Under the Radar Conference - Our Thoughts

What a great and unique event! This is the first conference I’ve been to where the VCs, Entrepreneurs, and the Press are able to mingle quite intimately. Usually, one party is sitting on a high chair and leaves before lunch breaks out. My only reservations were that UTR seemed far better positioned for a later-stage startup as opposed to an early-stage. One recommendation would be for DealMakerMedia (host of UTR) to substantially reduce the cost for cost-conscious start-ups. The cost for a one-day pass was nearly $700.

Nevertheless, the presentations were awesome as our personal favorites came down to CloudKick, Symplified, Usable, and Zuora. Each of these companies had a strong and consistent message around their product and value-add. In a conference of “game-changing and paradigm-shifting” technology companies, we felt this was one of the more important aspects of the pitch presentation.

In a related note, Maha Ibrahim (General Partner, Canaan Partners) was like a shark biting at the value propositions of these startups. She lashed her questions with ferocity and demanded knowledgeable and thought-provoking responses. Based on her facial response and body language - she was not awarded with many. We both respect and fear Maha. Here at Cloudize, we’ve learned who NOT to be enemies with…

Lastly, we wanted to note that we got a great opportunity to solicit feedback from the demi-gods of technology. For instance, we got to pitch UTR moderator and President of Cloud Business, Rackspace, Lew Moorman. The guy is sharp as a razor with a piercing stare that would intimidate Chuck Norris, however Lew seemed to like and understand the value of little ol’ Cloudize. Awesome!

The full wrap-up can be found here:
http://www.undertheradarblog.com/blog/announcing-under-the-radar-winners-whos-on-cloud-nine/

Enjoy some of our snapshots from the conference.

Going to TechCrunch’s Cloud Roundtable and Meetup 2/27

Tomorrow, Cloudize will be at TechCrunch’s “Whose Cloud is Anyway?” Roundtable and Meetup at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus. The meetup seeks to answer the following:

1) Will there emerge one victorious cloud platform?

2) Will cloud computing applications become simply mashups of the best cloud apps/platforms/services?

3) We know that the consumer web has headed to the cloud…what enterprise apps will be next?

The panel includes some big players such as:

Dan’l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft
George Zachary, partner, Charles River Ventures
Geoff Ralston, CEO LaLa
David Bernstein, VP/General Manager, Cisco
David Kralik, Silicon Valley office Director of Newt Gingrich

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace

You should check it out:

http://www.techcrunch.com/whose-cloud-is-it-anyway/

See you there,

Edwin