In San Francisco, one of the flagship programs we’re excited to be a part of is called PeopleBrowsr Labs, a startup accelerator geared toward technology companies in the area. As you sit in the PeopleBrowsr office, the brilliance in the air is almost palpable … Young companies doing innovative things with everything they need to be successful at their disposal. One of the fringe benefits for participants in PeopleBrowsr Labs is that they’re actually rubbing elbows with the PeopleBrowsr team as well … Which is almost worth the price of admission.

In addition to the Labs sponsorship, SoftLayer is also the infrastructure provider for PeopleBrowsr and its unbelievable data mine of information. They’ve got every tweet that’s been tweeted since early 2008, and they’ve been able to take that content and make sense of it in unique and interesting ways … And that’s why we stopped by for a visit this week. Last night, PeopleBrowsr officially launched Kred, a dynamic and innovative social influence measurement platform, to a LOT of fanfare (see: TechCrunch).

In the midst of the launch-day craziness, we grabbed Scott Milener, PeopleBrowsr SVP of business development, to have him explain a little about Kred, what differentiates it from the other social influence measurements and what it means for users interested in engaging more effectively with their social networks. Check it out:

With the clear success of the announcement, we want to send a shout out of congratulations to the PeopleBrowsr team. It looks like a phenomenal leap forward in understanding social engagement, and we know it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we’ll see coming out of the PeopleBrowsr office in the near future.

If you feel a little jaded by the social influence measurements you’ve seen, Kred’s transparency and community-centricity should be refreshing: http://kred.ly

-@PaulFord

When Facebook launched back in 2004, it was designed with college kids in mind. I remember when you HAD to have a college email address to set up a Facebook account – the good ole days. A year or two later, Facebook created a separate section for high school students, and not too long after that, anyone on the planet could get a Facebook account, and the growing/changing audience necessitated changes in the platform.

Facebook is a great way to find old friends and catch up, and it’s also an easier way to update everyone all at once what you are doing. I found out my best friend was engaged on Facebook … That’s right. I found out by Facebook before I got a phone call. Facebook is like a drug – it’s addictive. Some people live there all day.

If you work for an IT company, you know that technology is constantly changing. To keep up with evolutions in technology and perceived needs of the growing user base, Facebook will update its platform every few months. If you have a Facebook account, you’ve probably noticed that they released a new layout this week. You’ve probably also noticed all of your friends’ status changes complaining about how they hate the way it looks, how “It’s too hard to use.” Those friends hated the old “new Facebook,” and somewhere down the road, they’ve learned to love and/or depend on that “new Facebook” which is now in the “old Facebook” category. It’s pretty annoying right?

Here’s my advice for the change-averse:

1. If Facebook didn’t change, it would get stagnant and someone else would introduce something better … The same way Facebook supplanted MySpace. DEAL WITH IT.
2. If you don’t like the changes Facebook makes, DELETE your account and move to a new Social Network like Twitter or try out Google+.
3. Instead of complaining how hard the new Facebook is to use, take the time to READ the instructions they have provided for you … From a desktop you are able to mouse over a section and it will tell you what it means and how to use it.
4. Last but not least – whining is for babies and last time I checked you were in your 20′s, 30′s, 40′s, and up – so suck it up!

Whew! Now that felt good …

- Natalie

With more than 80,000 active servers and 550+ employees, SoftLayer is essentially a Geek Think Tank of employees and and proving ground of sorts for customers. As I’m writing this, the faint hum of our generators and cooling systems remind me that the next Facebook or Microsoft might be getting started in the data center pod right below my desk at our Dallas Alpha HQ.

Just considering that prospect reinforced to me that the geeks have really done it! The 2.0 millennium has been marked by the rise YouSpaceTwitterWikiMyTube sites spurred on by textbook-definition nerdy underdogs … It’s right in line with Lance’s theory of world domination. No longer are geeks merely the Steve Urkels of the business world.

They’re successful, smart, savvy, innovative early adopters.

