E2.0, Productivity and Joblessness
In the months leading up to last year’s Defrag, I began to blog about what I called “the productivity boom .” By that I meant this broad phase that we’re in, whereby we’ll see productivity in the enterprise make better than normal gains. The boom has a couple of pieces: 1. the advent of cloud [...]
Defrag in the weeds
My last post addressed the “meta” aspect of this year’s Defrag. But if all that you do is stay “in the meta,” you don’t get the full picture. The problem is that when a lot of people say “tactical” what they really mean is “case study.” And, while some case studies are wonderful, others really [...]
Defrag and the Meta
Let me start today’s post with a quick recap: The uniting thread that runs through Defrag is data. Specifically, how data’s exponential growth and increasing velocity is dealt with by individuals, groups and organizations, and the tools and technologies that “handle” that data. The “data problem” can be viewed through various angles. From the individual [...]
Defrag and the Bazaar
Yesterday’s post left us at the doorstep of “radical value propositions.” So, let’s dig in. For the individual a “radical value proposition” isn’t really an overt thing. Individual’s adopt, like, push, cajole and laugh. They rarely perform cost/benefit analysis on a given solution. That doesn’t mean there aren’t “radical value propositions” that become inflection points [...]
Defrag Back and Forward
Now that I’ve looked at some of the underpinnings of Defrag, I wanted to capture (briefly) my personal big takeaways from last year’s conference. 1. Two sides of the same coin: The overwhelming meta-theme from Defrag 2009 was that social media and enterprise 2.0 are two sides of the same coin (call it “social business”). [...]
Defrag and Data
In my last post, I wrote: Bottom-line: There’s an exponential increase in the amount and velocity of data that we’re dealing with — as individuals, groups and organizations. And most of the technologies we’re implementing are actually increasing that amount and velocity of data. Defrag is about that. It’s about how we derive useable information [...]
Defrag: A Beginning
To “defrag” (or defragment) is to move disparate bits closer together, so as to create a more contiguous grouping of data. In computer terms, it leads to more efficiency and a cleaner file system. At its core, it’s all about data (okay, technically, 1’s and 0’s – but call it data). The first time I [...]
The Chaos of BYOW (Bring Your Own Wi-Fi)
It all started as an innocent joke: Robert Scoble was sitting in the front row @ Apple’s WWDC conference while I was following the tweetstream from home. Little did we know out joke would soon turn serious, as Steve Job’s keynote demo crashed when his shiny new iPhone 4 could not get a network connection. [...]
A Startup Guy and His Tale of Recovery
I’m a startup guy. I didn’t know that until I was already neck-deep in a startup, but it’s true. I often get asked why Glue’s sponsors are so dominated by startups. Partially that’s because guys like Techweb (producers of Cloud Connect) have “national account” reps for the big guys; folks that can pick up a [...]
T-Shirt Friday #23 – Defrag
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with [...]
Wrapping up Defrag by looking ahead
Inspired by recent theories around the nature of the time-space continuum, specifically that the past crystallizes out of the future, I thought I’d “wrap-up” Defrag by trying to look ahead to 2010 — and the in process of doing so offer up some “what I learned” thoughts. I’d be remiss if I didn’t begin by [...]
A podcast with Felix Van de Maele, discussing Collibra
Steve Ardire introduced me to Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Brussels-based Collibra, at the Defrag conference in Denver last month. We met again at the European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC), where Collibra won the seedcamp event. I spoke with Felix recently to record a podcast exploring the issues that Collibra sets out to address [...]
A podcast with Flip Kromer of InfoChimps… and the end of an era
I’ve been following InfoChimps for some time, intrigued by their aspiration to build a marketplace for data that combines the free with the paid. Thanks to the team at Jones-Dilworth (honestly, does Josh have any clients that aren’t interesting?) I managed to get some time with founder Philip (Flip) Kromer and Joseph Kelly whilst over [...]
Defrag… And That’s a Wrap
After the recent defrag conference, I traded emails with event organizer Eric Norlin. Defrag was the second Norlin Inc event I’d been to after attending Glue conference in May this year. After defrag I tweeted saying that Defrag and Glue, along with Antipodean event Webstock, are the three best conferences I’ve attended (and I’ve done [...]
Twitter and the Ricochet Effect
Defrag came to Denver. I couldn’t go, which was particularly difficult for those of us going through conference withdrawal after three great days at Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco. I’m a conference junkie. I like the excitement of live events. To me, industry conferences are Shakespearian theatre wrapped in a religious revival tent. Live events [...]
