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Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin (Part 2)

Posted on Wednesday, Jul 18th

SM: So your professional career began at Oracle. KR: Yes. I left Oracle to get a business degree at Stanford University. When I graduated in 1994, I started a consulting company called Emergent that focused on designing and building Business Intelligence solutions for large companies. We were acquired by Keane (a public systems integration company)

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Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 17th

SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? EG: Well for one thing, Blurb was a very contrarian play at the time. VCs were funding blogging platforms and social networks and online plays – and here we were taking bits back into atoms. But fortunately I had good relationships in the

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Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin (Part 1)

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 17th

We have had lots of discussions about Enterprise 3.0. In this interview, I will be speaking with Ken Rudin, CEO of Lucidera, a young company attempting to become a leader in the massive Business Intelligence market by applying Enterprise 3.0 principles. Readers, note that Ken is an experienced serial entrepreneur, and you will learn much

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Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 7)

Posted on Monday, Jul 16th

Sridhar’s thesis around Zoho is to ride on top of the market awareness already created by Salesforce.com, Webex and others around On-Demand / SaaS delivery models for business applications like the Office Suite, CRM, Web Conferencing, Project Management, etc. and simply do a dramatic undercutting based on price. He insists that the amount of Sales

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Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins (Part 1)

Posted on Monday, Jul 16th

I have written a few pieces on how the book publishing business needs to / is going to change because of the web. [Book Publishing Moves West? . Will the Digital Era Change Writing? . eBooks Future]. In this interview, I speak with Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb, who is attempting to democratize self-publishing by

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Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 6)

Posted on Sunday, Jul 15th

Here we begin to explore the current status of Zoho a bit further. Impressive numbers considering there has been no advertising campaigns conducted. The business model is simple – let users try the service for free, when they are comfortable they will migrate over. Afterwards, they compete based on pricing (less than 20% of the

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Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 5)

Posted on Saturday, Jul 14th

Interesting comparisons here by Sridhar between the Zoho CRM and the SalesForce CRM products; while SalesForce has a high focus on sales teams (and one of the best telesales teams anywhere in the world), Zoho is simply looking to take a competitive advantage in terms of pricing. According to Sridhar this shows in the construct

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Entrepreneurship Case Studies

Posted on Saturday, Jul 14th

You have read many of my interviews on this blog. Here’s a synthesis of some of the case studies I have done, in an interview format. These differ slightly from the series that I have titled Role Model Interviews, since in this series, I go into the company and its strategy, market, financing, etc. in

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