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Decisions, Decisions
“I took the canal zone and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on the canal does also” – Theodore Roosevelt The world is not black and white. Neither are most business or technology decisions. One of the most difficult things in any company is understanding where the line between “too much” and “too… Continue reading
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Clay Shirky – The Power of Social Media for Social Change
Clay Shirky’s timely article on the power of social media to spread ideas and foster change. Written before Egypt, it’s a good example why the “Twitter revolution” is possible. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-political-power-of-social-media Continue reading
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Change, Anchors and Rugby
“Change” is a commonly used term in organizations. We have “change agents,” “change process,” “change management” — all ostensibly in pursuit of making the organization work better. In business, in social groups and politics new efforts to effect positive change are begun every day. But many of these efforts ultimately fail. Organizations who have all… Continue reading
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Communication
“The problem with communication…is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” – George Bernard Shaw Technology affects many aspects of the way we work and live. The profusion of communication methods today makes it easier than in any point in history to convey ideas, to provide news, and to connect. Rapid advances in storage and… Continue reading
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Embrace and Replace
In its heyday, the company seemed to dominate market segments effortlessly. From humble beginnings developing BASIC language interpreters for the early hobbyist computers, it developed the operating system that powered the platform that became the standard for nearly every computer sold in the world. It watched from the sidelines in the mid-1980s as graphical user… Continue reading
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The Blue Rose: A Different Kind of Coding…
Spurred on by reading Flower Confidential a while back (and being connected, at least loosely, to the floriculture industry), I’ve been tracking the quest to create a naturally blue-colored rose through genetic engineering. Think back to biology class and recall that all organisms — from flowers to frogs, humus to humans — are built from… Continue reading
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The Great Netbook Experiment
So, I purchased a netbook over the holiday — an Acer AspireOne to be precise. It came with XP Home loaded on an internal 8GB solid state drive…Which lasted about an hour while I downloaded Kubuntu which I’ve wanted to experiment with for a while. The whole idea behind a netbook is that all your… Continue reading
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Adobe Air
Ever since the Web moved from being a tool of academia to a platform for commerce and communication, companies have looked for ways to leverage its “access from anywhere” and “zero install” nature for applications. I’ve written about this before when the industry I then worked in was consumed by the hype over Web-based applications.… Continue reading
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New York is Taxing…
…Amazon.com. This is the first real challenge to the long-standing rule that online businesses without a physical presence in the state are not required to collect state sales tax. http://www.macworld.com/article/133276/2008/05/amazon.html Continue reading
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When the Database Gets it Wrong
One of the outgrowths of the digitization and mass collection of personal information is the ability to match disparate bits of data into a profile of individual, a profile that can then be used to make certain judgments about that person. Privacy considerations aside for a moment, when it works it is tremendously powerful. But… Continue reading
