Archive for April, 2009

At the 10th Nantucket Conference, Sim and Jana Eggers, CEO of Spreadshirt, will lead a conversation on new strategies for customer acquisition at the Entrepreneurs’ Lunch (Friday @ noon). There is limited space in the room so post a comment here, RSVP to the conference organizers or sign up on site when you arrive. If you haven’t signed up for the Nantucket Conference yet, we’re sorry but the event is sold out and running a good-sized waiting list.

I helped organize the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge’s cloud computing event. Beat the Tax Day blues and join us for a candid discussion about the promise vs. reality of cloud computing. The event promises to be great as we’ve assembled a stellar cast of speakers from both coasts.

Adam Selipsky, VP Product Management and Developer Relations at Amazon Web Services will start off with a short keynote followed by a fireside chat with me and audience Q&A. Amazon continues to lead in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) part of the cloud services spectrum but they are also pushing deeper into the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) space by improving SimpleDB and driving additional innovations such as the recently-launched beta of Elastic Map Reduce. Adam is a dynamic speaker who’s got his finger on the pulse of cloud computing.

The goal of the event is to showcase what’s possible today with cloud computing. This is where the demos come in.

My friend and former co-worker Spike Washburn, who recently founded Stax Networks, will show off his company’s PaaS offering targeting Java applications. While Engine Yard’s amazing management of Ruby apps is impressive and Google’s AppEngine shows how one can manage Python-based apps in the cloud, there are a lot more Java developers and many more Java applications out there. Stax Networks is going for the sweet spot of enterprise cloud hosting.

Following that, Fumi Matsumoto, founder/CTO of Allurent will tell the story of how Allurent migrated its e-commerce 2.0 platform from on-premise to on-demand delivery and changed its go-to-market approach in a matter of months by leveraging cloud computing. Fumi will also share some of the hard-to-come-by data about the real costs of running a product in the cloud.

Frank Gillett, Vice President & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research will close with a panel including Roman Stanek, founder/CEO of GoodData , Richard Reiner, CEO of Enomaly and Josh Fraser, VP of Business Development at RightScale. This will be a real treat.

Register for the event now and leave a comment if you’d like to join me at the VIP reception before the event (very few invitations are left).

After more than seven years at Polaris Venture Partners, it was time for me to move on. I had co-founded or helped start four companies Polaris invested in and the pull to become more entrepreneurial grew stronger over time. My relationship with the firm will continue as a technology advisor. FastIgnite came to life as a vehicle for my work with existing companies I’m involved with and my new projects. Subscribe to the FastIgnite RSS feed to stay in touch.