/1M ). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series . You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions . The recording of this roundtable can be found here . Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here . You can register for the next roundtable here . Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy , and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys , Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction , Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour , as well as Vision India 2020 , are all available from Amazon. Photo by Svilen Milev Discuss

Click here to read more

Opscode , a cloud infrastructure automation company, announced today that it has closed an $11 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by Battery Ventures and brings the total raised for the company to $13.5 million. Proceeds from the new funds will be used to expand the company’s engineering staff, research initiatives, and sales and marketing efforts. Sponsor “We are witnessing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make world-class IT infrastructure available to the masses,” says Sunil Dhaliwal, a general partner at Battery Ventures and now a member of Opscode’s Board of Directors. “The future belongs to those that can deliver simple, scalable automation to any IT user, regardless of their size or sophistication.” Opscode is the maker of Chef, an open source systems integration framework for managing and scaling infrastructure. Chef allows developers to manage large-scale server and application deployment by writing code, rather than by running commands by hand. Chef helps automate some of the manual tasks that have historically been required to fix server issues. Opscode also announced today a limited beta release of Opscode Platform, a hosted configuration management service. The Opscode Platform is a centrally managed data store into which servers publish data such as IP addresses, loaded kernel modules, and OS versions. According to Opscode, Chef and the Opscode Platform allow developers and systems engineers to fully automate their infrastructures with re-usable code – without having to build or maintain systems management tools. Opscode was founded in 2008 and is based in Seattle, Washington. Since its launch, over 150 individuals and 25 companies, including Rackspace and RightScale have contributed to the open source project. Discuss

Click here to read more

Enterprise SaaS and PaaS (platform as a service) vendor Netsuite announced the availability of Netsuite Manufacturing Edition last week. The company’s Manufacturing Edition is aimed at mid-sized manufacturers and provides support for “multi-company, multi-plant, multi-location and multi-currency” enterprises. The product was built by manufacturing management software company Rootsock Software on Netsuite’s SuiteCloud platform, which opens a new vertical market to Netsuite and escalates its competition with SAP . Sponsor The suite’s features include: multi-site planning and management, material requirements planning (MRP), production management, engineering change control (ECC), shop floor control and work-in-progress (WIP) management. Netsuite and Rootstock’s joint product , originally called Rootstock MRP for NetSuite, has been beta since April 2009. Launched in 2009, SuiteCloud is Netsuite’s platform as a service offering. Rootstock, founded in 2008, was one of the platform’s early adopters. According to a press release , the company was able to bring Rootstock MRP for NetSuite to market twice as fast and at half the cost as would have been otherwise possible. SAP is the dominant player in enterprise manufacturing software, so this product brings Netsuite directly onto SAP’s turf. SAP meanwhile is readying its SaaS offering Business ByDesign , which will compete directly with Netsuite in the SMB market. Netsuite has been aggressively positioning themselves as a SAP competitor and CloudSuite has been seen as a competitor to both SAP and Oracle (Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison is a majority shareholder and major financial backer of Netsuite). Netsuite Manufacturing Edition will also compete with manufacturing ERP SaaS provider Plex . Discuss

Click here to read more

Today, SalesForce partners FinancialForce , the first native accounting package for SalesForce.com, and CloudApps , a new breed of carbon management solution, announce their products integrate to enable carbon credits to be managed in accounting terms within the Salesforce platform. In reviewing this integration and observing the momentum of the ecosystem we see another clear example of the advantage in being both first in a new platform – and going native into it. This seems especially true in the cloud as it is positioned for massive growth. Sponsor Cloud and the Environment Carbon is a building block of life. It is also being looked at seriously (especially in Europe) as a new currency that counts the cost of doing business. The effort to reduce the carbon emissions going into the atmosphere is becoming a critical discussion in terms of both the future – and the present quarter. As legislation and credits have been established, accounting for these transactions has become a natural extension to managing the business. Cloud Apps – Platform for Carbon The process of carbon management includes a process of measurement, planning, and executing change. Cloud Apps has delivered a carbon platform for activating a program, this technology lives on the Force.com platform. Counting and monitoring the use of physical assets touches concept we cover in the ReadWriteWeb called the Internet of Things. In this case, monitors of activity can push data of real world changes directly into a decision management solution to make decisions. In this context, it seems like SalesForce Chatter platform will be a important piece of this puzzle, as information an processes continue to merge, basic communications and escalations will be a key part of making real-time decisions. FinancialForce – Native Matters FinancialForce is the first native accounting package on Force.com platform. We spoke with CEO, Jeremy Roche, and found that he described FinancialForce as “speaking SalesForce natively”. The company shares product feature screenshots on how the product maps workflows and generates reports on the state of the business. Shown here is a view of cash flow for the organization. The natural expansion of the SalesForce platform shows us several things that seem key to a thriving business environment. In particular, this partnership shows off the case of specialization of services that are complementary and worthwhile to business leadership. Perhaps it is too soon, but here’s one vote for Marc Benioff getting a nudge for the Nobel Prize . It’s one thing to build a case in Powerpoint, entirely another to command a platform. Have you counted your carbon today? Photo credit: otodo Discuss

Click here to read more

Twitter just announced that it will soon update its Terms of Service for developers and prohibit third-party advertising networks and developers from inserting ads into a user’s stream. This could mean the end of a number of third-party advertising networks like Ad.ly and 140 Proof , both of which created their business around in-stream ads. According to Twitter’s COO Dick Costolo, the company decided to take this step in order to “preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created” and ensure the “long-term health and value of the platform.” Sponsor Twitter’s Reasoning Twitter argues that it wants to create “a platform of enduring value.” To do so, Costolo says, Twitter has to ensure that the platform remains valuable for its users. In-stream advertisers, however, are only interested in near-term revenue opportunities – which come at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform.Costolo also argues that these in-stream advertising networks are simply not innovative enough and “the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization.” The real reason for banning in-stream ads, however, becomes obvious after reading this paragraph: It is important to keep in mind that Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service. Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support emails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison. Twitter simply doesn’t want to bear the cost of supporting these advertising networks that don’t bring the company any direct value and revenue. Prohibiting in-stream ads isn’t so much about fostering innovation and preserving the integrity of the platform. Instead, it’s about ensuring that advertisers flock to Twitter’s own Promoted Tweets. Shutting Down the Most Natural Way to Monetize Twitter Clients It will be interesting to see how third-party developers will react to this. Just a few weeks ago, Twitter began launching its own official Twitter clients and now the company has prohibited the most obvious method of monetizing unofficial clients. Instead of being able to insert ads into their users stream – the most natural position for these ads – developers will now have to show ads outside of the stream. As Costolo puts it, “there will be all sorts of other third-party monetization engines that crop up in the vicinity of the timeline.” Starting today, however, the stream itself is off-limits for all advertisers besides Twitter itself. Discuss

Click here to read more