Gmail offers surprising innovation lessons for the Fortune 500
If you’re familiar with the story of Gmail, you know – for a fact – that it was a 20% time employee project by Paul Buchheit. A little bottom-up experimentation that grew into something big. Surprise! That story is wrong. It was a desire by Google, the company, to offer its own email. From Harry McCracken’s great piece How […]
Cloud – It’s About Flexibility
While at OSCON in Portland recently, I took part in a panel alongside Rishidot Research founder and principal analyst Krishnan Subramanian and TechCrunch writer Alex Williams – the panel was an attempt to get some industry observers together to discuss the future of the cloud. Krish has written about the session here at Cloudave. In his post […]
How to Lose Your Work in Gmail in One Simple Step
I’ve been planning to come back from my “blogging hiatus” (code for writers’ block) with a more substantial piece. After all, my drafts folder is full of half-baked, abandoned posts. But hey, no better incentive to write then frustration! Have you ever seen this error? Yes, I’ve just finished composing email, hit SEND, and thought […]
Oh Google, why did you stop being sexy?
[Image by Exey Panteleev] Born out of a tweet from Tom Raftery, who pointed me to Google’s Terms of Services concerning their latest love child: Google Drive I waved at Google Wave, Buzz didn’t thrill me other than enabling the opt-out in Google Mail, and I jumped onto Google+ as soon as I could but […]
Google Apps Introduces Vault–Enterprise Will Love This
One of the barriers that people put up against using Google Apps within enterprise is the apparent lack of robust functionality that the largest enterprises require. A big part of this lacking functionality lies in the e-discovery of documents, the ability to apply governance to information assets and to archive and manage those assets. Especially […]
What is the Future of Email?
Gartner has an interesting graphic they created which I stumbled upon after reading a CMSWire article. The image helps explain the email paradox which is email is not the best method for information sharing and distribution yet it’s not going to go away. The image compares email with social networking and looks at several variables. The most […]
How To Fix The Inbox
I’m notorious for the amount of email I receive and the difficulties I have keeping up with it. My best estimate is that I receive about 200-300 emails each day. On those few blessed occasions when I do get my inbox into single or double digits, I feel both enormously productive and focused. (Alas, the […]
How to Sync your MyTouch 4G with your Outlook Contacts
I recently bought a MyTouch 4G Slide to use as my primary phone. Since I’m a T-Mobile customer, I wanted to lock in a new plan and phone before AT&T can do something to screw it up. And since I’m a physical keyboard enthusiast (I hate losing half the screen to the virtual keyboard–a big […]
Google Account Craziness
I have been a long-time Google user. For example, I’m probably the only person in the world who signed up for Blogger in 2001 who is still using it as their primary blogging platform. When Gmail came out, I lobbied for early access so I could make sure I got my name (thanks Hunter!). PBworks […]
Gmail’s Most Ridiculous, Idiotic, Intrusive, Useless Feature Ever. Google Apps, Too.
Google keeps on coming up with new features at a rapid pace, some making it to adulthood soon, others stuck in “labs” mode forever, some we like, other’s less so – to each their own. But I’ve never thought the day would come I would write the words utterly ridiculous, iditiotic, intrusive, with absolute certainly […]
New Gmail Scam making the rounds
Again with the warnings: do not click on that link or reply to that email a new Gmail scam is making the rounds today. Don’t give out your e-mail information, including user name and password. The e-mail contains this text: We are shutting down some accounts due to congestion in our database system and your […]
Learn From the Gmail Fiasco: You Need Redundant Copies of Your Email–Don’t Worry, It’s Painless :-)
A few hundred thousand (numbers range from 150k to 500K) Gmail and Google Apps users had the scary experience of losing ALL their email content yesterday. Their account was accidentally “reset”. Google acknowledged the error, and issued a statement that they are working on restoring “lost” content. Let’s stop and think here a minute. Is […]
Email as the Problem or Email as the Solution?
Email is getting quite a bad reputation, in fact Atos Origin (a large consulting and outsourcing company) is pledging to be a zero email company within three years! Bertrand Duperrin wrote up a great post on this examining whether or not this realistic. This post however is not about whether or not we could or […]
Advertising – paying for our free(mium) world for how long?
Ads – no wiki definition needed this time I think. I recommended TweetCaster to Thijs Muis the other day, for Android, and the first thing he said after installing it was: @MartijnLinssen has ads! Not my app so far, but @tweetdeck isn’t the best either. I don’t see ads anymore. Well maybe I see them, […]
Can We Take Availability Off Cloud Concerns List?
One of the concerns cited by people who believe in traditional ways of computing is the issue of service availability in the public clouds. For reasons known only to psychiatrists, they associate availability to the presence of the software inside their organizational boundaries. If we talk to enterprise users who use email system hosted on-premise, […]
