It is called “the garage effect” and it is a nod to the humble origins of some of the giant companies in Silicon Valley.
David Hunter, chief technology officer, platform security at VMware, predicts the rise of the ‘garage effect’ for people working in today’s cloud and virtualised environments.
The NZ-Australia Investment Forum this month was told there is a new breed of entrepreneurs that is not well understood and not well served but whose contribution to the economy could be tremendous.
Net Generation entrepreneurs grew up with the internet. They are mostly young, possibly still in colleges or universities, or fresh graduates starting careers.
This week represents an important inflection point for the Enterprise 2.0 market, a set of software vendors that sell social networking technologies to businesses. Analysts say the number of competitors will consolidate in the coming year as Microsoft captures greater market share. The start-ups that will survive must carve out a long-term place for themselves by building applications that are far more innovative and cheaper than those of the incumbent software giant. In addition, they must convince businesses that Microsoft SharePoint's "good enough" strategy is not, in fact, good enough for today's enterprise collaboration needs
As Enterprise 2.0 vendors convene for their annual industry conference in the US this week, many continue to fight the complacency of businesses who prefer to use Microsoft as a default choice for all their enterprise collaboration needs. SharePoint, an application that started as a document management system to store (among other items) Microsoft Office files, has since added social features, including profiles, blogs, and wikis. Although Microsoft's smaller, more nimble competitors have built more sophisticated social networking applications for businesses, analysts say SharePoint has been "good enough" for many companies.
Late last year, Omar Kilani quit his job as an IT consultant to focus full-time on three-year-old start-up Remember the Milk.
Mr Kilani started the web 2.0 venture - a high-end task management tool that has about half a million users - as a university research project with partner Emily Boyd when both were at the University of Technology, Sydney.