“We raised $3 million, and we’re effectively an infrastructure company,” James Lindenbaum, co-founder and CEO of Heroku, said at last month’s Structure show, seemingly in half-disbelief.
San Francisco-based Heroku is a hosting and platform provider that helps app developers create, test and deploy their apps more easily. It offers a choice of dedicated and shared resources, making use of Amazon’s flexible cloud-computing platform. And as highlighted by that quote from its CEO, it’s one of a growing number of startups dismantling traditional notions of infrastructure and services in a cloud-based world. One more mortal roasting meat over fire stolen from Mount Olympus.
“Voice,” the lifeblood of the telecom service provider business for more than a century, is now no longer a service, or even a commoditized service, but an inadequate name for a long list of features – from call recording and routing to voice-to-text and more – present in countless custom applications and mashups. They’re being created by small developers and individuals and enabled by firms whose tiny size belies their cloud-given ability to scale.
More than 3,000 developers are now building IP-telephony-enabled apps based on a platform from Twilio, which uses cloud computing services from the likes of Amazon and Salesforce to enable its customers to add telephony to their apps without needing to know in advance, for example, how many ports or channels they’ll need. “We’ll take care of the scale for you,” said Evan Cooke, chief technology officer at Twilio, which employs eight people.
Unlike the isolated Olympians, residents of the cloud understand that power doesn’t come from armies or gold but from handing over your magic to the masses and letting them do with it what they will, creating previously undreamt of things in the process.
This is what Andy Lippman, associate director of the MIT Media Lab and a “visiting fellow” at Nortel Networks, was trying to tell us. At last fall’s TelephonyLive event, He urged service providers to let users “take apart” and reconfigure their own services and devices in order to foment innovation. “The more power you shift to edge, the more inventive the area is,” Lippman said. “Inventions come from the edges.”
He drew a distinction between innovation and inventions, arguing that inventions can be useful or not. But of course, that uncertainty suggests it makes more sense for those determinations to be made by the market and for those risks to be spread out among armies of small entrepreneurs.
Evidence of this logic is everywhere. In June, one of the most popular education apps purchased on the iPhone was created by an 11-year-old boy. He didn’t do it all by himself, mind you – his 9-year-old brother helped. And Apple, which couldn’t have predicted this scenario, enabled it by creating an environment with which it could harness the unpredictable. Without creating that environment, a global tech giant could never have harvested the brain power (and the labor) of a pre-teen boy in Hinsdale, Illinois.
So it should be no surprise what you can do with just $3 million in funding. In the cloud-based age now dawning, success will go to those who most adeptly tap the talent and creativity of their customers.