Welcome to my ATTHell.com
this is my first video blog about my hell experience with ATT for the past month or so when they turned off a cell tower by my house. You can find out more about this at http://atthell.com/
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
A Brand New Day for the New Blogtronix Enterprise Social Platform
Hello Summer and the new Blogtronix Platform! But hold on a second, do you remember winter? In February 2008 we made the painful decision to sever our relationship with our previous development partners. We had outgrown them. We gave them a limited license so they could sell our basic yet robust Blogtronix platform to small businesses, those with less than 500 employees. We're after bigger fish, and so we separated. We wish them the best of luck. But that was then and now that summer is here there is much good news to share. Since last year, after asking our customers what they wanted, we worked closely with them to fully redesign the Blogtronix architecture and platform. The new Blogtronix architecture is geared to socializing the Enterprise. Social Networking is now all grown up and ready for business. We're targeting large global enterprises, particularly Financial Services, Media Corporations, Publishing, and more. Later this week we will have a major new update on the existing platform out and our current customers will be upgraded to version 2.1. Some of our bigger clients have been beta testing our new release and the feedback is extremely positive. This new updated 2.1 version is based on what our large Financial and Media clients are using today for their external and internal collaborations with thousands of clients, partners, and employees. We fixed the many bugs left from our previous dev partner with the help of our CTO Nick Dimitrov. Nick has always been the software architect of the Blogtronix platform and his skills from the start made it the award-winning solution it is today. Nick hails from the enterprise side with years of executive technology and managerial experience from working with leading global organizations. With his leadership, we were able to make the new platform more stable, secure, scalable, and easy to integrate seamlessly with other internal and external systems and applications. Working closely with out customers and partners, Nick made sure the Blogtronix platform is easier to use by both end-users and their IT people. The Best News: We were able to do this with our new dev team in less than 4 months. In this latest version, we are finally opening our API's. In fact, a major project that we are finishing now with a top Fortune 100 company is interfacing only via our API's. On top of our new API's you will see content compliance workflows, corporate compliance exports, live video blogging, a brand new Wiki rivaling the best of the wikis on the web today, new admin interface, and a robust dynamic LDAP integration tool, (to name just a few of the new things.) What are we doing in our next version? Stay posted! More to come before the summer's end. All I can say is that many Enterprise 2.0 wannabe's out there will have a tough time trying to compare themselves with Blogtronix .Yes, I am talking about IBM Lotus Connections, MSFT, Oracle / BEA and other big companies with large R&D organizations and development teams in Asia that just don't get it. They can try and copy us. Don't be fooled. We are the real deal. If you want to test drive Blogtronix, please contact us and see for yourself who can improve your global collaboration and communication, make you different, help you meet and exceed your business objectives. SPECIAL NOTE to Resellers and Channel Partners: We are rapidly adding new partners across the US and Europe and are seeking quality people to join us in our mission to socialize the enterprise. Europe is taking the lead in adopting the new Web 2.0 technology tools to enhance global collaboration and communication. Join us and you will be rewarded in more ways than one. Please contact us at: Head Office email: partners@blogtronix.comBlogtronix, LLC
California HQ
2332 4th St. Suite C
Berkeley, California 94710
Phone: 1.510.665.8012 or 1.877.blogtronix
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Monday, May 07, 2007
SuiteTwo vs. Blogtronix Smackdown Part II
Few months ago, when Intel announced the SuiteTwo, the media went wild, the bloggers blogged, and I could not understand what was the big deal. Jerry Bowles than noted my comments and posted his posts about our Smackdown with SuiteTwo and Intel.
Two weeks ago during the Web 2.0 Expo I finally was able to check the SuiteTwo offering in person and also I was able to talk to the sales people from Intel (or Spike) I am not sure.
So, I am not going to bore you again that Blogtronix was the original company to combine blogs with wikis, RSS, and Social Networking with enterprise focus on the market early 2005. This was almost two years before Intel Capital borrowed our original idea from a VC meeting I had with them in the Fall of 2005. Back than Intel dismissed us and did not believe that people will pay for this. Or at least this is what they told me.
During the demo I got at the web 2.0 Expo ( I wore my Vassil Mladjov, Blogtronix badge) all my big prediction about technological problems SuiteTwo will have, were confirmed!
1. SuiteTwo is one big MishMash. Not a Mashup. (In Bulgarian, MishMash means an omelet.) The integration that Spike Source did is not a very good one. Maybe they did as much as they could, given what the products can do. I am not sure. All products have kept their original look and feel and there are several UI’s for the different products that users will need to deal with.
2. SuiteTwo is not scalable! At least not compared to Blogtronix or any other major social media platform I know. It appears that on a single Intel server box SuiteTwo can support no more that 1,000 users. On the same configuration, even today Blogtronix can support hundreds of thousand of blogs, wikis, RSS, documents, and Social networking users. I think that in Bulgaria we are running some 70,000 users social networking site on an AMD chip with 2Gigs of Ram that is more than two years old server box. I guest Intel wants to sell you lots of Intel boxes here. In our US data centers our Dell 2950’s with dual core Intel run hundreds or groups with thousands or users. The problem for SuiteTwo is that they need to run a lot more software on the same box. They have MS Windows, MS SQL, VMWare and all 5 (five) software apps on top of this. Each software is written in different language; .NET, Pirl, PHP, Java…..I not sure about it all.
