CubeSocial Selected for Seedcamp London

August 4, 2011 Leave a Comment

Seedcamp logo

We’ve just heard… CubeSocial is one of 20 tech start-ups selected for Seedcamp London! Smile The event takes place next Thursday 11 August.

During the event, we get five minutes to showcase our business to a range of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, lawyers, accountants and other experts, followed by an afternoon of expert mentoring and coaching.

Becoming a Seedcamp London finalist is great recognition for everyone involved here at CubeSocial and follows on from last month’s listing as a Company to Watch in the Thames Valley 250. We hope the day itself brings us more good news.

Wish us luck!

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Building for the Valley – Bootstrapping tips from Tweetmeme

March 3, 2011 Leave a Comment

I posted this up on the CubeSocial blog yesterday, but thought readers here might be interested too…

Nick HalsteadYesterday Linda and I were guests at an excellent Thames Valley Innovation and Growth (TVIG) event “Building for the Valley”.

The session was delivered by Nick Halstead, CEO and founder of TweetMeme.

As a TVIG-sponsored start-up ourselves, we were fascinated to hear the story of Tweetmeme’s growth from being one of the first TVIG start-ups “when it was just Nick and his heavily pregnant wife in a cupboard” (!!) to a globally known brand, with 15 staff, handling more web hits than the BBC.

It was a story of rapid growth on a bootstrapping budget, and an inspiration for all budding entrepreneurs. Here are some of the takeaways:

On Networking

Don’t go to a networking event unless you can get a list of attendees beforehand. When you get the list, run it through LinkedIn and choose your ‘targets’ deliberately. Time is too valuable. Don’t leave networking to chance meetings. Have a maximum of one beer all evening: this is about business not partying.

On Marketing and PR

Become a reference point for your industry. Bootstrap your PR.

When Nick started Tweetmeme he blogged every night, then nagged friends and other bloggers to read his posts: “we have never paid a PR agency”. Nick explained that it helps to have a consumer focussed element to your portfolio because these tend to get more press.

Blogging means that you get to lead the conversation; the traffic you get translates into customers; you become a reference for news stories; and you get asked to speak at events.

On Public Speaking

Public speaking = free PR, but don’t be tempted you use it to advertise your product. Instead give useful information. (Don’t sell, educate). Build your reputation and integrity, and the (interested) attendees will become customers over time. A side benefit of public speaking is that you are more prepared and confident when you have to pitch to investors.

On Recruitment

Avoid recruitment agencies. Hire straight from university; only “bedroom coders”; pay them in options – “they must believe in the dream”.

On Investment

Getting investment has the biggest learning curve. It takes up 90% of your time. Keep the deal simple – complex terms tend to drive the wrong behaviours in leadership team: “with hindsight we would have given more away for simpler terms”.

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Choosing between SQL Azure and Windows Azure Storage

February 16, 2011 Leave a Comment

I was having a chat with an Azure architect at Microsoft last week, and he pointed out that SQL Azure storage costs 66x (yes, sixty-six times) Table Storage.

Not quite believing I went back to check pricing. And sure enough it’s true. In fact it is probably an even higher ratio as you have to buy SQL Azure in chunks of 1,5,10,20 GB etc.

If you have 15Gb of data in SQL Azure you need a 20Gb database @ ~$200/month.

15 Gb of data in Table Storage = 15 * $0.15 = $2.25 / month.

That would make SQL Azure around 89x as expensive as Table Storage.

Wow.

That’s not quite the full story though. In Table Storage the idea is that you would often not normalise your data. Data is likely to be stored multiple times in the store. And additionally there are transactional costs associated with Table Storage ($0.01 per 10,000) transactions.  These both make estimating cost more tricky.

As a guestimate starting point, let’s say I need to store each data item 3 times in Table Storage, meaning that 15Gb of normalised data gives me a requirement of 45Gb Table Storage. If my system has 1000 users each performing 10,000 transactions / month, then my total Table Storage costs would be:

(45 * $0.15) + (1000 * $0.01) = $16.75 / month

That’s about a 12x ratio (and is based on a lot of assumption too).

There’s probably a need for a simple spreadsheet to help look at the trade-offs here, but as a rule of thumb the pricing model from Microsoft is giving us some strong guidance: Windows Azure architects should look to put data in Windows Azure Storage first and SQL Azure conservatively.

The two scenarios I see when I would prefer SQL Azure over Table Storage are:

  • When I need SQL Transactions – ie. the ability to group together a bunch of database actions and commit them as a single atomic unit. There’s no concept of this type of transaction in Table Storage.
  • When I need reporting – especially enabling end-users to design their own queries and reports. In this case I don’t know how the user will want to query the data at design time and will need to rely on SQL Servers ability to query across tables to enable this.

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How Cloud Computing Changes the Economics of Software Architecture

January 13, 2011 5 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about architecting software applications for the cloud lately – particularly for Windows Azure, as that’s the platform we have chosen to build CubeSocial’s SaaS solution on.

Lots has been written about the impact of PaaS and IaaS services like Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure on software architecture.  I’ve seen plenty of commentary arguing that architects need to change the way they design systems to consider the platform billing model and on-going costs.

But is that really a change? In my opinion, it’s no different to what we architects have always done – only in the past the cost considerations were different. It was about numbers of servers, software licences, software versions etc.

I believe the cloud computing model changes our approach in a much more fundamental way.

I see the shift that is happening right now as the modern equivalent of what happened when Windows went from 16-bit to 32-bit.

