Jason Thibeault is a seasoned consultant with years of experience building, designing, marketing, and launching high-tech products, software companies, and applications. Whether it’s in the trenches with your developers or at the boardroom table with investors, Jason can help with all facets of your business.

Jason provides a number of services that cross a wide-range of business needs. These services include:

• Consulting. Strategic in nature and sometimes amorphous to define, this is enabling you to tap into Jason’s extensive business expertise (gleaned from startups, private companies, and public corporations). Whether it’s helping you define a business plan, execute on marketing strategy, or identifying the right features for your product, Jason can bring practical experience to bear.
• Writing. Jason provides a variety of writing ranging from blog postings to whitepapers to end-user manuals to press releases and marketing fluff. Whatever your writing needs, his pen can craft the right message for the right audience.
• Software Engineering. Jason is an experienced software engineer. Whether building from the ground up or taking over established products, he has proven his abilities to plan, architect, and implement everything from simply mobile applications to complex n-tier enterprise systems.
• Development. Building on his software engineering background, Jason has a broad working knowledge of programming languages including C++, C#.NET, VB, php, perl, Java, and python.
• Marketing. Jason provides a broad range of marketing services ranging from the operational (developing and publishing marketing materials) to the strategic (brand and market assessments).

URL: http://www.lax101.com

Note: Lax101.com is built on the SportsRecruitZone platform owned, supported, and marketed by the SportsFoundation.

JiWire also allows wireless broadband network host advertising as a currency for wireless Internet access and mobile application publishers a unique advertising revenue stream. With a goal of engaging users however they connect to the Internet while on the go, JiWire provides a cross-channel solution that extends location-based targeting to multiple devices, from laptops to smartphones across content channels from Wi-Fi to the Internet to mobile.

Prior to their current business model, JiWire made a name for itself by compiling and licensing the largest hotspot database. The JiWire Wi-Fi Traveler was a PC/Mac client designed to manage the connection to wireless hotspots (replacing existing software provided by the operating system). I lead the team responsible for this software, working with designers to ensure that user experience matched user stories as well as coordinated development efforts based on creation of the overall application specification and architecture.

URL: www.jiwire.com

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/28/1232258/Google-Announces-Google-CDN

Although the CDN market is heavily commoditized, that is not the issue. There is plenty of revenue to make in value-added services and, most of all, the expertise to help customers deliver high-quality events.

And that’s the key thing here. Just because you have the servers, the bandwidth, and the software doesn’t mean you can successfully run a CDN. This is a 24/7/365 business. When you are delivering mission critical content (whether web pages or videos), customers want to be assured that there won’t be an hiccups and if there are, knowledgeable people on staff are dealing with it before the customer has to ask. I believe that Google will discover over the next 12 months the operational intensity required to operate a high-performance CDN to content publishers and companies that rely on their websites. We’ve seen it before with companies like AT&T and Microsoft. It simply does not make economical sense to jump into this market unless the CDN portion is simply one element of a larger service offering that helps companies tackle multiple challenges.

Although I appreciate Google’s software, their manpower, their technical and intellectual capital, I don’t believe that using the Google CDN will be the right choice for many customers. It may be like Amazon’s AWS: a sacrifice early on of performance for lower cost.

http://gigaom.com/collaboration/ovia-asyncrhonous-video-interviews/

Using an asynchronous video approach, Ovia can enable candidates to submit video-based interviews to potential recruiters. Already with Fortune 500 customers, this young startup embodies what’s best about the internet technologies: applying them to age old problems. Finding and recruiting talent is a pain (and costly) especially when you have to fly candidates in from all over the place. This solution enables companies to leverage video (which has very established and proven technologies on the web) coupled with web-based software services to replace a lot of the antiquated methods of recruiting new talent.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/comcast_teams_with_elemental_technologies_to_stay.php