Let’s take a moment and explore some of the more polarizing geeks of our day – Geeks who made being a geek cool:

• Steve Jobs – 500,000 iPads sold by the end of the first week of release. Apple’s market cap exceeds that of Microsoft for the first time since 1989. Open Source application development and support is a key part of its ongoing software strategy.
• Bill Gates – Windows, Microsoft Office, Xbox and their new “To the cloud” focus.
• Mark Zuckerberg – The Founder of Facebook:
  • More than 500 million active users
  • Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform
    • Many of whom use SoftLayer as their Infrastructure host
  • People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
• Peter Parker – Spider Man – Peter has a natural gift for the sciences and is considered by some genius. After being bit by a radioactive spider Peter develops super physical human strength and ability along with a sixth sense for danger.
• Dwight Schrute – Top salesman for the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. Winner of numerous sales awards. One-time Assistant to the Regional Manager and beet farmer extraordinaire

Alright … I might be getting carried away lumping fictional characters into the mix, but you get my point.

As a member of the SLales department, I am forever “geeking out” over new and exciting applications, products and tools the our customers are coming up with. Although I don’t believe I can truly claim my geek badge of honor yet, I aspire to reaching that rank.

-Arielle

PS: For the geeks out there, (without cheating) what year was the first Star Wars film released? Did you see it in the theater? If you weren’t alive when it was released, when did you first see it?

One minute, I was enjoying Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker (of Napster fame) yelling, “Let’s get some Sho…” and the next minute, I’m smacking my iPad to figure out what happens next. Since they were at a club, I assume he was saying “shots,” but I may or may not have had shots at the SoftLayer Happy Hour, so I might have been projecting.

Needless to say, I was mentally writing a sternly worded email to the higher-ups at Apple as I smacked my iPad like a early 80′s televesion set to get the movie to start again. The story was interesting, and I couldn’t help but think about its motivational slant.

Sometimes when you do the same job for a few years, you lose focus of where you’ve been and where you’re headed … both on a personal level and on a company level. I’ve had the opportunity to see SoftLayer grow from “start-up mode” to where we are today, and in the course of that growth, I filled seven or eight different positions throughout the organization. From the frontlines of support to the back office of marketing to large scale projects that work strategically on the company as a whole, I’ve seen our success from every angle. And The Social Network reinvigorated me with a fresh wave of SoftLayer-focused motivation.

What I’m trying to figure out now is which perspective in the story I was most motivated by. Is it okay to be inspired by the way Zuckerburg executed on the idea of “thefacebook,” or does the moral compass require me to root for the Harvard Connect gang? Does Sean Parker’s vision for Facebook and influence on its growth lose steam if it’s framed by how it affected Eduardo Saverin?

Regardless of which sides are the “right” ones to take, each involves a dramatic departure from the status quo. I’m not encouraging you to go start a legal war or model your business after Facebook’s quasi-factual history, but don’t be afraid to rock the boat a little if it needs to be rocked.

Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.” If that quote were to pick a side in the movie, it would be on the now-defunct Harvard Connect side … With a few billion dollars less than the alternative.

-Skinman

For our first few giveaways, we asked our followers to post a phrase like “I love @SoftLayer! They’re Bigger, Better, Badder. For hosting that rocks: http://softlayer.com/.” We got a great response, but that task was a little too easy. To make the next set of giveaways a little more challenging, we started asking SoftLayer Trivia questions and rewarding the first correct responder. The content of the questions spanned the spectrum from SoftLayer-specific facts to off-the-wall esoteric trivia.

Here are a few of our favorites:

• At Parallels Summit in Feb, four SoftLayer employees caught something. What was it and how has it been used?
• A SoftLayer executive shares his name with a Houston-based rapper. Who is he?
• What is SoftLayer’s ASN? What is the server capacity of our Dallas facilities? IPv6 addresses are how many bits?
• The SoftLayer “3 Bars” logo is based on a seven-layer model. What is it? What are the seven layers? What is the most common protocol you hear of from it?
• In the holiday song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” what did “my true love” give to me on Day 11?

What kind of swag are we talking about here? I thought you’d never ask:

As you can see, we’re not just sending out pens and paperweights.

Don’t be sad if you’re just now learning about these giveaways … As it turns out, this blog post is your opportunity to get in on the action. Last week, we teased the idea of a “Social Media” adventure, and here it is.

The first ten participants to complete all of the tasks below win their very own swag bag.

• Leave a comment on this blog post telling us which one of our data center locations you’d choose for your next server and why.
• Visit our Facebook page and leave a post on our wall with your favorite feature of SoftLayer’s offerings
• Post a Tweet that includes “@SoftLayer is awesome” and #socialmediaadventure
• Click through to the YouTube page for the video above and leave a comment on it like “SoftLayer’s hosting rocks!”
• Send an email to khazard@softlayer.com with your blog comment author name, Facebook name, Twitter handle and YouTube username so we verify you’ve completed the adventure.