3. SuiteTwo is very, very Expensive! The starter kit, which includes the above-mentioned appliance costs $9,999 USD for 10 (TEN), YES, TEN (as 10, X, Deset, Dix, Tien, Dieci, Diez…) users. And what do you think a license for 500 users would cost you? How about $81,295.99. This is not in Canadian dollars! This is a license only price for SuiteTwo from the web (INTEL SUITETWO BLOG RSS WIKI-500U BL, MFG#: SUT010MSGE0500) I am mot sure, but I don’t think this includes the hardware applaince, installations, customization, upgrades, and support. I may be wrong. If you want Social Networking, you need to pay more. I am not sure how much, but you can do the math.
4. SuiteTwo is not very useful. One thing that I noticed during my demo is that content and tools were still working in silos and were not very well connected. What do I mean by that? There were groups in the SocialText wiki, (the wiki SuiteTwo uses) but these groups had nothing to do with the groups (if they were groups ) in the Blog section. The tools were not integrated very well. The only thing that was cool were the tag cloud, which again w/o the integrated groups is not very productive.
5. IT Department will hate to deal with SuiteTwo software! At least I will hate to be the IT person in charge of updating this appliance or software, doing regular maintenance, and backups. After spending more than a decade from a network admin on the Stock Exchange, a CIO for a media company, or a VP of Technology at ABN AMRO Bank, I know a bit about enterprise IT. I am not sure how many of my IT peers will agree with me, but I would hate to buy an appliance that is made of too many parts and run my day-to-day operations on it. SuiteTwo has five or six (if you count the social networking) applications by itself that are running there. These 5-6 apps are also from different companies that may or may not survive over the next year. They are a single feature companies waiting to be bought or die. What assurance do you get that someone will be here to support you? I know you may ask yourself the same thing about Blogtronix, good. Blogtronix is now more than two years old, but we are a spin off from a larger, TEN-year old company with thousands of clients all around the WORLD today.
6. Well, I want to stop here. There is so much more that is not working for the Intel SuiteTwo, but I don’t have the time to write about all of this like the lack of secure RSS, secure groups, statistics, customizations, document management, video blogging and podcasting, user administration and so on.
You need to make up your own mind about what you need and what you want to buy, use and support for your organization. We are here to show you why Blogtronix is not only superior to SuiteTwo, but also more useful and a better product all together. I know, Intel is behind them with big marketing cash and they have a bigger booth at the shows, but that does not mean that their technology is better. I remember the time when Google had a small booth in the back at Comdex and no one was stopping at their booth, well, not any more ;)
If you have any question on how Blogtronix works and how we are better, just call or email us. We are here for you. And you will not get “Intel” sales people with Spike emails to contact you.
Best,
Vassil Mladjov
Technorati tags: blogtronix , suitetwo , intel , socialtext , spike
KPCB's Ray Lane and Blogtronix
So, I approached Ray, since Brook Byers told that I needed to talk to Ray about Blogtronix. It turns out that KP invested in Spike Source, which I totally missed somehow and that they could not work with us at this point. It was interesting however that Ray knew that there is a conflict of interest just by reading my biz card.
During the keynote Ray gave, (which was excellent) Alex Vieux (Red Herring’s publisher) asked Ray about the affect of KP’s investments on other companies in the same space and why they keep things under the radar about their investments.
Ray told us that KPCB invests only in companies that can change the world in a big way and after they invest in a specific sector, many new companies follow their funded startups and try to copycat them.
How ironic is this when Spike Source is now trying to copy what Blogtronix has been doing for years and they are doing it so poorly. How ironic is that Blogtronix needs to compete with several large companies like IBM, Intel and MSFT with billions of cash reserves and still have a superior product on the market. We also need to keep writing these blogs and tell you about it.
Well, the wind is changing and finally the market is taking notice in Blogtronix. Just last week, if you have missed my posts, we won Red Herring’s 100 award for North America in 2007. We also won the Under the Radar award and we just got nominated by AlwaysOn as well. There are some other very big announcements coming later this month and in June, for which, you need to stay put.
Best,
Vassil
IBM Lotus Connections is a joke. Needs lots of work still.
I was expecting to see a true competitor last week, when I had a chance to check out the new IBM Lotus Connection, I was very disappointed. I think you will be too.
Last week during the Web 2.0 Expo and this week at the Gartner ITExpo I had the “pleasure” of checking out the latest “Innovation” from IBM Lotus Connections.
What can I say?!
IBM has a lot of work to do before they should ship this Innovative product to their customers. I also think that many of their customers must not understand what is going on and IBM knows it.