The interesting thing about this is wondering how many other companies have their growth tied to the growth of the iPad. I can’t say that dedicated software developers count as they launched products/services because of the iPad. This is more applicable to companies that were servicing an existing industry, made changes to their product to reflect the needs of Apple’s tablets, and saw their company grow as a result of it. Can you think of any other companies that have benefited like Elemental? Or any other examples of this happening before? I guess one example might be a content developer (i.e., a magazine) that migrated to an iPad application and ditched their print version?

http://thenextweb.com/us/2011/07/17/eight-chicago-startups-you-need-to-know-about/

But in cloud, we are seeing a much different trend:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/07/report-cloud-computing-catchin.php

It seems that in emerging countries, like Brazil, the cloud is seeing massive enterprise adoption. This is reversed of what we usually see with technology in emerging markets: the cost benefits of the cloud (or, more importantly, Infrastructure as a Service) are so tangible — it’s a clear cost savings. And the cloud doesn’t really represent any new technologies (just a distribution of existing technologies). It’s just swapping one form of distribution for another. And what’s more, there are other operational benefits to not having a lot of your own servers (whether they are hosted externally or within your own walls): power consumption. In a recent article in GigaOm, it’s postulated that the cloud can save billions in annual energy bills by simply reducing the total number of servers. This is another very tangible benefit to emerging markets where the cost of power may be significant.

It will be interesting to see if these emerging markets drive enterprise cloud usage in the U.S. and Europe. If nothing else, they should provide valuable case studies regarding security, availability, scalability, and, most importantly, cost savings.

UPDATE (7/25/2011):

Below is a link to a great article by GigaOm that explores this energy efficiency in more detail, citing for clear reasons why cloud computing will be more energy efficient than traditional data centers:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/25/idUS59089929820110725

In short,

1. Economies of scale:  It’s cheaper for bigger cloud computing folks to make efficiency improvements because they can spread the costs over a larger server base and can afford to have more dedicated folks focused on efficiency improvements.
2. Diversity and aggregation:  More users, more diverse users, and more users in different places means computing loads are spread over the day, allowing for increased equipment utilization.
3. Flexibility:  Cloud installations use virtualization and other techniques to separate the software from the characteristics of physical servers (some call this “abstraction of physical from virtual layers”).
4. Ability to side step organizational issues instead of having to address them head on (which is hard and slow):  While most company in-house IT operations face the problem of a disconnect between IT departments driving server purchases, and facilities departments paying the electric bill, that problem has largely been solved for the cloud providers.

Josh Silverman, former CEO of Skype told me in an interview that company employees take their cue from their leader, and a confident leader instills confidence in her troops. Similarly, a founder or a CEO who is unable to be transparent with his board will make excuses. He will cut corners and create a company culture based on fear and deceit.

But I’m not sure this applies to just startups. Obviously, more mature companies, and especially those that are public, have a fiduciary responsibility to be transparent. But that is only from a numbers perspective. Although it’s good that public companies are required to disclose their profits and losses, the need for transparency extends well beyond that. As Om pointed out, it’s about establishing the right culture. When management (and not just at the executive level) begin to hide things, the process and concept of hiding things becomes accepted all the way down. And when things do come out, it tends to undermine the culture of the company as people ask themselves why they didn’t know about it sooner.

Alternatively, having everything transparent isn’t conducive to building a successful company in today’s highly competitive global markets. The slightest advantage created by keeping something “close to the vest” can make or break young startups and veteran businesses alike.

There must be a balance between the need to tell and the need to hide. History has proven that hiding potentially damaging information can cause more harm than just coming out with the information in the first place. But it seems that for some reason we believe we can fix the problem before it gets out of hand, a belief that usually ends in ruin.

The need for transparency is critical in businesses, especially during the early years when there is a “circle of trust” within which investors and executive management must work together to help achieve business success. But that transparency cannot come at the cost of the business itself. It is an ethical battle that all managers may one day have to face.