The Future of Emergent Collaboration, “Smart” Platforms
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how collaborative platforms are going to evolve or the next few years. After starting my vendor review series I was really able to get much more insight into what vendors are thinking and where they are going. I was also able to look at what organizations [...]
Is Open Compute Ready for Prime Time?
I just returned from the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit in NYC. It was an eye opening experience. I thought I would share my take aways plus talk about what I perceive as a core issue: can the Open Compute Project (OCP) grow beyond Facebook? By that, I mean there is a clear challenge right [...]
Favorite Robots
All this talk about Siri – is Siri a robot? Personally, I don’t think so. Siri is an impressive voice recognition engine with some very clever programming associated with it. The break thru in Siri really isn’t in what it does or says, that’s just programmatic, but rather what it understands. I think robots should be [...]
Announcing TalkingPointz
Welcome to my new site: TalkingPointz.com – the new home for PinDropSoup. It was four years ago this month that I started PinDropSoup as a telecom blog. A lot has changed. It was initially just a hobby, but the page views consistently grew. The blog created numerous opportunities for me, regular writing opportunities at major [...]
Free Social Selling University Workshop by InsideView
This week is the Sales 2.0 conference (check the link in the sidebar) and the folks over at InsideView decided to put together a free workshop and panel all around social selling. For those of you not familiar with social selling, the concept is about using social tools, data, information, and strategies, to… sell! The [...]
Will Quorans Develop Enough Spine to Ensure Quality?
On Quora, this question was recently asked: Is the upvote bias towards more popular answerers a threat to quality on Quora? One answer caught my attention, and it’s one with which I wholeheartedly agree: I would say it’s very important for Quora users to use those voting powers to downvote answers by A-listers that are [...]
Is Caring About Your Customers Enough?
We’ve all been on the phone – frustrated with the customer service rep who we need to dictate all of our information to even though we just typed it in via our telephone key pad. We’ve all had problems with internet service providers or cable operators who can’t seem to fix our problems. The usual [...]
Changing the Molecules of the (Board)room
Every Monday night in a cozy Brown Stone on 39th street a group of New Yorkers congregate. I was once one of these New Yorkers. At exactly 6:15 PM I would climb on the small stage, strike my gavel and start the Toastmasters meeting: Good evening and welcome. The mission of our New York Toastmasters [...]
The Corporate Social Strategist Can’t Move Fast Enough
It will take more than a few Jedi-mind tricks for change agents and social strategists to convince upper management of the value of social. We are years away from where we need to be in corporate America. Yesterday it was reported that Wal-Mart made 3.5 billion dollars in the third quarter–and most of this revenue was coming from overseas operations. With the state of the American economy, social business might be the trick to speed up progress–unfortunately it’s going to have to be much faster than we can comprehend. As it stands innovation is not happening fast enough.
Is an informative error message really so hard?
I was on the British Airways web site this morning, checking to see whether or not I could upgrade my flight to San Francisco for next week’s Tech Field Day. And this was British Airways’ wholly useless and uninformative response; So does that mean something’s broken on the web site? Does it mean there are [...]
Gatorade Mission Control Project Misses the Social Biz Mark
When you were growing up did your dad have a so-called “man room”–a haven for football worship and other dad-items banished from the house? My dad did. This room served as a venue for poker and a sound-proof space where he could hoot and holler at the Philadelphia Eagles football team and no one could [...]
The EI Agenda Takes Shape
Did I mention that Defrag’s Early Bird pricing expires tomorrow? The Enterprise Irregular Track on the Defrag agenda is starting to take shape. It’s not up on-line just yet, but I wanted to get it posted here asap, so that folks would be able to see it prior to taking advantage of the early bird [...]
The Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneur Scholarship
I’m overjoyed to be able to finally announce something we’ve been working on for a while: The Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneur Scholarship for Defrag. If you’re not familiar with the Kauffman Foundation, this blurb might help: “The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation was established in the mid-1960s by the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ewing Marion Kauffman. Based [...]
Is Privacy a Lost Cause?
No doubt privacy has been quite a controversial and popular topic as of late, especially when it comes to Facebook. The common thread that we hear about is that people want to own their information and control it. We don’t want advertisers to take our public information and use it as a way to market [...]
Defrag: Summit or Conference?
I had a really interesting phone call with Sameer Patel yesterday. The last couple of times that we spoke Sameer had taken to describing Defrag as a “summit-y feel” or “more of a summit than a conference.” Yesterday, when he said that again, I asked him exactly what he meant by that (and now I’m [...]
