I recently sat down with the folks at VisibleGains and other members of our technology team to talk about our thoughts on structured team collaboration, as well as search and our partner Attivio. Mush Hakhinian also gives an interesting talk about security with two-factor authentication and our partner RSA, while Charlie Weiblen discusses performance enhancement and our partner Akamai.

Please click on the video below to watch.

I was recently invited by Sasa Zorovic, Managing Director and Senior Software Analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott to attend their "Software and Service" conference in New York and participated on a panel titled "Best Practices in SaaS." Other panel participants included the CEOs of other SaaS or SaaS investment companies including Advent Software, Internet Capital Group and Management Dynamics. It was really energizing to be in the company of CEOs that share the same passion, energy and commitment to bring real and immediate value to customers through a SaaS-based software and delivery model!

I just returned from speaking at the Akamai Customer Conference as a member of a panel called “Accelerating Global Collaboration across the Enterprise.” It fell into the first of three tracks at the conference: 1) Enterprise / High Tech, 2) Media & Entertainment, and 3) Commerce. (Incidentally, I noticed the panel had a much higher number of attendees this year than in the past. Is this a direct correlation to my participation?)

The overwhelming response by the media, bloggers, and consumers to Sidekick’s data loss earlier this month was the usual question: Whose fault is this? Many doubts were raised as to whether or not the cloud can be trusted with any valuable information.

What wasn’t addressed in the flurry of responses to the Sidekick news was any indication of a practical course of action. It ignores the two fundamental concerns that everyone shares: Consumers and business users have increasing volumes of data that need to be securely shared with authorized parties, as well as backed up for safe keeping.

The first problem of controlling data access is becoming increasingly complex to address, since information needs to be shared with new categories of users, sometimes outside of the data owner’s control. The second problem of backing up data lies not in the complexity but in volume.

This past summer, websites all over the Internet banded together to defeat a terrible scourge that was "stifling innovation," "awful," and "restricting." This scourge was not the work of hackers, anti-competitive behavior, or hardware failure. This scourge was Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), one of the most downloaded web browsers in the history of the Internet.

The ‘Kill IE6' movement received so much notoriety that it made the front page of CNN. In tech circles, blogs like Mashable led the charge with the article IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On. Within that article, author Ben Parr states that "15 to 25 percent of the world's browsing [is] done in a browser created in the digital Stone Age (aka 2001)."