Monthly Archives: April 2012

Competitive Energy

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It’s been an exciting week in the Cloud business.  Microsoft and Google both entered the market to compete directly against SugarSync with new products.  I wrote about the Google Drive offering here.

Despite being physically tired from the wedding I worked late the last couple of nights writing the blog post, responding to questions, and talking to everyone about the state of the cloud market from journalists to board members.  I reflected on it as I went to bed last night and I realized how competitive market challenges are energizing to me.  This is in contrast to the typical big-company, political people challenges that consumed lots of my time earlier in my career – those seemed to sap my energy while this one sparks it.

I think we had some of our most thoughtful, creative and strategic discussions at SugarSync in the last few days prompted by these competitive actions.  Maybe this is obvious but it points to why competition is good and why the wealth of competition has led to so much innovation in the technology industry.  When an industry has many players all trying to out-innovate and out-perform each other we are kept on our toes and it is the customer who wins.

Competition also adds energy and even growth to the market.  Yesterday was our biggest day of signups in our history.  Game on!

In the Place Just Right

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‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.

Elder Joseph of the Shaker community in Alfred, Maine was correct:
When we find ourselves in the place just right, ‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

I was in that place this weekend, in that valley.  With my husband, walking my son down the aisle to marry his beloved, a young lady we adore.  All of our children participating and supporting their brother and sister-to-be.  Our parents, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews all there with us. Surrounded by the love of our extended family and dear friends.

It is hard for me to imagine life being sweeter. Sure there were wonderful extras, a beautiful setting, music, food etc.  But that valley of love and delight is created by family and friends.  I’m sure I will be visiting this valley in my memories in the days and years to come.

I’m not sure who to thank for this good fortune but I am truly grateful.

SugarSync, Shared Folders and a Wedding

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We’re in the home stretch of wedding planning for my son Todd.  He is marrying his high school sweetheart and we couldn’t be more thrilled.  We adore Emmanuelle and her family.  But this post is not about gushing about love, romance and wedding bells, it’s about spreadsheets, photo editing, and logistics.

Planning a wedding involves lots of coordination and logistics.  All of this is a little more complicated given modern day lifestyles.  Todd and Emmanuelle (Emu) live in Pittsburgh where they are attending medical school.  Emmanuelle’s parents and we live in the Bay Area near the wedding location but all four parents are working full time – not easy to get together in-person for projects and planning.

The cloud and SugarSync are definitely helping manage in this environment.  An example is the video we want to make for the rehearsal dinner.  Our idea (not original) is to do a photo montage, set to music with photos of both Todd and Emu growing up then pictures of them together.  I set up a shared folder in SugarSync for all the pictures.  We’re all working on our subsets – culling down to a reasonable number (not easy as we like looking at the cute baby pictures but there is some limit to what the guests want to see), ordering etc.  The nice thing is that we can do this at any time, even offline (e.g. for us on the plane home from Italy) and it will all sync.  Working with the photo files and filenames on the local machine is a lot more convenient then pure cloud but in the end the cloud is doing the coordination and synchronization for us.

Spreadsheets, table assignments, todo lists are all being handled the same way. Ditto for copies of budgets, files, contracts.  Using the cloud and SugarSync.  The one thing we are doing via Google docs (to allow for simultaneous multi-person editing of a single file) is the RSVP tracking.  I must say that while it works well for that use case it is a good reminder that I won’t be doing a lot of independent spreadsheets in Google docs anytime soon.  Much less responsive and a hassle work with compared with Excel (more on that in another post) but the comparison was useful.

There are lots of online wedding planning tools but having planned many events including 4 bar/bat mitzvahs and my eldest son’s wedding what works best for me is to use my general work tools Office, iLife, email plus the cloud.  Have you planned any events using the cloud? What has worked best for you?