The Corrosive Downside of Acquihires
For the past 5 years or so Google, Facebook and a handful of tech industry giants have been quietly buying scores of early-stage startups for their talent. And to keep up with the Jones’s it seems that Yahoo! has now employed the same strategy. And who cares, right? A couple of tech giants throw millions [...]
Facebook needs to learn to manage scruffy neighborhoods to stay relevant
Facebook needs to learn to manage scruffy neighborhoods to stay relevant Not all of us live in or want to live in a PG-13 world. But the recent rash of shutdowns over perfectly normal behavior has me wondering how Facebook’s going to set a global standard for what the social media neighborhood looks like. Failbook, [...]
Continuity Rolls Out Public Beta of its Big Data PaaS
When Continuuity launched late last year I was pretty skeptical given the buzzword heavy press release, light on any real specifics. After spending some time talking with the founders however I was more positive, and not only because of the princely $10M funding round the company had just raised. As I said at the time: [...]
Book Review–Bank 3.0
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, talking with and sometimes consulting to organizations in what I think of as traditional sectors about how the rise of a new way of doing business, of communicating and of personalization affects them. From telecommunications carriers to airlines, from retail to banking there is a number of [...]
Does it matter if you are popular on LinkedIn?
I am sure that some of us have gotten these really cool e-mails from Linkedin lately helping us put some kind of context around our relative popularity on the internet, or at least on the LinkedIn system. The problem is that being popular on LinkedIn does not matter to me at all. Sure the infographic [...]
Social Sales | 10 Social Sales Lead–ership Tips
Sales professionals are some of the earliest adopters and most annoying users of social networking. The problem is that most sales reps treat LinkedIn like a prospecting database for cold calling. To succeed at social sales you must have something to offer beyond your product. You must be someone your prospects want to know.
Divorce Facebook Style
Who gets the data after a couple gets divorced? You might be surprised at just how much Facebook data plays in a divorce scenario, and if Take this Lollypop didn’t scare you, this should make you stop and think for a minute about data, and who it belongs to. Any good divorce lawyer is going [...]
Facebook gets freakier with Take This Lollypop
Facebook gets freakier with Take This Lollypop If you ever wondered who was looking at your public information, and you were silly enough to post real information rather than plausible dummy information, then “Take This Lollypop” will totally make your day. Facebook indeed presents a danger for oversharing information that can allow a person to [...]
Easing Password Hell – Key To Living Online Life Safely
As we all use more and more different services and applications in our personal and work lives, password management becomes ever more of an issue. It’s staggering the number of times I’ve had to gently make people aware of the fact that using one simple password for every single service
54% of blog posts contain pure facts
A post by Dion Hinchcliffe on “social business maturity” made me laugh and cry at the same time. It’s one of those misleading semi-analytical semi-research posts that will be joyfully accepted by most people as solid truth. However, it ain’t. If it’s anything solid, it’s solid suggestimation. Why? The post smacks the reader in the face [...]
Harvest Launches Time Tracking Platform-The Rise of the Real Time Business Application Approach
I spent some time the other day talking with Tom Mornini, founder of Boocx (more on them to come). Suffice it to say Boocx is focused on becoming the accounting platform for web developers – but platform in the true sense of the word – some core pieces of infrastructure that, via API hooks can [...]
The content continuum and why I’m worried about the direction of the online world
At the risk of sounding (even more) like a crotchety old man, I feel like the online world is moving in exactly the wrong direction.I would argue that there is a direct correlation between the amount of effort a creator expends and the quality and valu…
Zendesk Scores New Funding Round and Updated Interface
I’ve been writing about helpdesk provider Zendesk now for going on five years. Their original employee, and now APAC head, Michael Hansen, likes to tell the story about their first blog coverage (a piece I wrote for ReadWriteWeb) corresponding with the beginning of their hockey-stick growth. I don’t know about that, but I do know [...]
The Misstep of Quora and The Importance of Trust Amongst Your Community
You know the old saying about trust … “It takes years to build and seconds to destroy.” And once destroyed it is very difficult if not impossible to repair. You need to be the guardian of your own reputation. You need to constantly ask yourself whether your actions in rapidly scaling an online community are [...]
Is Silicon Valley Really Coming to an End?
By now you probably know that David Sacks, co-founder of PayPal and founder of both Geni & Yammer made some observations on Facebook that Silicon Valley “as we know it” was coming to an end. He says “In order to create a successful new company, you have to find an idea that (1) has escaped [...]
