Digital Dumbo 18: The Dumbo Loft

Image of Reshma Saujani

I was at Digital Dumbo last night. It is a go to event. Yesterday was special. They had a job fair. There was a large crowd. Beer was free. Water you had to get from the vending machine for 50 cents, which I did.

I so love this venue. I wish they had the event the same place every month. The Dumbo Loft is a great space.

I was wearing a Reshma 2010 shirt (Phone Calls, Dress Code) - Reshma For Congress - and that attracted a few political types, including a Clinton 92 veteran who now lives on the Upper East Side. He had not heard of her yet.

"How many people are running?" he asked.

"Two. Her and Maloney."

"Then you are winning," he said.

You just started a small fire on the Upper East Side, he added. I guess he is now a strong supporter. Maloney declared she was going to run for the US Senate, he said. That's right when she loses this race. She said she was too good to keep representing the people in this district.

Nobody I met had heard of Reshma before.

But I also talked plenty of tech, and blogging, and jobs. Made some new contacts.

"Great event," I said to Kaitlin, (@kaitvillanova) the key organizer. I believe Andrew Zarick is currently in Spain. The first time I was at the Dumbo Loft, I was like, this is such a healthy male female ration for a tech event. This time too there were a lot of women there. I guess Kaitlin might be responsible.

If you can go to only two tech events each month, those would be the NY Tech MeetUp and Digital Dumbo.

I also have to give a shoutout to DigitalFlashNYC. NY Tech MeetUp is 10 bucks, Digital Dumbo is free with free beer on top of that. DigitalFlashNYC is also paid. Sara and Laura run DigitalFlashNYC, got to meet them again last night. I went to their Popular Science event a while back and it was just great. The talk was great. I met some great people including one potential business partner I had been trying to track other ways, and he just showed up there on his own. I met another dude who seriously considered investing in a venture of mine. You pay for a DigitalFlashNYC event but the drinks are free.

How Many Bottles of Beer Does it Take to Host An Event
Social media firms looking to hire
Crain's New York: Social media-focused ad firms look to hire

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Disney's Playdom Purchase

Image via Wikipedia

Disney just expanded in the entertainment space: it went ahead and bought Zynga competitor Playdom. This for some reason reminds me of Yahoo's attempt to buy FourSquare months back, although the parallels end fast. Yahoo is a scatterbrained company, it occupies all sorts of spaces. Disney is more focused on entertainment. And Yahoo did not go ahead and buy a FourSquare competitor instead. I think it was for a lack of a capacity to digest.

An Offer To FourSquare

This purchase is of interest to me because I just blogged about Zynga a few days back: Zynga: The Google Of Games?

I have a feeling Mark Pincus' profile at the New York Times a few days back where he says in no uncertain terms that social gaming is a big, new, fundamental space online might have hastened efforts on Disney's part to make this move.

Is this like Google buying Android? Or is this more like one of those Barry Diller purchases? Time will tell. This might be somewhere in between.

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Zoho

Image via CrunchBase

Zoho is an upstart, but it is an upstart with major advantages. How about a laser focus and a great slew of products? And I admire their decision to not sell out to Salesforce.com.

What is holding it back is its not wanting to take venture capital money, and have no obvious ambitions to go IPO at some point. Those are mistakes. You can stay small and private and cozy and beautiful, or you can go big. I think Zoho should aim to go big. Zoho has to have IPO ambitions.

Microsoft is a giant but its major revenue sources are so foreign to what Zoho does that you could argue Microsoft is almost in a different industry altogether. Google is more in the cloud, but search is that company's strength and weakness. It is a good thing Zoho products integrate seamlessly with Google office apps. That way you get the advantages of Google being big and Zoho being nimble and superior.

Zoho's competition is not with Microsoft or even Google, but itself. It has to have IPO ambitions. That lack of ambition was not something given to it by either Google or Microsoft but itself.

Wall Street Journal: Blogs: Digits: QandA: Upstart Takes on Google, Microsoft in the Cloud

Competing against industry giants can be a brutal ordeal. Just ask RC Cola, which took on Coke and Pepsi. ..... For Zoho, a small company that competes with Google and Microsoft in the market for Web-based software, the strategy for surviving alongside huge rivals has been to target gaps in their products. Zoho now offers nearly 30 free and fee-based tools in the cloud: from wikis, word processing and spreadsheets to customer-relationship management, invoicing, and project management. ..... Zoho’s 3 million registered users ..... A small percentage pay subscription fees, enabling Zoho to quietly build a profitable niche, without PR or advertising. ...... founded in 1996 ..... headquarters in Chennai, India, and Pleasanton, Calif., now has 1,100 employees, nearly 1,000 of whom work in India...... has long refused to take venture capital funding and has rejected numerous acquisition offers. ...... founder and CEO, Sridhar Vembu ..... Google’s product suite is limited to Mail & Office suite, while Zoho has a much broader product suite targeted at small and mid-sized businesses. We integrate well with everyone, including with Google Apps. ....... Microsoft has formidable technology resources, but faces the economic challenge of transitioning their business model to the cloud ....... earn the trust of consumers through actual daily execution, not just talk ..... why we focus on small and mid-sized companies first, because they tend to have fewer inhibitions about trying something new. ....... we have stated a preference to be independent and private, so that we can keep our vibrant engineering and customer-support focused culture. We tend not to spend a lot of money in sales and marketing. This allows us to invest in engineering, and come up with interesting new products. ....... Google’s philosophy is to offer a minimalist interface, while Zoho provides a much richer suite in terms of depth of functionality, breadth of applications and richness of the interface. We believe business users want and need a lot more than what Google offers. At the same time, recognizing the immense reach Google has, Zoho has chosen to partner with them, so that customers can mix and match Google Apps with various apps from Zoho. ..... Over the next three years, you will see cloud offerings really mature in terms of features and functions, and become feature rich, overtaking desktop offerings in many areas. As feature parity is reached, market adoption will explode. Just as mobile phones overtook wired phones in terms of features, functions and of course usage over the past 10 years, cloud software will overtake installed software over the next 10. The reason in both cases is the sheer speed of technology evolution. .....Financial investors necessarily need exit or liquidity, while our focus is to stay in business for the long haul. We prefer to sacrifice near-term growth in favor of keeping our company healthy and vibrant for the long term, which is not something an exit-focused investor would like to see.

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