Last week, as I was working through my online “to do” list that I have automatically sent to me via TrackVia, an e-mail popped up that was forwarded to me from my 13-year-old son Kaleb. He wrote:

Dear Dad,

Since you’ve been sending me so many daily thoughts, I thought I’d send you one! We all know that we’re not perfect, and we feel bad about it, but usually we don’t do a lot about it. The key to this is finding a specific problem and fixing it. So, every night, as you reflect upon your day, think of something you did wrong that day (or recently), and try never to make the mistake again. The next night, determine whether you solved the problem. If you did, move on to a new one you can fix. If not, try again the next day. If you follow this pattern every day, you will have a lot more peace in your life.

Love,
Kaleb

My first thought was, Wow, pretty heavy for a 13-year-old! But Kaleb’s a bright kid and certainly mature for his age. My second thought was, Hmmm, maybe he’s right.

So, if you’re one of the customers I’ve reached out to recently as your TrackVia account representative, please feel free to contact me with your TrackVia problems. I promise to work on them — one per day!

You cannot turn on the radio, TV or even walk down the street in Denver without hearing the buzz about the Democratic National Convention coming to town.

It has been a hundred years since the last convention was held in Denver. A 1908 New York Times article referred to the convention as a “show” and referenced the mounted police on horseback and lemonade/fruit vendors on the corners. If the convention was billed as a show in 1908, I can only imagine what that same reporter would call the extravaganza that is to be the 2008 DNC. From reported Secret Service agents on rooftops to the closing of I-25 for the Obama speech at Invesco Field at Mile High, Denver is not holding back.

There was an elaborate ticket distribution scheme for the 2008 Convention, and I can only hope that the organizers learned from the 1908 convention, which “had blundered in distributing tickets” resulting in a thousand empty seats on the first day of the convention. The Broncos fill the stadium for all games, and I know the interest in seats to this event was great so it would be a shame if seats were empty.

A lot has changed in Denver since the first convention, and I look forward to having our city showcased to Democrats and Republicans alike during the DNC.

Up next: telesoftware!

Dell’s recent attempt to trademark the term “cloud computing” illustrates the importance of buzzwords in the high-tech industry. Cloud computing is on a roll, with almost 400 mentions in the mainstream media this year, according to Google News – more than all of 2007, and twenty times the number in 2006. But if history is any guide, none of us will be talking about cloud computing in two years. Not because it will have failed – to the contrary, cloud computing has been going strong for more than a decade – but because we’ll have found a new word for it. 

Let’s rewind. In the mid-1990’s, the idea of delivering hosted software through the Internet was called, well, hosted software. As the dot-com crescendo built, a new term was invented: “application service provider,” or ASP. As the chart below shows, talk of ASPs reached fever pitch in the year 2000, with more than 20,000 press mentions – more than thirty times what cloud computing is on pace for in 2008!

In the Internet Dark Ages of 2003 to 2005, ASP talk quieted down. But then a brand, new, shiny term came along: “software as a service,” or SaaS. The big year for SaaS was 2006, with more than 10,000 media mentions. No dot-com bubble, but excitement nonetheless. Alas, it too became passé, with press mentions dropping by half in 2007.

The key point, though, is that many of the companies discussed in those ASP and SaaS stories, and today’s cloud computing stories, are the same. Chief among them is Salesforce.com, the ASP/SaaS/cloud-computing poster child. Same companies, same business models, same pros and cons; different buzzword.

So I expect the cloud computing discussion to reach its peak in 2009 and then plummet as sharply as ASP and SaaS did. (I plan on shouting, “The cloud is dead! Long live the cloud!”) What will take its place? Well, let me think…how about telesoftware? “Tele” as in from afar, like television and telephone. I like the ring of that: TrackVia, the world’s first teledatabase. Maybe we’ll trademark it and sell it to Dell in two years.

Veteran TrackVia users have probably noticed that our “views” feature has evolved over the past few months, making it easier and more efficient (we hope) to organize and view your information.

Never ones to rest on our laurels, today we’re launching a few more enhancements that affect views. To introduce these new enhancements, and more importantly help you find tools that have moved to new places, we offer the following tips:

• Views have a new Format drop-down menu that allows you to change the format of a view between Table (rows and columns), Edit-all mode, Statistics, Map, Print, and Excel. Note that this menu has replaced the links that used to appear at the top of each view. So if you’re trying to figure out where the “Excel” link went, look in the new Format pull-down!
• In the Tools area of every database is a new link called Arrange Default Views. Default views are those views that appear on your database overview page. By clicking this tool, you can now quickly add, remove, and reorder (by drag-and-drop) the views you want on your database overview page. Accordingly, we’ve removed the “Show on Database Overview page?” option that used to appear when editing a view.
• You can now choose a default format for your views, so that a view always displays as a map, statistics, or in edit-all mode. This means you can have maps and pie charts appear on your database overview page.
• The option to mail merge a report has moved to the Mail Merge tool, under the Tools area of each database. To merge a document template with a view, instead of running the view first and using the “mail merge” link, you should go to the Mail Merge tool and select the view from there. Merging a single record with a template is still done using the link on the view-record page.

We think these changes make TrackVia views easier to use and more flexible. Please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions!