Open-source SugarCRM eyes stock market entry
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Blog: The open-source packaged application company, which is releasing the beta of a major product upgrade, is on track to go public, CEO says.
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InfoWorld - SugarCRM began in 2004 and offers its Sugar CRM package via a hybrid commercial-open source model and delivers it via onsite and on-demand modes.
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Investors are keeping an eye on sequential numbers.
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It adds CRM functionality but faces competition from hosted services.
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SugarCRM has released the 5.0 version of its open-source customer relationship management software following a long period of development and testing.Sugar 5.0 features improvements in three main areas, according to the company:&#160;A new on-demand architecture designed to improve security, tools that let nontechnical users build custom modules, and an AJAX e-mail client that is compatible with any server that supports the POP3 protocol. The release also delivers upgraded dashboarding capabilities.The software went through three beta cycles and was tested more than 30,000 times by members of SugarCRM&#39;s open-source community, said Chris Harrick, senior director of product marketing for the Cupertino, California, company.Harrick said the open-source development model allows software to be vetted far more thoroughly than an in-house quality testing team can.In-house teams &quot;serve their purpose. They do a good job, and they&#39;re hard-working people. But [open-source provides] the wisdom of the crowd,&quot; he argued.Harrick downplayed the fact that it took three betas to achieve a release-worthy product. &quot;I think it&#39;s really a result of our development process. We iterate quickly and get it out there,&quot; he said.The company has created a Flash demo that walks through the new features in detail.China Martens, an analyst with the 451 Group, said SugarCRM is looking to land larger enterprise customers with the 5.0 release.&quot;This is the most substantial kind of project they&#39;ve done ... it was really crucial for them to try and get this right,&quot; Martens said.&quot;We think it&#39;s good, but the bottom line is we want to see bigger users for Sugar until we get really excited,&quot; she added.In a space crowded by seemingly similar CRM offerings, SugarCRM has tried to differentiate itself partly through fostering a user-friendly image, according to Martens. The company&#39;s attitude, according to Martens, is, &quot;Forget about the technical guys, we&#39;re Sugar and you can configure us. We&#39;re friendly.&quot;SugarCRM Professional in on-demand form costs $40 per user per month.
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Helicos BioSciences Corp. of Cambridge, a 71-person firm trying to develop a faster way to analyze genes, is planning to go public in a $100 million stock offering.
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Sharper Image stock may be worth a look at current levels.
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TechWeb - Availability of Entellium's code could speed development of industry-specific CRM products.
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com December 2, 2004, 12:29 PM PT. This priority jumped up two spots into second place as CRM returns into the spotlight among top software initiatives alongside directory services and open source.
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Fastclick sets the stage for a 2005 market debut by filing to go public.
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Are crowds really wise? A growing number of businesses are betting they are. The latest venture is a new incarnation of The Industry Standard, the poster child for the rise ? and precipitous fall ? of the dot-com boom.                                                    Published by International Data Group (InfoWorld?s parent company), the new Industry Standard won?t be the telephone-directory-sized magazine of 1999; in fact, it won?t be a magazine at all. The Industry Standard, which launched this morning, is a Web site featuring editorial content about online business, with social networking components and an online ?casino? where readers make mock-currency bets based on their predictions about trends and events in the world of technology.You might think that bets placed with Monopoly money wouldn?t be meaningful. You?d be wrong. A significant body of academic research supports the idea that predictive markets ? such as Iowa?s Electronic Markets, which features small wagers in real money on national politics ? actually outperform conventional polls, whether or not real money is involved. Moreover, the data generated by those markets has real value.Hewlett-Packard, for example, has been experimenting with an internal predictive market for at least seven years. In one early trial, sales people were encouraged to bet on the number of printers the company would sell. The result? The bettors? predictions were closer to the actual sales numbers than HP?s own internal forecast, said Bernardo Huberman, director of information dynamics at HP Labs.Emile Servan-Schreiber, a cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence engineer who co-founded NewsFutures, a five-year old, online predictive market, says that Google, Microsoft, and perhaps 100 other companies are also experimenting with internal predictive markets. And HP, said Huberman, plans to monetize its work by selling predictive market software and possibly running markets for other companies.Indeed, the global equities markets are, in effect, predictive markets, said Stanford University?s William Sharpe, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. Prices, he said, are very efficient accumulators of information. What about predictive markets for politics and other arenas? ?I?d much rather look at the Iowa market than any of the polls. It?s more accurate,? he said.Betting on the White House ? and more It?s