TiEcon, Day 1

The Micello Team was at TiEcon today. Our attorneys are one of the sponsors of TiEcon and were generous enough to allow us to use their booth. This gave us presence on the floor and the ability to demo the application to the attendees. With over 3600 attendees, there was a lot of energy. We demoed to 100+ folks and recieved positive feedback from all.

The opening keynote was given by Intuit CEO, Brad Smith. This talk certainly allowed the conference to start on a high note. He urged the audience to play offence, and not defence because "the clouds will part and the sun will shine ultimately".

He talked about four structural shifts taking place in the industry:

1. User demographic shifts. Increasingly Gen Yers are using technologies and entering the work force. The baby boomers (46-64 year olds) are still a force to contend with. Momtrepreneurs, Careerpreneurs and Immigrants complete the demography shift.
2. Value creation shift. User contribution and social interactions are huge and must not be ignored.
3. Technology shift. Mobile is growing at a CAGR of 30%. This is far outpacing other technologies.
4. Structural shift. There are geographic shifts taking place.
   

He said that Innovation is a Team Sport:

• Customers - engage with them. Find out what they love about your product and what they hate. There are things that you can do to change and recognize that there are things that cannot change. Get the roughest, roughest prototype out to customers ASAP. Failing fast will allow you to succeed faster.
  
• Employees - when they gave employees unstructured time, productivity and employee satisfaction improved.
• Networks - tap partners to dramatically increase market potential and customer value.

Later, I attended a panel on "Wireless. What is working and Why". The panel was moderated by Levi Shapiro of Hiro Media. Bernard Gershon, Gershon Media; Atif Hussein, Nokia; Yves Maitre, Orange and Dilip Venkatachari, NEA were on the panel. The following is a quote that Dilip made in his opening remarks, "There are numerous innovative technologies that are coming out in the mobile space. Check out Micello. They are bringing the conference to your phone and allowing you to locate and network with friends and associates easily." Atif Hussein mentioned, "Mobile applications should connect people with where they are right now. The data presented to users should be location aware and time sensitive. No sense in letting people know of an event that has concluded." Atif just articulated Micello's value proposition. This is exactly what we do!

The afternoon's keynote was given by TIBCO CEO, Vivek Ranadive. Vivek said that the 20th century did not dawn until 1908 - the year Henry Ford introduced the Model-T. In a similar vein, the 21st century dawned in 2009. He mentioned the following highlights in 2009:

• America has a black President
• More homes with cell phones than land lines
• Micello launches its application - ok, he did not say this ;)

Vivek talked about the evolution from Enterprise 1.0 to Enterprise 2.0. Moving from mainframe to client server. From software running on bare metal to software running on databases. We are now in the Enterprise 3.0 era - where the architecture is cloud facilitated and all the processes are virtualized. The architecture is event driven and transactions are in-memory.

He peppered his talk with anecdotes from his personal life. When he beat out Reuters in a high profile bidding war for the trading floor application at Shearson Lehman, he got invited to a Reuters event (in the U.K.) where he was the guest of honor. At a cocktail party, he was talking to one of the directors at Reuters about "TIB" being The Information Bus when he responded, "Oh! they told me that it stood for That Indian Bast**d".

I am certainly looking forward to Day 2 on Saturday.