From the Blogosphere

Truth in (Round) Numbers?

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:30:00 EST

Statistics matter, not only in business, but increasingly also in our social life - well, at least in our social media life. Some of the statistics I noticed this week were round numbers, like 1000. With 1000 representing both the number now showing under "followers" in Twitter and the revenue number for research (that's excluding events, consulting and other items) we grew to in 2011. And on my blog I saw - a bit to my surprise - it has been a full 10 weeks since my last post! That's however more a case of blogger's block than writer's block, as I did (co-)author the round number of 10 research notes since joining this summer. To catch up, I am including below a short overview of the topics these research notes covered (Gartner clients only) and that I likely will explore further in the future - both in research and using (social) media. So what topics did these 10 research notes address? First to mention are the Predicts 2012. I participated in two this year, one called Predicts 2012: Cloud Computing Is Becoming a Reality in which we revisited an earlier prediction on cloud lock-in and explored the idea of a Maslov type hierarchy of needs for cloud computing customers. In this needs hierarchy fear of lock-in will be gaining ground as more basic needs like security are better understood.

Trends in Social Media – 2012

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:45:00 EST

Struggle and Contradiction in four different dimensions – that is how I can summarize the trend in social media. Till Facebook came in, web was mostly open. Two of the key drivers behind the success of the Web are (1) the ease with which pages can be hyperlinked irrespective of where it is hosted and which site it belongs to and (2) the ease with which you can search a specific page which has been indexed by search engine mainly Google. However, most social media especially Facebook do not allow Google to search and index their pages. Even if you have access to specific pages in Facebook, you will not be able to search and find those pages using Google. You will necessarily have to login to Facebook and do the search. This is not true for sites like Wikipedia. But, is that not a fight between Facebook and Google? Anyway, this is true for most sites which require a login. So, what is the big problem? You may not want to classify this as a problem but you need to acknowledge that this is a big change because people are spending more and more time inside their favorite Social Media which is likely to be Facebook. What you do inside Facebook and what you do outside becomes almost two different worlds with very little linkage.

Does Social Media Reflect Society?

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:45:00 EST

You are what you eat; You become what you believe; I am not my art. A 2011 study from the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Psychology titled "Manifestations of Personality in Online Social Networks: Self-Reported Facebook-Related Behaviors and Observable Profile Information" found that Facebook users are no different online than they are offline. The study also declared a strong connection between someone’s real personality and their Facebook-related behavior. Social and personality processes, according to the study, accurately mirror non-virtual environments. It was published in the academic journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. Professor Samuel D. Gosling and his team looked at the big five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism and found that self-reported personality traits are accurately reflected in online social networks such as Facebook. Extroverted users reported the most friends and the highest engagement while conscientious types had the least. Simply, extroverts engaged more than introverts.

The P.R. Disaster Intensifies

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:01:00 EST

Last week I wrote about the local Saratoga Springs, NY HUD Board public relations disaster. They had done everything wrong by ignoring and then mishandling a problem with bedbugs and providing a “not our fault” response. You can look at the earlier blog and videos for a full account. The Board quickly had to decide [...]

Welcome to Planet Data...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:16:00 EST

Let me begin this post by dating myself - when I first (truly) got into technology, AOL was a big deal and there was an interesting level of anticipation anytime the modem on your computer would start read more

Inspiration for Compelling Content Found in the Simplest of Places

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:00:00 EST

Content marketing surrounds almost every aspect of the marketing world. There are countless books, articles, blogs, social media outlets, and websites (like the one I am siting) dedicated to content marketing and why it is an essential tool for B2B and B2C marketers. They define strategies, layout plans, and provide case studies detailing the ever-present need to deliver good content to the right people at the right time. A marketer can find virtually every aspect of content marketing they need to know about in these various outlets except one: the content. Of course, it would be senseless to think that a book or a website could tell every company exactly what they need to say to engage their specific customers and promote their specific products. It is up to a good, creative marketer to develop that piece of the puzzle, but where does a good, creative marketer find a bottomless pit of content ideas?

Do You Translate Well from Geek to English?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:28:06 EST

My son took a bite of his hamburger and immediately exclaimed "it's too spicy!" I knew there was no spice in the burgers (okay there was some black pepper) as I had made them from scratch. I ate some myself and said, "See, not spicy". He took a long hard look at me and then he said "YOU don't think it's spicy, because YOU are not a kid!" Yes I am not a weirdly picky kid who loves seaweed but won't touch his hamburger. I am just the exasperated parent trying hard to figure out the most efficient strategy to getting from a defiant to a compliant five year old. I do realize that to get there I'll have to exchange him for another kid. As a technologist I suffer from the fallacy that others (adults and five year olds) will see things from my point of view and easily get on board to follow my lead. I might get really excited about something but my audience will not get on board if I am not able to relate it to their point of view.

