June Forecast: Cloudiness

Two free events coming up, related to cloud computing...

On June 4th, Branko Gerovac and David Carver have put together a panel on The State of Startups Using Cloud Computing. It takes place at the Vilna Shul on Beacon Hill.

The limited tix to the second will vanish in a flash: Intuit founder Scott Cook, local GM Bill Lucchini, and VCs like Jeff Bussgang, Jeffrey Beir, and Todd Hixon will be speakers at Startups and the Cloud, coming up June 11th at Bentley. A CEO panel will feature chief execs from Pixily, DimDim, and ClickFuel.

(There's also a cloud session on June 22nd as part of the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.)

The latest Globe column: Can Pixily duplicate Netflix's success?

Sunday's Globe column focused on a boot-strapped start-up called Pixily. From the opening:

Like Netflix, Pixily has bright, durable envelopes. The difference is that instead of sending DVDs, you send Pixily a stack of documents you'd like digitized. Pixily scans the documents for you, makes the text searchable online, and then either returns the documents to you by mail or shreds them and recycles the paper.

A plan that allows you to send in one envelope a month (envelopes can contain up to 50 items) costs $14.95 per month.

Will it fly? Pixily, with its sprightly name, is onto something big. Who doesn't have a desk cluttered with papers that can't be thrown away, but might never be glanced at again?

...

But to make Pixily a household word, the company's founders will need to crack the riddle that faces every entrepreneurial venture: How do you generate awareness and acquire customers without spending yourself into oblivion?

Here's the video, with Pixily founders Prasad Thammineni and Vikram Kumar... one of the things they talk about is why they chose to build the company atop Amazon's Web services infrastructure: