Kaiyzen Group

After leaving my post at SugarCRM last February I set my sights on launching my mobile start I have been developing over the past 3 years, with roots back to a 2003 project before my Sugar days.  After a few months of cranking away full time on the mobile project, I quickly realized that it was still a tad bit early to be pushing my solution in the market place.  I took a step back, decided to add some new technologies to the concept, and wait for the next couple generations of devices to be pushed into the marketplace.

As part of this “down shifting” on my mobile project, I had a whole lot of un-used time on my hands.  With my skill sets as in software, and deep knowledge and experience across web, mobile, IPTV, enterprise, consumer, etc, etc, I figured I would start advising to other projects.  I figured I would focus on two types of projects.  One being idea/early stage startups still getting their projects together to fully launch.  The other would be existing companies that have empassioned/visionary founders, and good technology and IP foundations, but missed the mark and are looking to reboot things.

I started passing word through my network and hitting up as many events as possible.  After about 4 months I had a pretty good pipeline of orgs I have been helping out.  After another handfull of months of having a few fall off the map choosing different paths of development, I am proud to announce that I have filled up what I am calling my “Advisory I” slots.  These are orgs that I have been working with for the past six or more months, and are nearing ready for product launch/re-launch, and/or ready to go and raise capital.

I am calling it Advisory I, to borrow concepts from the VC community that has various funds they raise and they have different classes of companies in each funds.  This, coupled with the fact that I am currently only a single person and cloning technologies are not up to snuff yet, I am pretty much tapped out on being able to spend quality time with any more companies, on top of my continued mobile master plan.

The four companies are a good mix of orgs.  One is a mobile software startup that is being launch by an experienced entreprenuer who is self funding and bootstrapping his first phase of the company into place.  Second company is a fantastic software platform solution for the Consume Electronics space working on interactive inputs.  Next is a fantastic play in the Enterprise/DataCenter space which has been in development for the past year.  The last org to join on just a bit ago is a reboot candidate in the meeting/collaboration space.

Hopefully they continue to progress and I will be able to share more details about my experiences.  The post lagging on this site is still pretty rampant with most of my posting time focused over at SiliconAngle.

If you are, or know people looking to get help with their startup, I would still like to hear about the projects, and possible point them in the right direction or match make them with someone within my network.

Its now been.., (cough).., over a year since I put up a post on this site.

Its hasnt been all due to laziness on the posting front, for the most part I have been very active over the past 14 months covering the Enterprise IT, Mobile, and IPTV sectors, as well as working on, and advising to some startup projects in those same sectors.

Its been a great treat to see all the rapid changes and innovation that is happening on all fronts.  From connectivity, advancements in hardware, which in turn causes software to revamp, as well as massive cultural shifts both at the consumer and business levels, there has been no better time in the past 20 yrs to take advantage of the changes.

My hope is to finally get my arse in gear and tend to this site a little more over the up and coming months, hopefully a post a week or so reflecting on the diferent start up and industry experiences I am going through.  Hopefully these will be interesting to some, and informative to others.

Tops on my list of “TO DO’s” for the site is to work on implementing some of the content categories which I started but never spent the time to fully round out.  The best example is People I Want to Spend An Afternoon With…, I got one of these done and that was it.., pretty piss poor, but good intent.

Some other stuff I plan on working on is morphing this current WordPress site into some more functional, and platform-esque.  Over the past year I have spent here and there working away on some PHP framework stuff, and am now starting to put it to use in some first projects.

First of which is the Television Developer Hub, or TVDH for short.  This is a pet project with some friends to make a kick ass central hub on the interwebs to cover and house all things Television and Developer related.  Its in its early stages, but evolving/growing pretty rapidly.

TVDH is just the first of many projects that are finally ready to see the light of day.  After having many irons in the fire since leaving my post at SugarCRM I am finally ready to start taking the wraps off these various projects I am directly, or indirectly involved in.

You can continue to check out SiliconAngle for a great community of tech related content, I will continue to be involved in that community for all my general tech coverage, this site will remain more personal in nature which was how it was originally intented when I started it a few years back.