If you’ve had a tough time finding that perfect present for the person who has everything, the SoftLayer swag bag might be exactly what you’re looking for. Instead of circling the mall for half an hour looking for a parking spot, you’ll complete our challenge in about five minutes, and your SoftLayer gear will be on its way to you.

On your mark. Get set. GO!

-@khazard

My appreciation for Kevin and Scott Mosier has clambered up a notch following this article on Techdirt. Read the article and watch the embedded video and I think you will soon see what I mean. Smith and Mosier, for lack of a better phrase, ‘get it’ or perhaps they backed into things and ‘got it’ once it had happened. They understand the notion of building an audience; they understand the idea that it is tough to build something and monetize it immediately. In a world driven (supposedly) by instant gratification, they have introduced the word patience.

While it seems antithetical, there is a certain truth to this – there are very few businesses that went viral and surged to terrific profitability as soon as they started to Tweet or became active on Facebook. For 99.99% of businesses, audience takes time to build, which means that success takes time to come. And oftentimes, it does not come at all despite best efforts.

Twitter, Facebook, and podcasts are all part of a toolbox that, if used properly, can build something much more valuable than the stand-alone channel. As Techdirt author, Mike Masnick, points out; Smith has been able to build something that he can monetize by giving away some goods free. He has taken the time to build his audience and now he is reaping the rewards by monetizing other, ancillary efforts.

I am not implying that all business is equal – there are few comparisons to Kevin Smith that make sense for most business beyond the fact that everyone is producing something and trying to sell it. But I think the lessons are the same across most businesses – audience is not instant. In fact, I am not sure that it ever was (that said, I suppose beer was probably close to an instant success when the Egyptians invented it and stated to hieroglyph about it. It was probably the rage of Alexandria in short order). Simply beginning to Tweet and expecting instant success is a fool’s game. However, starting the game with the notion that Twitter, Facebook and whatever is next are useful tools to build toward success, forces a deal more patience and an almost deliberate approach. Here we can find success. Not overnight success for most, but success nonetheless.

As the saying goes recognizing the problem / challenge is half the battle. All we need to do now is figure out what to do next. I am working on it.

-@quigleymar

When Don Draper was thinking about making his clients happy in 1964, print, radio, television and billboards comprised the palate that he had to play with. The Internet has changed this in ways Don would struggle to comprehend were he to time travel to 2010. This new palate is virtually endless, essentially combining everything that Don was familiar with, putting it in one place (sort of), and then putting it on steroids.

While Don would have a hard time understanding the internet, he would appreciate the power that it brings, and not only in terms of how he can get his message across. The ability to track who goes where and what they do when they get there has enabled market segmentation far beyond what Don would have ever considered. And because the internet has a little something for everyone, companies are able to market with a greater degree of accuracy.

In theory, we ought to be able to spend less money to reach OUR audience, versus spending more money to hit a broader audience only some of whom are interested in what we do. Theory also dictates that companies ought to be able to measure a real return on this investment. Don would be amazed as this was mostly unheard of in his world – the desire was there, but no one really knew which parts of the budget were delivering results. As the old saying goes “I know that half of what I spend is wasted. I just don’t know which half.”

The advent of ‘social networking’ sites like Facebook or Twitter has made matters more challenging as they change the relationship a company has with its target audience.

First, a company first needs to be attractive enough to merit being followed or ‘friended’. This theoretically means that a captive, receptive audience has self-selected for you. The challenge is in understanding why people show up in the first place.

A Facebook page provides the audience with a profile – this gives the audience context and a reason for adding you as a friend. Twitter is not like this in that in depth profiles do not exist in the same way. On Twitter, the ‘who you are’ element plays itself out over a series of 140 character Tweets. The odd part is that people often ‘follow’ based on a single Tweet, which may or may not be related to what you do. The audience is there, but the intention is often less clear.

While I understand why I follow the people I follow, I confess that there are Tweets that I get from people that I follow for reasons I have long since forgotten. It gets tough to filter things when you are following only 186 people like me, never mind the thousands that some people do. For example, journalist Leo Laporte follows 1,427 people, while English actor / author Stephen Fry follows an astonishing 53,230 people. When you are following that many people, there is not going to be a lot of consistency regarding a decision made to follow. Indeed, the inflow of Tweets is so prodigious that filtering the noise must be next to impossible.