Freed from the memory limitations of 16-bit computing we all stopped optimizing our Windows code, as there were simply so many system resources available to play with… it was effectively limitless.

Cloud computing platforms bring the same philosophical shift to web applications.

Yes, I could spend time architecting for the billing model. I could spend money getting programmers to performance tune their code to reduce billing charges. But that doesn’t mean I should.

Let me ask you this: Why spend 50$ an hour on getting a programmer to tune their code, when instead I can pay Microsoft or Amazon another $50 a month and throw another web front end at the problem. Then, instead I can have my developers doing something much more useful to the business: adding new product features more quickly than the competition so that I can sell more and make more revenue.

And that is the true economics of cloud computing.

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Installing SharePoint 2010 using Windows 7 Boot from VHD

May 5, 2010 Leave a Comment

If you plan to install SharePoint in a VHD using the Windows 7 Boot from VHD capability, there a few gaps in the story that are worth sharing…

First off, I wanted to make my life as simple as possible and start with a base Windows 2008 build, rather than create my own from scratch.  Here’s how to speed along that process.

First, download the Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Trial VHD from the Microsoft Download site

Expand the downloaded files, then open the Command Prompt. Be sure to Run as Administrator though!

Now execute these commands:

bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Boot_From_VHD”

Copy the CSLID that is displayed, and then use that CLSID as you run each of the following commands:

bcdedit /set {CLSID} device vhd=[C:]\vhdname.vhd

bcdedit /set {CLSID} osdevice vhd=[C:]\vhdname.vhd

bcdedit /set {CLSID} detecthal on

You should replace [C:]\vhdname.vhd with the path and name of your extracted VHD.

Once that is complete reboot and you will have the option to “Boot_From_VHD”!  You can verify the bootloader is configured correctly with the bcdedit command which will list all the boot options.  If you want to delete the entry make note of the GUID listed in bcdedit and use the following command…

bcdedit /delete {GUID} /cleanup

At this point you may find (as I did) that when you boot your VHD it bluescreens. This can often be because the maximum size of the VHD was configured to be larger than the free space available on the physical hard drive.

In Windows 7 you can mount the VHD as a volume in Computer Management, and shrink the volume (thanks http://radicaldevelopment.net/index.php/2009/11/20/create-virtual-hard-disk-vhd-windows-7/)

To do this, open Computer Management from Administrative Tools. Click Disk Management in the nav pane. Then, on the Action menu click Attach VHD. Right-click the volume you want to shrink and click Shrink Volume.

But that just decreases the size of the volume as seen by the guest OS. It doesn’t decrease the amount of physical disk space the VHD attempts to reserve when you boot it.  That’s the next step…

Download and install VHD Resizer from vmtoolkit.com and shrink the VHD to a suitable maximum size for your physical disk. I chose 25Gb.

Now reboot your PC into your Windows 2008 virtual machine and simply install SharePoint 2010.  I recommend using Joe Li’s SharePoint 2010 installation FAQ as a guide.

Happy SharePointing!

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Office 2010 – 32-bit or 64-bit?

April 26, 2010 Leave a Comment

Office 2010 is the first version of Microsoft Office to be available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

If you are running a 64-bit version of Windows, you should install 64-bit Office, right?

WRONG!

Official advice from Microsoft is to use the 32-bit version unless you specifically need to make use of some of the capabilities only available in the x64 version such as Excel 2010’s support for larger data sets.

The problem is that Office 2010 x64 introduces breaking changes that mean 32-bit add-ins may not work in 64-bit Office. For a complete discussion see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee691831(office.14).aspx

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SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 RTM available for download

April 23, 2010 Leave a Comment

MSDN TechNet Downloads

As you can see from the screengrab here the RTM versions of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 are now available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers to download.

My download is ticking away as I write.

Enjoy!

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Windows Phone 7 Series – SharePoint Integration

February 16, 2010 1 Comment

Windows Phone 7 Series Office Hub

Yesterday Microsoft announced the successor to their current crop of Windows Mobile phones, to be called Windows Phone 7 Series. Interesting in the announcement was built-in SharePoint integration, shown in the image above. I wonder… might it just start to make an impact on Blackberry’s dominance in big business?

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Office 2010 System Requirements

January 23, 2010 Leave a Comment

Minimum CPU and  RAM requirements are unchanged from Office 2007, but the footprint of most Office applications have gotten larger. Most standalone application disk-space requirements have gone up by 0.5 GB and the suites have increased by 1.0 or 1.5 GB.

So, in short, if your PC can run Office 2007, it will be able to run Office 2010. If you just acquired a brand new PC, it also will be able to run the forthcoming suite. But if you’re using Office 2003, there are no guarantees you’ll automatically be able to run Office 2010 on the same hardware.

The 32-bit version of Office 2010 will run on the following 32-bit operating systems: XP with Service Pack (SP)3, Vista SP1, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 R2 (with MS XML). The 64-bit version will run on on 64-bit versions of all of these same operating systems, with the exception of Windows Server 2003 R2.

via Mary Jo Foley

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Cloud Computing to Top IT Spending in 2010

January 3, 2010 Leave a Comment

Gartner has published it’s annual prediction of the Top 10 strategic IT investment areas. They are:

  1. Cloud computing
  2. Advanced analytics
  3. Client computing
  4. IT for green
  5. Reshaping the data center
  6. Social computing
  7. Security
  8. Flash memory
  9. Virtualization
  10. Mobile applications

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