Coffee, Sun & Technology

Peter Kim (Forrester Research) makes a few interesting calculations challenging their recent $2B valuation claim.

Thursday March 9th, 2:30PM - Perenety, Sunnyvale, California. GC, Guillaume and Arnaud running Perenety “AG2X” (AG2X is a code name). Lots of energy right now at
Perenety.

Totally impressed with (1) Coremetrics’ $31M series D funding (company has raised $62M to date), which nicely prolongs a series of other impressive moves in the WA space - (2) WebSideStory’s Visual Sciences acquisition for $57M, (3) Omniture’s $40M round last year, and their plans to go public this year, (4) Google offering Urchin for free, thereby killing the lower end of the market, (5) Webtrends going back to being privately owned.

As an WA retired veteran (!), I’m seeing:
- a market that is technologically mature
- no clear leader
- lots of growth
- lots of cash
- VCs involved

How long before we see a real big merger like Omniture/Webtrends or something like that?

This sounds cool: “in a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power […] Google plans to get all the worlds information, not just some. […] Google should be able to “house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)”.

Which reminds me of: November 17th 2005:

Scalability is one of the strong points of Google Analytics, according to Brett Crosby.

But the last few days, that scalability apparently had some problems. I put the code on this blog on Monday, but I had to wait until today to view the reports.

Brett Crosby: “We were the victims of our own success. We have been pounded with signups in the past few days, and the crunching fell behind”.

And that was (just) for 250,000 signups for Google analytics - which trust me, are nothing in terms of data volumes and bandwidth requirements compared to a GDrive. Meanwhile, to this date, Google still can’t deliver on the original promise of “free Web analytics accounts” for anyone.

Some fun at Perenety - an avatar contest! We don’t have billion dollars in prizes, but this could be exciting nevertheless. Tell your designer friends about it.

Things are cruising along otherwise.