I’m a start-up guy! I’ve been living the startup life for more than 20 years. (Click here to see my recent article on Boston.com’s Hive.) Start-ups are the economic engine that drives the entire global economy. It is where innovation pushes business and humanity forward and where the jobs are created.
And now, everything is moving to the cloud. At Blackwave, my last company, we spent about $4 Million a year in hardware and network gear just to develop and test our product and operate our business. Today, I’d spend a fraction of those cloud based services. No stand-alone data center. No IT closet with upgraded electrical and air conditioning. No lost office real estate. And, as we grow, we can access more servers, and create bigger networks in minutes, not months.
The cloud allows start-ups to plow more precious cash into talent and development, rather than capital expenditures. In addition, the cloud gives every startup equal footing – to be agile – from the development team to the marketing team.
Why Startups Are Following the Trends
Just last week, the incomparable Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, published her latest slide deck of amazingly useful data, the “2012 Internet Trends Year-End Update.”While it is not directly about start-ups per se, Ms. Meeker definitely shines the light as to opportunities that are available to technology start-ups, specifically in application development.
- Meeker’s research shows 2.4 billion Internet users worldwide, a number that’s still growing eight percent yearly.
- There are 1.1 billion smartphone subscribers worldwide — but that’s still just 17 percent of the global cellphone market.
- There is now visible evidence of a dramatic shift away from Windows-powered Intel machines that has been
going on for the past few years. Although Apple drove a wedge into the Windows/Intel monopoly, Google’s Android OS is what has been eating Microsoft’s lunch. Since Q4 2010, the combined shipments of Android tablets and smartphones have exceeded the number of PCs shipped, with no sign of reversal. - 29 percent of adults in the U.S. now own either a tablet or an e-reader.
- Mobile devices now account for 13 percent of worldwide Internet traffic, up from 4 percent in 2010.
- Mobile app and advertising revenue has grown at an annual rate of 129 percent since 2008, and now tops $19 billion.
- Mobile traffic app Waze has been adding users faster than all GPS makers combined have sold personal navigation units, and it’s been that way since the beginning of 2012.
Mary’s presentation details how these computing devices and connectivity trends are leading to the complete re-imagination and transformation of everything around us – from encyclopedias to money. At the center of it all is “the cloud.”
Introducing the ProfitBricks Foundation Program 
This is an exciting time for the start-up/innovation community. That’s why it is so important to nurture this important segment. It’s also why I’m introducing the ProfitBricks Foundation Program for Startups at tonight’s Massachusetts Innovation Night to be held at the Boston Globe.
ProfitBricks is offering qualifying startups virtual data centers, featuring the industry’s first user-defined network configurations, at a dramatically reduced cost for one year. The program rolls- out today to qualifying New England startups and will be expanded across the country beginning in early 2013.
Companies with revenue of less than $1 million per year will be eligible to receive the use of a single ProfitBricks cloud server for one year for free. Additionally, qualifying start-ups will also receive a 20 percent discount off of all other additional IaaS services from ProfitBricks for one year.
ProfitBricks’ clear, simple pricing model enables startups to break free from the typically complex and confusing cloud computing pricing model that, until now, has been widespread across the industry.
Every startup deserves a cloud infrastructure that offers the speed and flexibility they need to stay competitive. We want to offer ProfitBricks’ virtual data center technology to startups who value access to cost-effective, next-generation cloud computing services. Our Data Center Designer, and APIs enable startups to get up and running faster and spend less time on DevOps.
Take advantage of the ProfitBricks Foundation Program — Contact ProfitBricks Today!
- Telephone – 866-852-5229
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