Child Entrepreneur Caleb Sima: Cofounder Of SPI Dynamics (Part 5)

SM: What was the genesis of creating that product? Was it your work on the pentest contracts?

CS: The head of Bell South told me that if I could automate my Web assessments techniques and provide a product that he could run in-house, he would purchase it from me. >>>

Roundtable Recap: August 26 – 85%-90% Of Search Traffic Comes From Organic Search

This week’s roundtable, co-hosted with Volusion, was focused on e-commerce entrepreneurs, and needless to say, one of the key topics of discussion was customer acquisition via search engine marketing.

First up was Andy Humphrey for EcoMowers.com, an e-commerce company that is already at $500k annual revenue selling eco-friendly push lawn mowers. Andy believes that the market for push mowers is about 350k-400k units a year, growing at 20% CAGR. EcoMowers has only 5% of this market, and primarily generates traffic through PPC and SEO channels. In fact he gets 50% SEO traffic through organic search, and 50% through paid search. Now, given that the web’s traffic is 85-90% organic search, it is clear to me that Andy has not yet leveraged SEO to its fullest potential, and doing so would give him the biggest bang for the buck at this point. To get from 5% market share to 20% market share in his market, Andy clearly has some low-hanging fruit in front of him.
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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Mark White, CTO Of Deloitte (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Saurabh Mallik

This interview is part of our series on Thought leaders in Cloud Computing. I am talking to Mark White of Deloitte. Mark is the chief technology officer of Deloitte Consulting LLP’s technology practice and the lead IT principal on the Department of Homeland Security account. In his six years at Deloitte, Mark has served clients in the federal government, financial services, real estate, high tech, energy, transportation, and other industries. Guest author Narayanan Raman interviewed him last year as part of the CIO Priorities series.

SM: As a thought leader for your company, where is your sense of cloud computing adoption today?

MW: It actually has progressed well. We spoke nine months ago; part of the discussion was about what we see CIOs doing based on the economic downturn and the potential back up. I think at that time one of the topics we discussed was how the economic downturn accelerated the evolution of cloud by at least two or three years, because in many cases it forced experimentation and adoption earlier than we would have otherwise seen. >>>

August 26 E-Commerce Roundtable Recording

In case you missed it, here is the recording:

Roundtable Starting In 30 Minutes

Today’s roundtable is starting in 30 minutes, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/8:30 p.m. IST. Click here to join.

Child Entrepreneur Caleb Sima: Cofounder Of SPI Dynamics (Part 4)

SM: Your first real job, as a teenager, involved securing online banking products?

CS: That was when I got involved with real security work. I started going through security techniques and examining exploits. At the time, there was a very small company called ISS that was also based out of Atlanta. They found me and pitched me a product called RealSecure. I found so many ways to bypass their product that it was not even funny. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Ric Telford, Vice President Of Cloud Services, IBM (Part 8)

By Sramana Mitra, Pablo Chacin and Saurabh Mallik

SM: And it’s pay-as-you-go utilization.

RT: Right, they pay for what they use. One of the first questions I would ask is, Can cloud computing help me in some of these assumptions of ramping my cost more in line with the scale of my revenues? Does it allow me to avoid having to capitalize a lot of the cost upfront before I have any revenue and therefore have to get into debt before my business gets off the ground? I think that’s a fundamental change that’s come about because of the cloud, because it allows you to pay for what you use rather than incur a lot of startup costs. >>>

Child Entrepreneur Caleb Sima: Cofounder Of SPI Dynamics (Part 3)

SM: By 1994 the Internet was getting started.

CS: Yes, folks like AOL were big at that time. I was still reading on DBS, and I was hooking up with local groups. CompuServe opened up a whole new world by allowing us to publish text files and learned knowledge by posting into newsgroups that were security oriented. >>>