In general the product looks good on the outside. The problem is its architecture and the lack of understanding by IBM of the Social Media application on the web.
The system still works in silos and in order to try to use it right you need to buy several products and integrate them together.
Tags work only in the user profile, but they don’t come from your blog posts. There are tags for each group, but again they are not associated with posts, wikis or anything else.
User profiles are searchable, but you can’t filter them down. When I asked about the user profiles and the tags, on of the IBM experts looked and me and asked me why should they do it that way. This means that IBM had not looked at any social networks on the web before they started their Innovative Lotus product design. Tags should be “federated’ in future versions.
Now about the Blog software; Lotus’ blogging engine is based on the Roller (from SUN). You may want to go and get it for FREE and download it since it’s the same. I am not sure why would someone want to pay for roller anyway. All you can do is plain text blog posts and pictures. There is no support for any multimedia like podcasting, video, flash, etc.
The biggest problem with Lotus Connections is the architecture of the product. In companies, there should be open and closed communities, different user level rights. You can’t just blog about everything to everyone. They don’t have it. They may have another product for that, but why is it not here, I am not sure.
One other major problem with IBM Lotus Connections is the lack of analytics. This is a wide spread problem for many social media tools and I think we are trying to address it and have good stats ever right now. When I asked about stats (I heard others ask as well), IBMers were looking around for help. They said that this was coming soon, and the reason they don’t have it is because they “don’t know what statistics should be useful”. Come on, IBM does not know what stats are useful, WOW.
So, in overview, if you are on the market for an Enterprise 2.0 Blogging, Wiki, RSS, and Social Networking platform, you need to compare Blogtronix Enterprise with IBM Lotus Connections, SuiteTwo (for which I will post a blog as well) and MSFT Share Point for sure.
If you don’t compare our award winning platform (RedHerring 100 finalist for North America in 2007) with the new comers (IBM, MSFT, Intel) you will loose. On top of providing an unified suite of Web 2.0 applications for the enterprise. Blogtronix provides security and scalability like no other on the market today. We have the only true web 2.0 platform that combines all essential tools like communities, blogs, wikis, RSS (secure RSS), document management, corporate social networking, analytics and corporate compliance on the market today.
Come and test it out, call us for a demo today.
Vassil Mladjov
415.420.2883
Last week during the Web 2.0 Expo and this week at the Gartner ITExpo I had the “pleasure” of checking out the latest “Innovation” from IBM Lotus Connections.
What can I say?!
IBM has a lot of work to do before they should ship this Innovative product to their customers. I also think that many of their customers must not understand what is going on and IBM knows it.
In general the product looks good on the outside. The problem is its architecture and the lack of understanding by IBM of the Social Media application on the web.
The system still works in silos and in order to try to use it right you need to buy several products and integrate them together.
Tags work only in the user profile, but they don’t come from your blog posts. There are tags for each group, but again they are not associated with posts, wikis or anything else.
User profiles are searchable, but you can’t filter them down. When I asked about the user profiles and the tags, on of the IBM experts looked and me and asked me why should they do it that way. This means that IBM had not looked at any social networks on the web before they started their Innovative Lotus product design. Tags should be “federated’ in future versions.
Now about the Blog software; Lotus’ blogging engine is based on the Roller (from SUN). You may want to go and get it for FREE and download it since it’s the same. I am not sure why would someone want to pay for roller anyway. All you can do is plain text blog posts and pictures. There is no support for any multimedia like podcasting, video, flash, etc.
The biggest problem with Lotus Connections is the architecture of the product. In companies, there should be open and closed communities, different user level rights. You can’t just blog about everything to everyone. They don’t have it. They may have another product for that, but why is it not here, I am not sure.
One other major problem with IBM Lotus Connections is the lack of analytics. This is a wide spread problem for many social media tools and I think we are trying to address it and have good stats ever right now. When I asked about stats (I heard others ask as well), IBMers were looking around for help. They said that this was coming soon, and the reason they don’t have it is because they “don’t know what statistics should be useful”. Come on, IBM does not know what stats are useful, WOW.
So, in overview, if you are on the market for an Enterprise 2.0 Blogging, Wiki, RSS, and Social Networking platform, you need to compare Blogtronix Enterprise with IBM Lotus Connections, SuiteTwo (for which I will post a blog as well) and MSFT Share Point for sure.
If you don’t compare our award winning platform (RedHerring 100 finalist for North America in 2007) with the new comers (IBM, MSFT, Intel) you will loose. On top of providing an unified suite of Web 2.0 applications for the enterprise. Blogtronix provides security and scalability like no other on the market today. We have the only true web 2.0 platform that combines all essential tools like communities, blogs, wikis, RSS (secure RSS), document management, corporate social networking, analytics and corporate compliance on the market today.
Come and test it out, call us for a demo today.
Vassil Mladjov
415.420.2883
Blogtronix Red Herring 100 award pictures from tonight
Here are some pictures from tonight at the Red Herring 100 award ceremony.
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