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What happens when you build a company, show growth and clients, get investment, and then the market drops out? Sound like last year? Wendy Tan White was a Dot-Com entrepreneur who started and built MoonFruit in 1999, and her story is a good lesson for any entrepreneur to learn. I interviewed White at this years South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival in Austin, TX, at the Social Media Clubhouse .* I learned the necessity of having clear communications with investors and customers, even in the most dire of circumstances. White’s vision was to “allow users to build communities and share passions online, and to remove for them the barriers of technology and cost.” She and her partners wanted to create a system that allowed non-technical users to create these community websites by dragging and dropping shapes and boxes, designing their sites without knowing any code.

Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com, have introduced VaultPress , a plugin to plug the backup gap. Users of WordPress’ hosted service have their blogs backed up automatically (so to speak). So if something goes pear-shaped, the content is caught before it hits the ground. However, if you use a self-hosted version of the software you must back up your content yourself, and heaven help you if you forget. Sponsor Now, by downloading and installing a simple plugin, self-hosted users will have the same safety net as their hosted counterparts. Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, announced the plugin on the VaultPress blog . “Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups.” In an email, he said, “In the past two hours we’ve had over 600 beta applications with an average of 9 sites each.” The product alleges “real-time, continuous monitoring” of your site against dangerous and fraudulent activity. It also automatically updates fixes. Interested users can sign up for VaultPress in private beta. Automattic plans to charge $15.00 per month for the service. Discuss

The Mondrian Sideboard comes from  Boca Do Lobo and caught our attention due to its diversity, artsy feel and glamorous looks. We found out that the carvings and models on the sideboards reunite a variety of artistic styles and the materials used are also diverse. Lacquer, leather and glass are just some of the designer’s options for the finishing touch. A large part of the products  was handcrafted, which gives it even more originality. This is perhaps the reason for the limited edition items. The designers stated that this furniture “is an exclusive emotional experience, a sense of belonging and a state of mind.”We will not insist on the functionality of the design, as it is clear that so many drawers could only mean plenty of storage space.

A group of researchers have proven something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be “popular” Twitterers, but that’s not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don’t always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways. Sponsor The findings from this research project have been published in an research paper available here on the project’s homepage . How the Data Was Analyzed The data the researchers had access to is astounding: 54,981,152 user accounts, 1,963,263,821 social (follow) links and 1,755,925,520 tweets . In order to collect this massive store of data, the researchers contacted Twitter and asked permission to crawl Twitter’s service. Twitter granted them access and white-listed the IP address range for the 58 servers that were used in the data collection. In total, the crawler was able to scan 80 million Twitter accounts during the month of August 2009. Only 54+ million of those accounts were actually in-use at the time, which, in and of itself, is an interesting finding about how many people create a Twitter account and then abandon it. Only 8% of the active accounts were set to private, so they were ignored during the data analysis. The researchers also used the Twitter API to gather additional information about a user’s social links and tweets. The study focused on the largest part of the Twitter network – the “single disproportionately large connected component,” notes the paper, that contained 94.8% of users and 99% of all links and tweets. Within that large network of “in-use” accounts, the researchers further narrowed down the data to focus on the “active users.” These users where those who had more than 10 tweets and had a valid screen name that could be retweeted by others. (Interesting – it’s possible to have an account and not a screen name?) That left “only” 6,189,636 active users out of the initial 80 million to examine. To measure the influence of these 6+ million users, the researchers looked at how the entire set of the 52 million users interacted with these active users. The Three Measures of Influence After examining the data, the researchers found that the most followed individuals spanned a wide variety of public figures and news sources and included accounts like CNN, New York Times, Barack Obama, Shaquille O’Neal, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and others. However, the most retweeted users tended to be content aggregation services like TwitterTips, TweetMeme, and, interestingly enough, they counted the tech blog Mashable as an aggregation service, too. Other heavily retweeted users included Guy Kawasaki, the humor site The Onion and again, The New York Times. Meanwhile, those users with the most “mentions” – not a direct retweet including the original content of someone else’s tweet, but just a casual mention of their name – were celebs. These three measures of influence – followers, retweets and mentions – has surprisingly little overlap when looking at the top influentials. The top 20 lists from these three categories only had two users in common: Ashton Kutcher and Puff Daddy. The researchers also examined the ability of Twitter users to influence others. They determined that the most influential users hold significant influence over a variety of topics, as opposed to being experts in just one area. Examining the 233 “All-Time Influentials” Out of the 6 million active Twitter users, the researchers picked the top 100 users in each of the three categories. Due to the overlap, there were only 233 distinct users on these lists. These were dubbed the “all-time influentials.” Some of these accounts belonged to news organizations or celebs, but others were just regular users. Regarding that last group – it appears that those users who limit their tweets to a single topic are the most likely to increase their influence scores. In the end, what the researchers found was that follower count alone is not necessarily a worthy measure of determining influence. Other factors come into play as well. Although some heavily-followed accounts are also mentioned and retweeted a lot, just looking at audience size doesn’t reveal an account’s ability to influence and impact the Twitter universe. According to the project’s homepage, the researchers are hoping to make the data they collected available to the community at large. Before doing so, they will discuss it with Twitter in order to determine that their data sharing plan agrees with the company’s policy. They plan to have an update on this situation – possibly the data itself – by May 2010. Discuss

