On Public, Private and Horses for Courses…
I recently wrote a post critiquing some shortsighted thinking around Cloud Computing and in particular the relative cost implications of a Cloud versus Self-Hosted approach. A recent series of events has reminded me of this issue and bought me back to the topic. Recently Zynga, during a regular earnings call, released the somewhat startling fact [...]
1990s Called And Wanted Their AOL Back
On Saturday, Robert Scoble made a blog post declaring the death of open web. In the post Robert argued that the open web as we know now is dying and no one can save it from the walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.. John, where were you? At least Dave has been consistently trying [...]
Assistly rebrands as Desk.com. Quick Analysis
It was only a few months that salesforce acquired Assistly (more here) but already we see the product relaunching under its new corporate overlords. Rebranded desk.com, the offering has been rebuilt from the ground up including an all new UI, a new HTML5 mobile app and a range of new
How Klout could make Twitter a better place
I’ve written my fair share of posts on Klout. 1.5 years ago I started off with a mild post called “Why I have doubt about @Klout” At the beginning of that I stated First of all, I highly appreciate the service – and I ended with 11 extra Klout points in 12 days on the [...]
Web Second, Mobile First
Fred Wilson wrote two posts in 2010 that were very influential with the startup community. The titles were: Mobile First, Web Second Mobile First, Web Second (continued) If you’re in the minority that never read them – you should. I know that they really impacted an entire cohort of startups because every company that was [...]
tibbr 3.5 turns the world into interactive post-its
Tibbr released version 3.5 to the public today in Palo Alto California, 9 AM Pacific time. I got a solo preview yesterday and I was impressed by it – as usual I’d say. “In twelve months since launch, tibbr has been deployed to hundreds of thousands of employees across global enterprises, who can now use tibbr [...]
The evangalyst: preaching to the converted
There are definite signs of evolution in social media. Where I saw some issues around mainstream adoption over a year ago, I can now rest assured. Dozens of “priests and monks” have arisen all over the world to further aid the conversion towards social; Social Business now is the way to go and according to [...]
Twitter needs a radical change of security NOW
I wrote a post a while back titled Your Twitter security is an egg, not an onion, explaining how Twitter only has one front door, like your house, and if you let people in, you let them in – after which they have access to everything, including your Direct Messages. A few months after that, [...]
Mesagraph Launches Search and Discovery Platform–And Plays Buzzword Bingo
I’ve been travelling a lot lately and have attended a number of conferences at which the latest range of buzzwords are clearly being utilized by a new crop of startups. At the same time I’ve been railing against excessive use of acronyms that does nothing to make life easier for consumers and, in fact, confuses [...]
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 [...]
Cloudology–All That is Bad About IT
I haven’t got a lifetime’s experience in IT. Rather than an impediment in my career however, I’ve found that having come from a varied background has given me a degree of perspective that perhaps some of my lifers don’t enjoy. Case in point – this Cloudology diagram that Simon Wardley pointed out to me recently [...]
Flout.me is fun, but should be flogged and reported
I did what I guess most of you did when you saw the first entry of flout.me in your Twitter timeline: frown. Then I saw another one. And another one. And smiled. I clicked the URL, authorised the app, then laughed out loud Looks familiar? Well, there’s more to it than that: Flout is a [...]
Mind Blown at Defrag
Defrag is an unusual conference. The simplest way to describe it as TED for geeks. Lots of these tech folks are really smart, and when given a forum to speak about whatever they want might result with interesting ideas. The conference creator, Eric Norlin, figured there is no shortage of cloud, social business, mobile, etc. events, but [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
