Salesforce.com's $212 Million Acquisition of Heorku - A Sparkling Gem In Radiant Future Of Cloud And PaaS

I met James Lindenbaum, a founder of Heroku, in early 2009, at the Under The Radar conference in Mountain View. We had a long conversation on cloud as a great platform for Ruby, why Ruby on Rails is a better framework than PHP, and viability of PaaS as a business model. He also explained to me why he chose to work on Heroku at Y Combinator. I was sold on their future, on that day, and kept in touch with them since then. The last week, Salesforce.com acquired Heroku for $212 million. That's one successful exit, which is good news in many different dimensions.

PaaS is a viable business model

PaaS is not easy. It takes time, laser sharp focus, and hard work to build something that the developers would use and pay for. A few companies have tried and many have failed. But, it is refreshing to see the platform and the ecosystem that Heroku has built since its inception. Heroku did not raise a lot of money, kept the cost low, and attracted customers early on. I was told (by Byron, I think) that an average cost for Heroku to run a free Ruby app for a month was $1. They considered it as marketing cost to get new customers and convert the free customers to paying ones, as they outgrew their needs. I cannot overpraise this brilliant execution model. I hope to see more and more entrepreneurs being inspired from - simplicity, elegance, and execution of Heroku's model - to help the developers deploy, run, and scale their applications on the cloud. In the last few years, we have seen a great deal of innovation in dynamic programming languages, access algorithms, and NoSQL persistence stores. They all require a PaaS that the developers can rely on - without worrying about the underlying nuts and bolts - and focus on what they are good at - building great applications. If anyone had the slightest doubt on viability of PaaS as a business model, this acquisition is a proof point that PaaS is indeed the future. Heroku is just the beginning and I am hoping for more and more horizontal as well as vertical PaaS that the entrepreneurs will aspire to build.

Superangels and incubators do work

There have been many debates on viability of the investing approach of the superangels and the incubators, where people are questioning, whether the approach of thin slicing the investment, by investing into tens and hundreds of companies, would yield similar returns, as compared to return on traditional venture capital investment. I also blogged about the imminent change in the VC climate, and decided to watch their returns. The numbers are in with Heroku. It's a first proof point that a superangel or an incubator approach, structurally, does not limit the return on the investment. I believe in investors investing in right people solving the right problems. If you ever meet James and hear him passionately talk about Ruby, the Heroku platform, and the developer community, you will quickly find out why they were successful. Hats off to YC on finding this "jewel". No such thing as too little investment, or too many companies.

Ruby goes enterprise

I know many large ISVs that have been experimenting with Ruby for a while, but typically these efforts are confined to a few small projects. It's good to see that Ruby, now, has a shot of getting much broader adoption. This would mean more developers learning Ruby, cranking out great enterprise gems, embracing Git, and hopefully open source some of their work. I have had many religious discussions, with a few cloud thought leaders and bloggers in the past few months, regarding the boundaries of PaaS. The boundaries have always been blurry - somewhere between SaaS and IaaS - but, I don't care. My heart is at delivering the applications off the cloud that scales, delivers compelling experiences, and leverages economies of scale and network effects. To me, PaaS is means to an end and not the end. I am hoping that an acquisition of a PaaS vendor by a successful SaaS vendor will make Ruby more attractive to enterprise ISVs and non-Ruby developers.

I have no specific insights into what Salesforce.com will do with Heroku, but I hope, they make a good home for Heroku, where they flourish and continue to do great work on Ruby and PaaS. This is what a cloud and Ruby enthusiast would wish for.

15 YEARS OLD GIRL IMPREGNATED AND MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR IT TOOK FOR AN ABORTION THAT FAILED

BBI FACILITATE ARREST OF 35 YEARS OLD FOR DEFILEMENT, IMPREGNATING 15 YEARS OLD GIRL AND ABORTING FIVE MONTHS PREGNANCY IN ANAMBRA STATE. Today, at 1:26pm, We received a complaint from a concerned citizen who informed us of a 15yrs old girl brought into a hospital for medical treatment. Our intelligence team led by Director General Gwamnishu Emefiena Harrison Kenneth Nwaobi Ezika Kene and others left Asaba and arrived Ogidi Anambra state for investigation. 35yrs Chris Azuoma took the victim to hospital where she was injected and given abortion pills. She bled heavily and had complications and so decided to take her to a specialist hospital to evacuate the foetus. Getting to the hospital, we met the management and identified ourselves as Human rights group and they granted us permission to interview the victim. She confirmed the story and the perpetrator confessed forcefully having unprotected sexual intercourse with the victim. 2015 Administration of Criminal Justice permit private per

Hacking Into The Indian Education System Reveals Score Tampering

Debarghya Das has a fascinating story on how he managed to bypass a silly web security layer to get access to the results of 150,000 ISCE (10th grade) and 65,000 ISC (12th grade) students in India. While lack of security and total ignorance to safeguard sensitive information is an interesting topic what is more fascinating about this episode is the analysis of the results that unearthed score tampering. The school boards changed the scores of the students to give them "grace" points to bump them up to the passing level. The boards also seem to have tampered some other scores but the motive for that tampering remains unclear (at least to me). I would encourage you to read the entire analysis and the comments , but a tl;dr version is: 32, 33 and 34 were visibly absent. This chain of 3 consecutive numbers is the longest chain of absent numbers. Coincidentally, 35 happens to be the pass mark. Here's a complete list of unattained marks - 36, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53,

Reveiw: Celluon Epic Laser Keyboard

The Celluon Epic is a Bluetooth laser keyboard. The compact device projects a QWERTY keyboard onto most flat surfaces. (Glass tabletops being the exception) You can connect the Epic to vertically any device that supports Bluetooth keyboards including devices running iOS , Android , Windows Phone, and Blackberry 10. On the back of the device there is a charging port and pairing button. Once you have the Epic paired with your device it acts the same as any other keyboard. For any keyboard the most important consideration is the typing experience that it provides. The virtual keyboard brightness is adjustable and is easy to see in most lighting conditions. Unfortunately the brightness does not automatically adjust based on ambient light. With each keystroke a beeping sound is played which can be turned down. The typing experience on the Epic is mediocre at best. Inadvertently activating the wrong key can make typing frustrating and tiring. Even if you are a touch typist you'll still

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