Does that mean that Twitter does not have value as a marketing tool? Don would probably think so, but I don’t. I think that Twitter becomes a valuable tool, but not as a standalone means to reach your customer. If you start to think about Twitter (in combination with a bunch of other stuff) as a means to build community, then I think you are on the right track… I will get to that line of thought later.

-@quigleymar

Softlayer moves at a pace that I am not overly familiar with given time I have spent with some very large (and inevitably slow moving) companies. It has been a pleasure to find myself in a group of ‘quick-thinking doers’ versus ‘thinkers that spend too much time thinking and not enough time doing.’ I have seen fewer PowerPoint decks and Excel spreadsheets this week than I thought was possible. It makes for a pleasant change, and change is a good thing (My wardrobe has also undergone a SoftLayer transformation. It now features black shirts and some more black shirts).

The week began with the announcement that SoftLayer had launched its second Dallas data center. The data center (DAL05) has capacity for 15,000 servers, delivers 24×7 onsite support, and has multiple security protocols controlling entrance to the facility. The diesel generators that sit outside are massive – think of a locomotive on steroids. DAL05 is fully connected to SoftLayer’s data centers at the INFOMART in Dallas, in Seattle, Washington, and in the Washington D.C. area in addition to the company’s network Points of Presence in seven additional U.S. cities.

The reason for the expansion is simple – Softlayer continues to grow. In fact, our new office location would appear to be mostly a home for large generators and server racks in the future than it is for people (there are more of those to come, too). Current plans call for the addition of two more pods to DAL05 to come alive over the next 18 – 24 months. In addition a facility in San Jose is expected to go live early in 2011 and we are in the midst of international expansion plans. There is a lot going on around here.

I think it is interesting to step back for a second and take a look at what is driving this growth. The fact that SoftLayer is ruthlessly efficient, allowing customers to get from 0 to 60 faster than anyone else is certainly one reason. So are the fantastic support processes that are in place. The guys around here are very good at what they do. That being said this is a time when a rising tide is raising all ships. And this is a good thing. I mean, we want to beat our competition with every time we see them across the table, but we are glad that there are enjoying their share of success because it means the marketplace is booming. Even better, it is showing no sign of letting up.

The changes that we have witnessed in the past fifteen years are nothing short of staggering. I remember sending faxes to clients as the primary means of document exchange and then being thrilled at the notion of a single AOL account via dial up being shared by five people in the office. Now I have access to the internet via at least two devices in the office and one when I am not. At home I surf the net and watch content streamed via NetFlix over my iPad. My son plays the PS3 online with his pals, my daughter spends time watching Dora the Explorer on the Nick Jr. website and my wife has reopened countless friendships with high school friends that she has not seen in decades via Facebook. I don’t think that I am unusual in my habits either. None of this happened ten years ago.

The most recent wave has come with the arrival of social networking sites (which had a much different definition when I was young!) and associated applications. Companies like Twitter and Facebook has driven a terrific amount of innovation, and continues to do so. So too have companies like Apple – music downloads and application downloads are now in the billions. The net result of this has been in a terrific amount of business for companies like SoftLayer. I mean, who ever thought that on-line farming would drive as much interest, traffic and money as it has? And the really cool part of all of this is that the world my kids will occupy in ten years is going to be richer than mine by at least an order of magnitude. SoftLayer will be there to make it all work. It is going to be a fun ride.

-@quigleymar

Image from Wikipedia Commons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chichen_Itza_3.jpg

While the temples are cool, even more amazing are the little details the Ancient Mayans put into this that really set it off. Things like the serpent visible only on the spring equinox, the echo when you clap (which sounds like a bird – no kidding!), amongst others.

What’s really interesting here is the story of human engineering, and to see how far it’s come since those ancient times, and even though Its mind-boggling to see how far we’ve come, it’s quite intriguing to see what they did with their own type of technology.

While they used to clap at the temple, we now send facebook or twitter posts. They passed their stories and music verbally over centuries, and we share MP3s and other media across the globe at the speed of light. While SoftLayer sits at the edge of technology with our state of the art datacenters, hardware, and networking topology, it’s pretty hard to compare to the tools used by, and the creations made by the people of this era. Luckily our tour guide re-assured us that we’ll be fine in 2012, despite what the movies say, so we’ll have plenty of time to see some more amazing advances in technology. Who knows that our future generations will say about our ‘rudimentary’ communications and technology some 2500 years from now.