Emerging Enterprise Center Blog - Commentary and Analysis For Entrepreneurs and Startups

  I attended the annual meeting of Mass TLC this morning. Michael Mandel spoke and had a bunch of great insights. I want to get to what he had to say about energy and renewables but I need to go into a few preliminary items first. Mandel starts from the premise that the most accurate measure of the state of the economy, crude though it may be, is employment. The unemployment rate is the unemployment rate. Either you are paying unemployment tax or you are not. There is no ambiguity.  Having established this as his measure of health. He showed that one industry (communications – very... More

Wednesday night I went to the TiE event on cyber security in the age of the cloud at the Nerd center. Among the panelists were Michael Sutton of Zscaler and Chris Wysopal of Veracode. In each case they are kind of in the cloud and kind of not in the cloud. Veracode delivers is product on a SaaS basis from the cloud but maintains its own data facilities because it can’t really put client code on the cloud – why? For security reasons. The conversation turned to regulation, which was probably the topic of the evening. It seems clear that privacy regulation is a huge... More

A lot of people think cloud computing is one of the next big things.  It is obviously here, and there is a lot of hype and a lot of real activity.  MassNetComms is holding an event at the EEC (our offices in Waltham) on the topic.  Sim Simeonov wil the be the moderator.  John Considine (CloudSwitch), David Skok (Matrix), Omar Trajman (Vertica Systems) and Michael Werner (Microsoft) will be on the panel.  This promises to be an informative event.  The cloud represents, I think, a significant economic opportunity not just for companies (and entrepreneurs who learn to use it) but... More

I attended the very successful Cloud Computing event sponsored by MIT on Wednesday, which Sim Simeonov and others organized. At this point the event itself may be yesterday’s news, but a few of things came out of it that seemed noteworthy to me. Some are “micro” things about the cloud itself, how it drives innovations, pricing etc., but perhaps the most compelling is that the cloud it here and people are building great profitable companies around it today compared to energy and cleantech, which get all the mindshare, but who knows when economic conditions will reach a point where these technologies will... More