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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin (Part 8)
SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now? KR: Finding the right executive team members can be a nerve-wracking experience. You are essentially giving a huge amount of responsibility to a person who in many cases you’ve only known for a few weeks during the interview process. A key
Jim Satloff & Neal Goldman’s AI Engine, Inform (Part 1)
It turns out that both Jim Satloff and I happen to be Artificial Intelligence aficionados. What you read here is a discussion on Inform’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) based technology that attempts to create an interesting value proposition for publishers on the web. AI has been a notoriously difficult technology genre with big promises and
Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin (Part 7)
SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Any other metrics you track? KR: We launched our service in Q2 of this year, and the response has been fantastic. We’ve already signed up our first set of paying customers, which is a great milestone for us. Initially, our primary goals are
Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins (Part 6)
SM: If I were to publish books through Blurb based on my blog writings, I would need to be able to have a paperback that sells for $5-6. I would also need to have a customized storefront on my site that seamlessly ties into yours, so that you can fulfill the order. Can I do
Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin (Part 6)
SM: What are your top target segments? KR: We are finding a lot of success with Sales Operations managers, VP of Sales and also the CFO or Director of Finance at small and medium size companies. Those with a slightly distributed workforce and who don’t want the hassle of managing the cost associated with traditional
Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin (Part 5)
SM: Describe the value proposition of LucidEra, including differentiation versus the rest of the market. KR: LucidEra combines sales and financial data to give users at small-to-mid sized businesses powerful insight into the effectiveness of their entire sales operations process (including quotas, pipeline, revenues, and expenses). We firmly believe that just like the everyday consumer
Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins (Part 5)
SM: How did you penetrate the market and get early traction? EG: Word of mouth driven by a great and viral product and turbo charged with amazing PR. SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Titles? Any other metrics you track? EG: Blurb expects turnover between $5-10MM in 2007, its first full
Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin (Part 4)
SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? KR: When we founded the company in 2005, the BI market was pretty stagnant. Not much innovation had happened in that market in the prior 10 years. It was basically a lot of vendors selling expensive solutions that were difficult and time consuming