generally illegal in the United States to bet real money in a predictive market. But the Iowa Electronic Markets was granted an exemption because it is widely used for academic research.It works like this: A given candidate ? say, Hillary Clinton ? is represented by shares of virtual stock. In the event that she actually wins the nomination, each share will be worth $1 in real money. If she fails, the stock becomes worthless. Until the day of the actual nomination, traders can buy and sell ? and even short ? her stock.On the evening of Feb. 1, her shares were selling for a bit more than 59 cents, while rival Barack Obama?s were valued at a bit below 48 cents. On the Republican side, shares of John McCain had soared to 82 cents, well above his closest competitor, Mitt Romney, at 12 centsThe money at stake in the Iowa market isn?t large; the maximum investment is just $500. But it attracts legions of savvy political junkies, whose opinions are remarkably prescient. How prescient? The University of Iowa?s business school recently audited the market and found that, since 1988, it beat the conventional polls? accuracy by an average of 74 percent. Bet2give, part of NewsFutures, also uses real money, but any winnings go to the charity of the trader?s choice.Readers of the new Industry Standard will be able to bet fake money on a variety of topics related to online business.? For example, a prediction might state, ?Apple will ship 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008? or ?High-tech venture funding will decrease by 15 percent in Q2 2008.?The predictive market is just one leg of the new publication?s offerings. It will also feature news stories and columns by influential industry thinkers such as Guy Kawasaki, an entrepreneur most famous for his former role as Apple's ?chief evangelist,? and Mark Anderson, CEO of the Strategic News Service.Optimum conditions for wise crowds Remember the old IT dictum ?garbage in, garbage out?? The same applies to predictive markets. After all, ?the problem with the global village is all the global village idiots,? a saying that blogger Paul Ginsparg popularized.The New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki, whose book The Wisdom of Crowds is widely credited with igniting the boom in predictive markets, said crowds can be smart if they address four conditions: diversity, independence, decentralization, and aggregation.Why decentralize? Good decisions (or good bets) are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge. The open source software development process is an example of decentralization in action.Diversity is achieved largely through the absence of hierarchy (markets don?t have vice presidents) which ensures that no single person has too much influence and that diverse viewpoints don?t get shut out, said Surowiecki.That may be why the new Industry Standard won?t have is an editor in chief. ?No single voice will dominate the discussion, which is why we decided to forgo the somewhat print-centric idea of an editor in chief, despite talking to some great people for the position,? said Managing Editor Ian Lamont. ?We want readers to get viewpoints from the widest range of contributors possible, with the common theme being that these contributors are all people who believe that the Web is a major paradigm shift in business.?Turning crowd predictions into revenues HP has refined Surowiecki?s ideas, developing a methodology that may improve the quality of predictions while using a group, instead of a crowd. Assuming that more knowledge equals a better prediction, HP?s Huberman and researchers Leslie Fine and Kay-Ute Chen select participants with knowledge of a specific area ? supply chains, for example ? and then have them play a stock-market-based game.The results of the game let the researchers grade traders on their willingness to take ? or avoid ? risk. They then participate in a market, and their predictions are adjusted by their risk scores. The players win real money, and their predictions are of real use to the company, Huberman said.One of the most successful predictive markets, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, takes play-money bets on weekly movie grosses, Oscar nominations, and the like. Traders? predictions of opening-weekend returns are more accurate than the movie industry?s forecasts, and the exchange has done a good job of foreseeing nominations as well. In 2002, its traders correctly predicted 35 of the 40 Oscar nominees in the top eight categories, Surowiecki wrote in The New Yorker several years ago.The exchange monetizes those predictions by slicing and dicing the data collected on the site and selling (in very real money) it to movie studios and other interested parties, said NewsFutures? Servan-Schreiber. The exchange is private, so there?s no way to estimate how much cash it generates, but it?s successful enough to have been purchased by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a major private equity firm.Taking a leaf from that playbook, the new Industry Standard expects to sell slices of the data it collects on the predictive market via IDC, IDG?s market research arm, said Derek Butcher, The Industry Standard?s vice president and general manager.
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Investors are hoping for good financial news from the search engine giant.
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Looking to get started with stocks? Look no further.
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A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:    Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.    On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.    He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").   You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.
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There's a lot of money to be made in open source, both as a shareholder and for the company.
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A good starting point to analyze a stock is the demand for its products.
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Check out a new free market data service.