Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe (Part 2)

Christian Gheorghe: We’re seeing a transformation towards a much more volatile type of risk environment where there’s more global competition and where the user base is changing significantly to a prosumer market – where consumer experience is demanded at work. Furthermore, the mobile platform is starting to have a big impact on the enterprise space. With respect to these trends of user communities and cloud and mobile platforms, we need to answer how companies can manage their businesses in terms of performance, financial analysis, planning, and predictive analytics.

>>>

Building Fat Startups: Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were the mechanics of Abuzz? Was it a venture-funded company?

Andres Rodriguez: Yes, it was a classic Series A venture funded company. It was funded by SoftBank, Brad Feld, Solstice Capital, and Flatiron Ventures, which is no longer around. I was very lucky to have good guys. They were especially good with young entrepreneurs. They knew how to work with teams that did not have a lot of experience. They coached young entrepreneurs through the process of building companies very early on.

It was also a great time to build a company. I think we are in a very similar time today where young people’s ideas can get a lot of support and a lot of money behind them to make those ideas happen.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe (Part 1)

This discussion focuses on the evolution of analytics in the cloud era. Christian Gheorghe is a serial entrepreneur and a domain expert in the analytics field.

Sramana Mitra: Christian, introduce our audience to you as well as to Tidemark.

Christian Gheorghe: My name is Christian Gheorghe. I’m the founder and CEO of a company started four years ago that’s called Tidemark.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you located?

Christian Gheorghe: We are located in Redwood Shores in California.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you from? You have an accent, so I’m thinking you’re not from Redwood Shores.

>>>

Building Fat Startups: Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez (Part 1)

Andres Rodriguez is a rare Latin American entrepreneur in hard core tech. In this era of ‘lean startups’, Andres has built a couple of ‘fat ones’ and in this interview, we discuss what he has learnt, and what he advises other entrepreneurs wrestling with the need to raise money to fund ‘fat startup concepts’.

Sramana Mitra: Andres, where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What circumstances did you grow up in?

Andres Rodriguez: I was born in Venezuela, South America. I graduated from high school there and I came to the States to attend an engineering school.

>>>

The Future of Education: 10 Trends To Watch

It is that time of the year when we tend to pause and reflect. What have we achieved this year? What are the highlights of culture, business, technology, and trends that we have observed around us?

For me, the most exciting and positive movement at present is in the domain of technology impacting education. And it is an impact that is coming from many different directions.

Let’s explore them in further detail.

>>>

Innovation’s Next Decade

While the world economy continues to look shaky, the technology industry has never looked stronger.

Now is perhaps a good time to stop for a moment and reflect on what the next decade will be all about for the industry.

My vision of what the technology industry needs to focus on is best described by the title of Michael Dertouzos’s book The Unfinished Revolution (Dertouzos was the head of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science, where I was a graduate student). The revolution that Dertouzos talks about is in “human-centric” computing. Indeed, today’s open problems are not so much in the domain of chips and networking as they are in the more human-centric domains.

For example, the technology that makes it possible for a digital worker in rural Africa or small-town India to work on data processing projects already exists. What do not yet exist are systematic methods of locating such projects and connecting these remote digital workers to them.
>>>

What is the Future of Liberal Arts Education in America?

Ever since I read this recent WSJ article ‘At Harvard, Humanities Lose Status‘, I have been disturbed by this question. Actually, I have been thinking about the issue for longer, and wondering how the American Higher Education industry will evolve.

I am curious what your thoughts are on the subject. Here are some of mine:

>>>

Trend Spotting: Platform Eco-Systems

Have you noticed how platform eco-systems are cropping up everywhere these days? There was a  time when only large companies used to market platforms. These days, everyone and their mother launches software platforms.

Of course, there are some that are much bigger than the others. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android on the mobile side, Salesforce.com’s Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) Force.com on the cloud side are particularly successful ones. But there are also large platform eco-systems like Sencha from much smaller companies. [Read: Scaling a Platform for Device-Agnostic Web Interfaces]

>>>