A lifetime ago, before the market meltdown, when it was just an ordinary recession, there was a theory that the big emerging markets (BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India, China) were "decoupled" from the US economy. According to this theory, when America had problems due to subprime mortgages, these countries would only be affected marginally. Well, that theory has been totally discredited. It turns out that the other web, the web of financial transactions, makes the global economy tightly coupled. But it is possible, faintly possible, that there is another form of decoupling happening between the traditional economy and the innovation economy.

Why is the Enterprise 2.0 market not taking off more strongly? The reason has to do partly with ill-conceived pricing structures: volume-discount (VD) schemes. Fix them, and you fix one of the obstacles preventing the market from expanding rapidly. And by fixing them is meant reversing them, in particular by using volume-increasing schemes.

I'm going through an SEO overhaul of our company's website. There is definitely a combination of art and science that I never appreciated until having to do it. So, to save others some time, here are some very basic things that any business should do to optimize the ranking of its website in search engine results. Nothing explained here is necessarily a secret or difficult to find out. The trick is to find a good cookbook and a process that is easy to follow.

Security in the cloud is a hot topic. But when we interviewed Peter Bell, General Partner at Highland Capital Partners, he went out of his way to emphasize the need for security on the PC. He was "sticking to the script," as Highland has a number of investments in this area, which we'll review. Nevertheless, his basic point is valid. There is little point for the data centers that serve your SaaS applications to have excellent security if your PC leaks like a sieve. To all Mac-heads, good choice, but most people still use PCs!

The Secure Enterprise 2.0 Forum has just released their 2009 industry report and the topic is the top Web 2.0 security threats. Designed to serve as a guideline for assessing the risk involved with using Web 2.0 tools in the workplace, the document is intended to read by anyone considering the introduction of Web 2.0 technology into their workplace. The document doesn't name technologies or companies that in and of themselves are risky, but rather looks at the types of vulnerabilities that Web 2.0 can bring to a business environment.

About 6 months ago, I switched from Outlook to Gmail and wrote about the experience. It was a move I haven't regretted, and I've never been tempted to return to Outlook. Despite a few glitches in the matrix that occur when Gmail goes down, the service is as close to "free, perfect, and now" as it gets. So, why am I spending time switching to an email service by an unknown start-up called Relenta?

True Ventures got our attention by closing a Series A deal in the dark days just after the financial meltdown, funding Syncplicity. It has just announced that it is funding LoopFuse, a late entrant to the very crowded marketing automation space. Sean Dwyer, CEO of LoopFuse, confirms that the Series A investment is $1.4 million. This puts True Ventures into the very elite class of VCs that have sealed two Series A deals in web technology since the financial meltdown (the other VC is Emergence Capital).

Recently, a lot of new non-relational databases have cropped up both inside and outside the cloud. One key message this sends is, "if you want vast, on-demand scalability, you need a non-relational database".

If that is true, then is this a sign that the once mighty relational database finally has a chink in its armor? Is this a sign that relational databases have had their day and will decline over time? In this post, we'll look at the current trend of moving away from relational databases in certain situations and what this means for the future of the relational database.

If you sell SaaS, security is the big concern you have to deal with. Get past that one and you'll draw serious attention from potential customers. Stumble on the issue and you're in deep doo-doo. That is ever truer when money is involved. Who wants a leak in their accounting data? When a big vendor slips up with security, David is given a clear shot at Goliath. And when a market is in the "tornado" growth phase, vendors do what it takes to highlight their competitors' weaknesses. This is the story behind the emerging battle between two UK accounting vendors, Kashflow and Sage.

Emergence Capital is a VC firm that got our attention when it closed two Series A deals in November (with Maxplore and Zuberance). That is pretty cool at a time when most VCs were ringing alarms and knee-deep in doom and gloom. The New York Times even asked "Maybe We Should Call Them Venture Pessimists", citing a "quarterly Silicon Valley Venture Capital Confidence Index, which found that venture capitalists' confidence has reached its fifth consecutive quarterly low." Closing two Series A deals in November plants Emergence securely on our A-Team. So, we decided to interview Emergence and find out why it is "greedy when others are fearful".