How to Put Social Media Marketing to Work for Your Company

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:30:00 EST

Social media marketing is a trend, not a fad. Moreover, it’s a terrific extension of your content marketing strategy. What’s clear from current research is that when we evaluate social media, we are not talking about the marketing longevity equivalent of the hula hoop or the Lambada. Social media marketing is here to stay.

Five Lessons From Coca Cola’s New Content Marketing Strategy

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:30:00 EST

Coca Cola has been part of popular culture for over 100 years and has been called a “Vision Brand“. Its marketing and communication is purposeful and connects with its audience in a way that makes it stand out from its competitors. Its mission is not about selling products but to create significant positive change in [...]

Why You Need Better Content, Not Just More Content

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:15:00 EST

As part of a marketing evaluation we delivered to a client this week, we covered Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and in particular how the volume of indexed content plays a major role in the success of any SEO effort. The situation was simple: one of this company’s biggest competitors showed hundreds of indexed content pieces, and our client showed around ten. Game, set, match to the competitor, right? Not so fast, my content marketing friends.

Feeling Valued as a First Line Manager

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:00:57 EST

You were an individual contributor and you were good at your job. Now you're a manager and you've stopped producing something tangible. So what good are you? Why would your team respect you? Aren't they better at the work than you are? The manager job description has a concrete list of things you should be doing. These include some very important activities such as conducting reviews, suggesting training etc. Personally, I need more than what's in the job description to feel like I am providing value to my team. In addition to managing I also need to lead. Leadership is an art more than it is a science and best learned by example. I am going to take a shot at explaining what leadership means to me by using the example of my father.

Marchitecture 101

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:15:00 EST

There was an interesting discussion on one of the table-top wargame lists I belong to (Two Hour Wargames if you follow the hobby) about the “production value” of a given set of printed products. While it devolved (as web conversations often seem to) to a comparison with Hollywood, the point was valid. The original reviewer that caused the thread to get started was more interested in how pretty the books were than the quality of the contents. I, personally, don’t care how ugly or mal-produced a wargames ruleset is if the rules are consistent and provide many hours of enjoyable play. Since most wargames use a lot of charts, I prefer those to be easy to find also, but that’s not “quality of paper, binding, pretty pictures…” which is what the topic of the thread was.

It seems that every field of human endeavor suffers from this malady these days. A toy isn’t a toy until it is placed in a shiny box and sold for more than the toy should reasonably command. The same is true of smartphones, a field wherein huge advertising dollars are spent to spur your interest, even though those doing the advertising seem to know that word of (Internet) mouth drives sales as much as anything. In high tech, our shiny boxes and million dollar advertisement equivalent is Marchitecture. In marchitecture, the goal is to show you a solution that you want, whether the solution is implementable by reasonable people or not. And most often, a marchitecture can be implemented by reasonable IT folks, but has nothing special in it. You get everything you need to implement it when you buy the product, but the marchitecture brings the functionality together and puts it in a shiny wrapping.

Full Disclosure: My title is Technical Marketing Manager, though F5 is not the kind of company that forces me into marchitecture discussions unless they’re actually something of use – still, felt it worthwhile to mention for those of you who read this on one of its many syndicated locations. In short, I like to put the emphasis on the technical part, but thought you should know the marketing part.

The thing is, when you’re talking to your sales rep, you need to cut through the marchitecture discussion to figure out if the solution is real, reasonable, and supported. You will be sold something half-baked in your career, in my experience, most of the time you know it’s half-baked when you buy it. Several times I have been in meetings where the response to “function X is weak” is “but everything else is here, and X will get better.” And that’s okay, as long as you know that X is a problem going into the purchase. It’s those times when you’re told a product can do something and not given the 5000 line list of caveats that is a problem.

The point of marchitecture, like the point of the shiny packaging for a game like Skylanders is to pique your interest. The company wants to be involved in conversations with you. In a (sometimes misguided) attempt to speak to you on your terms, they offer something to pique your interest. The key is to find out early whether what they’re selling has legs. Ask for references, then when they bring them, ask for different references (I can find three people to support anything, but when you ask for a different set, then they have to scurry), dig into the technology, and though our sales staff may dislike my suggestion of lengthening the sales cycle, it is certainly in your best interests to do a trial of any major new product you’re considering before you offer up any money. Though if your “trial” must be big because the solution playground is, maybe you should just do testing of the features you need, and make your decisions off of that.