At the RSA Keynote a few weeks back, Amazon’s Security Lead, Steve Riley participated on a panel with other security leaders of the industry. We were impressed with the openness of all of the participants, and particularly excited with the new concepts coming from at Amazon. Riley used a term that is being used within his part of Amazon, the “Think Cloud”. As we understand it from the discussion on stage, a Think Cloud is a “body of knowledge” that is a real-time information base of Amazon cloud that can be pivoted all the way down to the threads and individual data concurrency. It would be an index that acts like a control point that helps define movement of data through a servers and compute tasks. Looking at the journey from the data point of view, including data about the environment itself and how to repair itself when damaged and keep data concurrency in tact. Sponsor Here’s the RSA cloud security keynote to get a bit of inspiration to benefits of portable (cloud) computing. In this 30 minute discussion, there are several notable considerations from the contributors on how cloud security challenge can be thought of as a big opportunity and that perhaps now is time to debunk the myth that security is not a part of the cloud. We picked out a few of Riley’s comments that we believe are leading towards the idea of the Think Cloud and why Amazon may be there first. I/O Amazon knows it is critical to be able to have good inputs and outputs. And emphasizes ease of use even more than data portability standards themselves. Riley described a great use case where an un-named customer used Amazon for compute, another cloud provider for data processing, SalesForce for crunching, and then pushed the results to Facebook. Interconnection is happening and applications are already “using all the clouds out there”. In this case, all the way down to the consumer. When we look at this pattern, it we see parts that mimic the history of web in the enterprise. Back-end systems moving data around, optimizing, and passing it to the a web portal. And, the portal demanding “real time” updates for key pieces of data, while relying on batch for others. We can see that idea of a Think Cloud may come into this pattern to help set boundaries and checks so that when a piece of data passes through an Amazon, it is returned reliably, ever time. Perhaps a Think Cloud is a registry that does part of what a smart Enterprise Services Bus does when registered new applications for master data, that is keeps track of activity. In a way, we need to solve the cloud-equivalent “floating point” problem in the CPU of generations past in the computer itself. On the CPU math co-processor, the question was, “Does it know how to do math correctly every-time under all conditions?”. Perhaps the question in the cloud may be “Are all my customers still in the database even though that thread died?”, or “Do we have encryption set on every cpu that this user’s information is stored in memory or on disk”. Solving that problem of interchange the role the concept of Think Cloud might lead. Many legacy applications won’t make it to the cloud. At least, not as-is. Riley comments that “servers are disposable horsepower, they come, they go”. In other words, Since applications sit on top of servers, and servers are sinking into the cloud, applications will sink or swim based on how they migrate to this model. So, the first movers are “the rats” that have jump ship as it started to sink. Follow the rats, or drown. The tear-down of the server into the n-resource cloud breaks-or-suboptimizes server based applications in a fundamental way. Thinking back, this is very similar to web services revolution in the enterprise, where just because an application can export its data model, doesn’t mean it is optimized for web services, or API level interaction. We find this almost a reverse-trend to server virtualization, which has expanded the physical compute space. Perhaps we are finding that there is some new turf to be claimed on where the cloud reaches and virtualization ends. We like to think of it as “smart service bus” meets “smart application” on infinite resources. Infinite, or course, equaling the credit in your PayPal (or other) form of payment collection required by either, or both parties. As reported by The Register’s Cade Metz, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer recently pointed out that this is a potential opportunity with Microsoft and Azure. Where, instead of “only” focusing on infrastructure clouds, the company is working towards a new programming model, Steve said on March 4, 2010. “I think Azure is very different than anything else on the market. I don’t think that anyone else is trying to redefine the programming model” When we look at the services recently in our post, Is Amazon’s Computing Fabric a New Economy , we noted a series of services outside of core computing that start evolving Amazon quickly down the path of a new development paradigm. Abstracting storage, network, monitoring, and perhaps in future security, in raw terms gives rise to new opportunities to bind them back together. Security is the topic for RSA. Compliance is the reason to get it right. If the computing model wants to be secure, it needs to know the assets and their relationships. As reported by Search Cloud Computing , Amazon’s Riley also tipped the audience at RSA that Amazon is weighing in on encryption as a service offerings. This is another example, where that now Amazon is supporting a new services such as Virtual Private Cloud, it moves one step closer the knowledge point for all the key assets, including their peers within the corporate network. We find this area, as well as certificate management, to be an area ripe for the type of thinking we see at Amazon. The problem to be solved isn’t a better routine, but is how to apply it tandem with the moving assets and data that is ever changing in demand. Perhaps We Needed to Get to Random, to Get to Secure We wonder if Amazon’s Think Cloud is something new, and if so, is a path towards solving the collision of the major parties in the network. If it joins network, storage, person, and server resources together, perhaps it is the brains of the next generation Internet. The winner will be the one that makes it simple, because as Devo on Chatroulette is proving, demand is asymmetric, and access control is from the eighties. Photo credit: RSA , Devo , Inc. Discuss