My interest in video games has drastically been reduced over the years.  Leading factor is how involved and intricate most games are leading to a sinkhole of time waste.  There are some gems here and there the past couple years that have peaked my interest enough to plop down and widdle away at my day.  I think that the new dj related games, a-la Guitar Hero will be new additions.

There are two games coming to market, much like Guitar Hero has competing Rock Band in the marketplace.  Little bits of info have been released over the past 6 months regarding the games, finally though the first controller by Numark has been released for “Scratch: The Ultimate DJ Videogame Controller” (pics below).

I have been dj’ing for about a decade now and scratching for about 9 of those ten years.  Although I am not a fan of Numark gear in any capacity (Vestax/Rane for me) I cant wait to get my hands on this thing and see what the feel of the controller is like with the game play.  Now all I need to do is get my hands on an Xbox to give this thing a test drive when its out.

Those of you attending E3 will be able to get some hands on for a early preview.

Haven’t posted here in a while.  It’s been a hectic last couple of months.

Back in February I put in my notice at my job of 4+ years and finished up at the end of the month.  The main goal of this life change is to work on my own projects and step up my coverage and involvement in the technology scene.

I have joined the Silicon Angle group and will be pushing the majority of my tech coverage out through their property, I am also looking into a couple other ops for my coverage as well.  Silicon Angle is a great org covering social media, intrastruture 2.0 and startup/company news.  Things are off to a great start and I have been able to cover some good cloud computing related events as well as the big Cable industry show in D.C. and recently Ad Tech-Sf.

The projects I have been putting together and will be pushing out a bit later are still under wraps but I will be dropping all updates on those here on the site…, some exciting stuff that has been brewing for quite some time, it will be awesome to finally get to talk more about them.

Amazon’s popular S3 cloud storage service is turning three years old.  In the three years since its launch S3 has opened up shop in Europe, drop prices, added auto backups for persistent storage on EC2, and plugged into their Cloudfront CDN service.

Three years and 52 billion stored objects later Amazon wants to say thank you by providing some birthday deals to developers out there.  Data transfer costs into S3 will cost $0.03 for the next three months instead of the traditional $0.10.

You can find out more information about the service at http://aws.amazon.com/s3

Not from a design perspective, but from an end to end solution perspective.

Lost of noise today around Cisco entering the server market, some here and here.

Just as Apple loves to own the end to end experience by making specific hardware to fit their design needs while powering their software they pride themselves on writing and bundling with their devices.

This approach is a tough one, but very fruitful if you can pull it off.  By entering the server market Cisco moves closer to owning the end to end “experience” of data, services and applications moving around the worlds pipes and datacenters.

Cisco dominates the high end router/switch market.  By optimizing their network gear to run extra efficient with their server gear that is a pretty nice value proposition for groups looking for plug-and-play capabilities.  You basically end up with a bunch of hubs and pipes that move the data and apps around to virtualized containers sitting in the servers/nodes.

My big question is how will all of this fit into their living room strategy?

Mavericks is supposed to kick off tomorrow here on the west coast.  The annual surf event has been waiting for the right conditions and a pacific storm has been pushing a huge swell our way over the past couple days.

Speaking of swells, seems that two of the video streaming startups, Kyte and Ustream are getting ready for a big push with some new announcements and most likely some new years growth.

TechCrunch is posting that Ustream will be releasing a new iPhone application that will allow users to stream any Ustream channel direct to their devices.  Michael gives the good idea of wathcing the inauguration via Ustream if you are out and about and can’t be near a television.  If Ustream can get some serious content partnerships going it will make a nice solution somewhat putting them inline with place shifter Sling minus the hardware and DVR.

Speaking of content partnerships, Kyte has a HUGE one just being announced.  Billboard is announcing that Kyte and UMG are partnering up to stream content over Kyte’s system.  Universal alludes that its artists will be using Kyte to communicate in a more personal way with their fans showing behind the scenes clips they are recording.  If Kyte has similar success to that of SayNow it should mean a chunk of new users to their site.

Maybe Kyte and SayNow can partner up, one providing the video and the latter providing the audio/sms.

(updated)

Seems even Qik has some news tonight.  They are sponsoring an online show at Sundance with streaming various people peroforming tasks over a 24 hr period.  It is being organized by Aston Kutcher.