Can OpenSocial Be Resurrected In The Enterprise?
For most of the pundits out there in valley, OpenSocial is dead and meaningless. However, at Lotusphere 2012 last month, IBM was highlighting how they have used OpenSocial in their image makeover towards Social Business. They have relied on OpenSocial for activity streams and gadgets. When I was speaking to Suzanne Livingston from IBM if [...]
BREAKING: Google to Capitol Records–We’re Not Going to Let You Shut Down Cloud Computing
Can someone tell Capitol Records that the music has stopped? If you haven’t been following events, Capitol Records (EMI) has sued Boston-based Redigi (a used digital music marketplace) for what amounts to copyright infringement. Today, Google decided to enter the fray as a third party, and filed an amicus curiae brief (friend of the court) [...]
TOSCA may prove a prescient name for new cloud standards effort
Image via Wikipedia Last week, open standards body OASIS unveiled yet another shiny new standards effort. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee hopes to make it “easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in,” and to support moving from one cloud to another. The usual suspects — the likes of IBM, [...]
Why I Think Office 365 Is Not (Yet) Ready
Earlier this week I had a Tweetbate with few folks who have a soft corner for Microsoft products on whether Office 365 (previous CloudAve coverage), Microsoft’s cloud based productivity suite, is a credible player in the modern cloud business applications space. When I say modern cloud business applications, I expect them to have, at least, [...]
The Google Apps Marketplace–Chances of Survival
Over on his blog, VC Brad Feld posted about the experience of three of his portfolio companies being part of the Google Apps Marketplace – Spanning, Yesware and Attachments are all built on top of Google Apps and Feld is particularly positive about their experience; While Google has been building
How I Fixed Reader
I read a lot of news – ok, I skim a lot of news – and the stuff that I find interesting should be shared. Google Reader had a great feature called Share for just that. I had a Google Shared Items page, and also used its RSS feed to share on Twitter and other [...]
Gartner 2012 Predictions
Forbes published an article called The Road Ahead: Gartner’s Outlook for 2012 And Beyond. It offers the reader, in summary/bullet form Gartner’s predictions for the IT sector. Some of the points are pretty obvious – a clear rise in Cloud and mobility, but there are a few surprises. In 2013, the investment bubble will burst [...]
Consumer and enterprise IT company analysis
In January this year I did an analysis of “classical” US IT companies: Google, Microsoft and Apple, which are targeting consumers, and Oracle, SAP, IBM and HP, which are targeting companies. Yes that’s a fairly big generalisation but please allow me to do so… This is the update which includes the next year, I need [...]
iComplete–The World’s Simplest CRM?
There’s been a lot of talk among a new breed of CRM providers recently about finding the right balance of functionality and complexity to meet the needs of very small businesses. While salesforce has cleaned up in the enterprise cloud CRM space, there’s no denying it’s product offering is both priced a little too high, [...]
Seattle Startup Weekend – Some Thoughts
It has been over a two years since I went to my last startup weekend here in Seattle, and the sad part is that it really did not leave an impression. You would think that something like this would, but two years ago, it did not. This year however, I was able to go [...]
Facebook’s new “Needs Review” feature
I like Facebook a lot, and spend significant social media time there talking to people and otherwise engaging in the usual social media voyeurism. What was very cool today though was the “needs review” tag that is automatically opt-in rather than the usual don’t sweat it you have to manually figure out how to opt-in [...]
Why I’m using fake identities to sign up
That is, from now on I will. It is not only getting harder to sign up, it is also getting harder to sign in, and out. Let me explain please as this story has a few sides to it. But first, let me make my point: I’m going to use fake identities to sign up [...]
On Corporate IT–All That Is Bad
I’m a volunteer firefighter here in New Zealand. As well as doing all the operational firefighting stuff, I have some responsibility for administration within the brigade and externally. As part of this role I have to utilize Fire Service systems and email. Which is where the trouble begins. Being an independent entity in my work-life, [...]
Law Firm going after individual sellers on Amazon for Patent Violation
I don’t know enough about this right now to go and make the statement of if this is a valid legal issue, or if this is simply “patent trolling”, but apparently a law firm representing Kelora Systems is now going … Continue reading →
A Layer 3 Elevator
For years, I’ve used the metaphor of escalators and elevators to explain the difference between Asynchronous and Synchronous (TDM and VoIP). It’s not a perfect analogy, but people get it. It goes something like this: Escalators are a consistent speed – people get on in a certain order and their arrival time and order sequence [...]



