As I am in the process of funding a new venture I thought I would add my thoughts and observations of some of the things I have discovered. I shall not be adding any detail about my venture or that being worked on by others. Yet the funding situation is interesting.

In investigating possible sources of funding I have spoken with three CEO’s of venture capital (VC) funded solution providers that each have unique propositions in the marketplace and I remain grateful for their assistance. They know who they are, yet I have agreed not to identify them. The unified response was that about 11 months ago venture capitalists were meeting with software companies loaded with bagloads of money for those having a good idea, even if a poor business plan was presented. This is simply no longer the case as venture capital companies have become extremely cautious.

So now many great ideas are going unfunded? Sadly true.

In researching my own funding requirements I have also had a briefing from a VC ‘friend’ of a ‘friend’. He stated that getting funding is 2 or 3 times as difficult as it was 12 months ago. Now this may come as bad news for software startups, but it has allowed me to go in with my eyes open to any future funding discussion.

In preparing for this article I have also done the normal amount of web research and find many statement similar to the following: “Aprilis invests in seed- and early-stage technology companies and finances its own idea development”. Yet right now the advice I would give to any proposed start up is to identify a way to get your idea into reality. Look to move it through to beta stage, prove it, have a working model, and even better have some customers before approaching  your funder.

Please note that I simply picked Aprilis at random on the basis of a Google search and I am not making any statement good or bad about them. However I appreciate their view that “there is no bear market for good ideas” and with the state of capital markets at the moment that thought is appreciated in this thick skull.

There way still be venture capitalists and angel funding companies that are prepared to work with an idea or simple concept. However the more advanced the concept the more likely the ability to fund future development will be. The demonstrable model does not need to include all of the functionality ultimately intended, but it does need to provide key concepts. In addition having a roadmap of future development is a key part of the presentation.

Funding does exist you simply need to be more focused in getting it.

For me the saving grace is that I am able to combine Outlook with Plaxo which will ensure that my connections are updated regularly.

After the name field there is a catalogue of problems.

The ‘Company’ field, needs to be more intelligent that it currently is. Firstly if I use the name of a company that is already in my database then it should be able to provide options for other fields on the form e.g. address and phone number so that I do not have to re-type these. Maybe an option to ‘copy from another contacts record’ could be implemented. Secondly I know several people that work with multiple organisations and have separate details for each organisation.

I would like to see a series of tabs for each organisation this would allow me to collect information about one person all in a single location. The tabs would probably be something like:

This would then open up room for further information about the contact to be stored. Doing this I can then record several web sites for a single contact for example. The key is that people now have a multitude of contact points they may wish to use at various times or locations, each needs to be stored.

There are also a number of new ways that people can be reached. For example Skype ID’s are starting to be commonly used and can double as either a phone number replacement or an Instant Messenger (IM) connection. Most of my connections who use Skype simply find a place to kludge the ID into outlook somewhere. There should be a field for ID’s that link onto various IM systems and of course to Social Media sites. Microsoft must accept the fact that they are not the only game in town and provide a mechanism to add other services.

I think it is important for a contact to have several IM addresses recorded against them, some can be work related, some personal – there needs to be space for each.

Going next to phone numbers I have always like the fact that you can change the description of the phone number, but there are not enough business ones I would add “Free Phone” 1 and 2 into the list at a minimum or have an option at the bottom of the list that allows me to add more. If my tabs idea is added then phone numbers are added to the relevant tab. In addition that details page can be put in the appropriate location and become more visible.

There is no place currently to record a person’s Social Media site memberships. I think this should be added to the personal tab. I then know what a person’s Facebook page is and can link to it from my Outlook record for example. Of course when it comes to Social Media we are joining a multitude of them so we should be able to leverage our own personal Outlook record to record this information.

On the notes field I often add details about our meeting, but I often forget to date it – it would be good if Outlook could add date details to each change I make.

When I export a person’s details (e.g. drop their .vcf  into an email) I should be able to control what information is sent. e.g. it may be inappropriate to send details of a persons alternative role in that virtual card and certainly no personal note data should ever be sent.

There are other problems associated with Outlook Contacts, but if Microsoft were to take a look at the existing applications then this would be a good starting point.

This is a complex issue. The part that no-one wants to hear when a person complains about application performance is the comparison between what they have now and how it used to be before computerisation. During the course of many BI projects I have moved departments from 95% gathering or organising data to 95% analytical or leveraging data, with the computer doing all the grunt work while the staff are warmly tucked up in their beds.

However we do have to understand the background to every complaint about application performance. Typically whenever we look at a complaint about performance we seek to monitor and improve performance in the areas of:

◊ Load Balancing

◊ Prioritization

◊ Network Optimization

◊ Database Tuning

◊ Compression

Planning Services and Growth

In terms of planning our application, database, hardware, and network architecture we do need to reconsider the requirements for each system as time moves on. When we implement a new system we do look at growth requirements in la large amount of detail, but we rarely track how usage proceeds against the original plan. This is probably the origins of virtualization as someone looked at the number of oversized servers and sought to use the resources better.

Today we are virtualizing in order to make better use of resources, but in the future we will need to check whether we have the right strategy in-place. Software as a Service (SaaS) also offers up its challenges in relation to speed, especially given that services are remotely managed and are no longer maintained my the corporation.

According to Paul Mah “Application performance [is] set to be next virtualization headache” we may have reduced excess capacity in a pure physical environment the factors were easier to measure. Managing the virtual environment is generally more complex than its pure physical counterpart, this is also true when it comes to managing performance.

Understanding the Business Community

The workplace is changing with an increased need to provide services outside the walls of the office complex. We have been imaginative with corporate applications being used in even the remotest parts of the globe. In the current economic climate we know that more of the business community is changing its work patterns. Can we predict every scenario? Unlikely, and at some time we will receive data from a trucker driving across an ice-road in the deepest Alaskan winter.

When users are connecting to a corporate system whether by a VPN or other remote protocols then security becomes another performance impact.

Can we move the applications closer to the user? Certainly mobile applications are better able to work on Blackberrys or iPhones, but they do still have to communicate with corporate servers. For a sales person dependent on data about stock availability and delivery dates performance is critical before he can take a product order from a customer.

Performance Goals and Measurement

In making any commitment for improvement it is important to be able to measure where we are right now, the baseline. We have to set realistic goals for improvement based on the corporate infrastructure, budget, and other factors. Measuring the environment is important, and so is retaining a history.

One of the issues of performance is of-course human perception. We can be perceived as spending money for zero improvement, therefore we have to prove the improvements over time, and always be able to identify changes to the environment over time. Yes we do have to be speed cops.

Improvement goals need to be measurable and attainable. Part of the problem here is that performance requirements are rarely documented well when defining systems. Poor performance can often be perception, but I always think that when there is a perceived problem then we must understand and resolve it.

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Related articles:

Application performance set to be next virtualization headache

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