Silicon Valley: The "Ultimate Meritocracy"
My fellow denizens of Silicon Valley are fond of referring to our happy little ecosystem as the ultimate meritocracy. It’s definitely true that in comparison to the rigid and/or corrupt regimes that prevail in other industries and geographies, Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, but it is far from perfect. I often joke with the female/minority/over-30 [...]
On the insignificance of (Re)tweets to a post
In a discussion about blindly ReTweeting yesterday, I remembered that I once did a short analysis on auto-tweets. An auto-tweet is a schedule you set up against an RSS-feed or any other trigger, which tweets the URL with a title, some of the post itself, a fixed word or hashtag, etc. Some “thought-leaders” use it [...]
Why TwentyFeet is Total Twash
Yet another Twitter analytic tool has made it into the spotlights: Twentyfeet
Like most if not all other tools that try to measure Twitter stats (Klout, Tweetlevel), it horribly fails. Apparently it’s too much work or money to actually measure all…
Twitter is what you make it
Following up on a challenging post by Luis Suarez, let me jot down my thoughts on what Twitter is, has become, and will be. The word “dead” is cunningly avoided after all these years that certain things have come to be claimed dead, dying, or extinguishing – and rightfully so. If anything, any new thing [...]
Microsoft, the bleedin’ advertisers
This week Microsoft produced their annual report for 2012. It’s been commented on by many and the main theme seems to be that they’ve reported their first quarterly loss since ages (or ever). Well, yes. And so what? The Online Services Division, a eufemism for “we wanna go where Google went” has been a [...]
Apple Q3 2012 – for better or worse?
Yesterday Apple announced its figures for Q3 2012.I decided to have a good look at them, given the news and blog posts that flew around. Here are the clean stats: 2012 Q3 Revenue of $35.0 billion Net profit of $8.8 billion Gross margin 42.8% 26.0 million iPhones – 28% growth 17.0 million iPads – 84% growth [...]
2004-2011 financial analysis: Non-traditional SI (Indian players and IBM)
Yesterday I published my financial analysis of 4 traditional system integrators: Accenture, Atos Origin, Capgemini and Logica. In a conversation I got asked why IBM wasn’t on the list, and my answer was somewhere along the line of “it’s not a pure player”. Also, I hadn’t published my Indian friends yet, so here are another [...]
Traditional system integrators 2004-2011 financials
Traditionally, 31st of March is the date that all my favourite system integrators (SI) have released their annual report for the previous year. Oddly, however, I’ve seen some strange changes this year – for the first time. I could -and will- even say that traditions have been broken with I had to look hard and [...]
Apple margin per device – expressed in Chinese
[Image by Sven Teschke] An article in the New York Times published 2 days ago suddenly gained a lot of traction and got discussed, reposted and reblogged today: Apple making money off of the United States, while directly employing “only” twice as many employees in the US than overseas – but indirectly more than ten [...]
Klout ‘o Calypse: 2.5 million people can’t be wrong
I wrote an initial post on people killing their Klout on the very same day that Klout enabled them to do so. I took tweets as a basis for my testset, and it appeared that 20% of (the 300) people tweeting about being able to delete your Klout profile, also had actually done so. Two [...]
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 [...]
Once bitten, twice shy? Klout scores get clouted again
Almost 1.5 years ago I showed how very, very flawed Klout’s actually is. I made some nice screenshots and illustrated how Klout’s scoring is statistically impossible, and how they magically manage to present you with two scores at the same time. Today, history repeats itself, proving that Klout is still just as immature a product [...]
Klout’s True Reach? Simply your follower count
In yesterday’s post I busied myself with new ways of looking at Twitter statistics. Today I was suggested to compare them to Klout scores. I did, and I found out that their True Reach – that vast, impressive number that you probably look up to – is nothing more than a simple mathematical equation Klout [...]
Twitter stats redefined – now measuring true influence?
I had a small revelation the other day while on Twitter and chatting with Alan Berkson. As you may or may not known, I’m a self-proclaimed statishist, meaning that I really get excited by statistics, or stats for short I did a few calculations on 20 Twitter people, taking their latest 1,000 followers, and looking [...]
Does Google get enterprise? No – so what?
After a small conversation with Frank Scavo – whom I hold highly – it struck me: we old enterprise boys that keep kicking the #socmed chins might be on our way to retirement. Not saying that Frank’s one of them, but I certainly count myself to the pack as I’ve only been around multinationals and [...]
