Inspirational Technology

We recently sent Sean off to be interviewed about JumpBox for the Scoble Show. The episode was posted last night and is included below. Check it out if you want to know a little more about what we’re doing.

After a quiet couple months, things are really cracking now with JumpBox. We had some great stuff queued up that took a lot longer to get out than I expected. The funny thing is that the product was ready, but it took a while to line up the rest of the pieces. So what have we been up to?

Well …

Nov. 1 we announced a partnership with Microsoft and support for Microsoft virtualization in all JumpBox virtual appliances.

We followed that up on Nov. 7 with a joint announcement with Virtual Iron that all JumpBoxes now support their platform.

So what this means is that JumpBox now provides a single virtual machine download that will run the same on any VMWare product, Parallels, Microsoft Virtual PC/Virtual Server, Virtual Iron and Xen Open Source. Now that’s portability. One download, run it on Mac, Windows, Linux using the virtualization platform of your choice. It’s simple, quick, flexible and powerful, everything software should be.

That’s some pretty cool stuff, but we weren’t quite done yet, so today we announced the release of the JumpBox Proving Grounds and eight new JumpBoxes. The Proving Grounds is our beta user community which we are using to get new JumpBoxes into people’s hands much faster. We released eight beta JumpBoxes today, and here’s a secret, there’s seven more sitting in the queue. Want to check them out, then get your invite now.

Here’s what’s available today to people who join the Proving Grounds.

The Alfresco Enterprise Document Management System Learn about this project	Joomla Content Management System version 1.5 Learn about this project
OTRS Open source Ticket Request System Learn about this project	Bugzilla bug tracking system Learn about this project
Mantis bug tracking system Learn about this project	Silverstripe Content Management System Learn about this project
Project Pier project management software Learn about this project	OpenLDAP LDAP directory software Learn about this project

BTW, we’re also doing a joint Webinar with Virtual Iron on December 12 so if you want to learn more about JumpBox or Virtual Iron it’s a great opportunity. You can signup here.

Man, it’s getting harder and harder to blog any more. There’s a lot going on in my life that I should be writing about, but never do. Not sure why.

We launched JumpBox in July and it’s moving along nicely. We’ve since released two platform point releases and one new JumpBox for the Twiki Enterprise Wiki system. It was a scary thing to launch the company with no idea whether or not anyone would be willing to pay for what we were doing. Thankfully they were and we easily beat expectations for our first month. Now the challenge is just getting the growth we need to become profitable. We have some really interesting stuff in the pipeline for release in November which is pretty exciting.

Perhaps more important though, it looks like after 37 years I’m finally going to get married. Oct 27 is the date, exactly one year after Lisa and I met for the first time. I’ve tended to not share too much about my personal life, but this is a pretty important event and it’s amazing that I finally found someone who is as quirky as I am.

That about sums up my life right now, business and getting married. Could be worse I guess.

On the latest Grid7 Entrepreneurship Podcast, Peter Burns founder of the Institute for Entrepreneurship discusses his initiative aimed at rolling out university programs for Entrepreneurship across the country. As part of this he talks about the University Entrepreneurs fund. This fund was first created last year as a $1 million venture capital fund for student entrepreneurs. Now Peter is looking to push it to $250 million and take it to a national level. Students from the Entrepreneurship program at any of the universities where the Institute for Entrepreneurship provides their program are eligible. From those programs, the best prospects can receive seed funding to get their projects off the ground. If I were still a student I’d be pretty damn excited about this program.

Overall this looks to be a great way to both train and seed the entrepreneurial spirit in young minds. Best of all, this is starting in Arizona with the College for Entrepreneurship at Grand Canyon University.

Just came across this site called bubbl.us. It’s a brainstorming app that allows you to build simple mind maps using nothing more than your web browser. I’m a big fan of mindmapping, although I don’t like to use the computer to do it. My approach just involves a blank piece of paper and a pencil and I intentionally try to get away from the computer when doing this. However bubbl.us looks to have some potential for collaborative brainstorming that’s kind of interesting. It’s fun to play around with anyway.

For Grid7 Venturecast #14 we recorded the audio for the presentations at the Arizona Entrepreneurship: Revolution in Marketing Conference. This was an event focused on introducing the concepts of social media and how it can be applied to help market a business. You know blogging, wikis, social networks and such. The opening presentation was by Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club and the closing presentation was given by Robert Scoble of Podtech and the Scoble Show.

The conference was mildly interesting to me, but I’ve been doing all the stuff they’re talking about for a long time so there wasn’t really a whole lot to learn from it. In reality, it was pretty fluffy overall. However, you could see all the business people in the audience drooling over the prospects opened up by this “new concept” of blogging and social networking. That’s a good thing, it seems most people in Arizona are quite behind the curve when it comes to this stuff. Anyway, if nothing else, Scoble’s section is worth a listen. Just make sure you stick with it past the part where he’s reading his RSS feeds on stage.

It has actually been out for a while (I’ve been slacking at this blogging thing) but the latest in our series of interviews with entrepreneurs in Arizona is online. This is an interview with the founders of UStrive.

Ustrive is a commerce platform that integrates with other social networking sites enabling the user to monetize his or her media across services like YouTube, Photobucket and Flickr. Bob Schobert (CEO) and Mike Fleet (lead developer) share their experience in developing Ustrive and offer advice to avoid some of the pitfalls of working with contract developers. Ustrive officially launched their site this morning - big thanks to Bob and Mike for squeezing in this interview given the timing. Start a dialogue with them via the comments link below.

The latest installment of the Grid7 Venturecast is now online. This installment features inventor Lon Safko.

Lon Safko is the godfather of the Assistive Speech Technology Industry having invented the technology that became the Dragon Naturally Speaking product. Eighteen of Lon’s inventions were recently inducted into the Smithsonian alongside thinkers such as Darwin, Wyeth and Edison for having made the most significant contribution this century to the human-computer interface.

Lon is an interesting guy and recently had some of his inventions added to the Smithsonian.

Chris Tingom of Tornado Design has announced that Viddler, a new social video web site has launched. Chris gave a demo of Viddler at Phoenix BarCamp over the weekend and it looks really interesting. The ability to add tags and comments to particular points in a video is pretty cool as is the ability to send a link to a particular spot in the video. There’s been a lot of activity in this space lately, but Viddler looks like it might have enough interesting features to get it on the map.

Grid7 Venturecast #10 with Pat Sullivan founder and former CEO of ACT! Software and SalesLogix is now up on the Grid7 website. Pat has been a leading figure in the Arizona software community for a long time and has now moved on to found something a little different in Jigsaw Health.