
Keeping Safe In The Cloud
The last few weeks have seen a seeming storm of examples of security breaches of cloud services. As is often the case when people have vested interests in a particular technology, many naysayers have pronounced that these security breaches spell the end of the cloud. Heck, even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak went on record saying: […]
The Shift has hit the Fan – Microsoft, Facebook Slides, Google Rises
In what seems to be from the lower paleothic period but in fact was about a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about the Mean Girls phenomenon and Shakespeare. This in turn was not actually about mean girls or Henry IV, but about the interesting relationship of…

Microsoft People vs. Apple People
There are Microsoft people and Apple people.Microsoft people want every option, and can’t imagine why others would find the surfeit of choices intimidating or annoying.In the parlance of psychology, they are “optimizers”.Apple people want a simple, ele…

FileTrek Fulfills Need for Workgroup Transparency
As more and more applications are enabled on mobile platforms, there is an ever increasing need to ensure that corporate IT and managers of workgroups have visibility over who accesses and makes changes to files. Historically there has been an emphasis on enabling mobile access, but a relative absence of focus on ensuring transparency over […]

More on Banking 2.0–Who Ya Gonna Trust?
I’ve been writing now for a few years about Banking 2.0 – a general term that I use to describe what financial services will look like when it discovers open, social, API enablement, mobile and all the other business and technology trends that are converging today. I wrote a post recently that suggested Apple and […]

Is There A Social Media Bubble?
Of course there’s a social media bubble. All over the map, everyone ranging from seed-stage investors to the public markets are paying inflated prices for social media assets. But while the current frenzy is a bubble, it doesn’t even come close to the magnitude and madness of the Dot-Com bubble. Back in those days, “eyeballs” […]

Social Media Doesn’t Constitute Banking 2.0–Apple and Google Get That
While I was at SXSW last month I attended a panel (yes I know attending panels at SXSW is rare!)entitles Financial Services & Technology Rockstar Women. The panel promised to allow attendees to “Hear from global financial services and technology leaders, who happen to be women, how they use social media to drive innovation and […]

Solar power in the data centre – solution or window dressing?
Most of us recognise that the Earth is warming and that — despite our planet’s temperatures having dramatically risen and fallen before — we humans must accept some measure of responsibility for the current changes. Already consuming at least 1.1-1.5% of global power, and only forecast to grow ever-more rapacious, the data centres that power our information […]

Why 99.9% of All Mobile Games are Not Profitable: The 6 Things Mobile Game Developers Must Do to Survive
Our minds are strongly biased towards causal explanations and they do not deal well with statistics. How else can you explain why mobile game developers continue to create games for an App Store market with 100,000 games already flooding it? Incredibly, there are 104 games per day that are being released into Apple’s App Store […]

Open, Closed, 1984 and the Evil Empire
On my recent Gillmor gang slot I spent time talking with Steve Gillmor and John Taschek about open data, the risks of a few all-powerful social networks and how open data can drive potential benefits for all. In what was I suspect an effort to create a provocateur outside of

Wrong Side Of The IT Ecosystem
I find it ridiculous that people are blaming Apple for job creation in China as opposed to in the US. People are also debating how US might in-source some of these manufacturing jobs to compete with China who has sophisticated manufacturing abilities and large skilled labor force supporting these operations. They are all missing the point. […]

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 […]

Steve Jobs
I have paid attention to Steve Jobs only in knowing he was producing some pretty sexy products at Apple. I had never owned one until December 23rd of 2011. I had however respected Apple & Job’s Products. I knew very little about the level of his drive and passion. I also knew little about his […]

Why Every Company Needs to be More Like IBM and Less Like Apple
I was thirteen years old when I first saw it on TV. An army of blue-gray drones march in lockstep through a long tunnel into an auditorium filled with more drones dressed in futuristic, grey drab. All eyes are transfixed on a big-blue image of a man speaking from a theatre-sized screen, extolling the virtues […]

Reality Distortion Field : 17 Companies’ Sitrep
I’m sitting on the bus this morning. As happens almost every day of the week. I’m flipping pages, sort of, it’s an eBook on my Kindle App. I’m reading about Steve Jobs taking over the Macintosh Program at Apple. How things started to fall into place for Apple, for the Macintosh, and how Jobs saw […]