And don’t make the mistake of assuming that just because something is dressed up like marchitecture it is not useful. F5’s deployment guides (and more recently iApps in the same vein) are an example where we have put the product through its paces, configured it correctly, and tested it thoroughly. They exist to help you get quick use out of the product, and strictly speaking I wouldn’t call them marchitecture because they’re full of good, tested, configuration information, while marchitecture is usually at the 10,000 foot level. But they do, in a sense, pique your interest. When we have a configuration for VMWare and NetApp to do VMotion outside the metro area, well we certainly didn’t configure and test that scenario because we had nothing better to do – our customers and prospects told us they needed it.

Know what you’re buying. Know how it helps the project at hand, but also know how it can help you in other projects, now and in the future. Sure, the NUTS! book pictured above is not the best quality book I’ve ever bought, but the rules are solid and have served me (and many others) for years. The same should be true of your major IT purchases. Why buy something of limited use or tied to a specific project if you have a need across several projects, or could see a benefit to using something for several projects?

Anyway, time to climb off my soapbox. Keep kicking rear and making your company hum along without realizing they’d be lost without you.

And yeah, Skylanders and NUTS! are both a lot of fun to play, when you have the time to invest. The difference in packaging quality doesn’t matter much after purchase.

Technorati Tags: marchitecture,Skylanders,IT Management,Infrastructure,iApps,NUTS!,Two Hour Wargames,Activision,F5 Networks,Don MacVittie

Connect with Don:	Connect with F5:

Mobile Strategies, PIOs, Optimized Intersections and Patterns of Life, Part 2

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

In Part 1 of this article, we discussed PIOs (performance impact objects) and "optimized intersections" as they relate to mobile technologies and the mobile workforces Here in Part 2 we are going to discuss "patterns of life" capabilities and how they relate to business analytics and decision making. In the intelligence community, patterns of life refers to the study or analysis of the patterns observed in a person's or object's life. For example, a building may be observed over time through the camera of a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) and people can be seen entering and leaving the building at particular times. The people leaving the building drive specific vehicles and come and go from specific locations. Over the course of a month or longer, patterns and participants can become clear and this offers valuable information to the analyst.

So, You Want to Outsource an Agile Project?

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:30:00 EST

Irrespective of what the Agile Manifesto says (“Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation”) we do require a signed contract for ANY medium to large software outsourcing engagements – and that includes agile projects. Why? Because when there is a commercial arrangement between two parties for delivery of any service where a significant amount of financial transaction is involved, there needs to be a clear agreement on: What is the service that is going to be delivered and what will be the charges for those services? What happens when things go wrong? Dos and Don’ts of how the interaction will happen.

Cloudy Implications and Recommendations in Megaupload Seizure

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:00:00 EST

The FBI seized popular upload site Megaupload.com yesterday. They took the site down and now own the servers. I am not an attorney, and I have no opinion on whether or not the MegaUpload guys were breaking laws or encouraging users to violate copyrights through illegal uploading and streaming of movies, recordings, etc. Right or wrong, the FBI did it and now we need to deal with the fallout. The challenge is that there were very likely many users who were not breaking any laws. People backing up their music, photos, websites, documents and who knows what else. I highly doubt any large corporations would want to use such a site, but I bet a lot of small businesses did. My focus here is on the ramifications to the enterprise, and how to protect yourself from being impacted by this.

Cross-Platform Mobile Website Development – a Tool Comparison

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:15:00 EST

Gartner says, in three years, mobile application development projects will outnumber PC projects by 4-1 ratio and in four years, 50% of the people will primarily access their emails from a mobile device. So, the necessity of establishing a mobile channel for your customer is – well a no-brainer. However, should you just build a mobile website or should you also invest in building native application is not easy to decide. There can be no doubt that you need to have a website optimized for mobile devices. What is the best way to build and maintain that website is not a simple decision.

How to Scale Agile

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST

Scaling agile is not simple. The complexity increases not in proportion to the size of the team but at the square of the size of the team. That means a 20 member team project will be 4 times as complex as a 10 member team. To ensure that complexity does not turn into chaos it is inevitable that the pure agile way of working may have to be sacrificed – is it possible without violating agile manifesto? It is also inevitable that the agile practices will need to integrate into other practices of the enterprise.

Fifty Most Influential Management Gurus

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:00:00 EST

Every two years, The Thinkers 50 publishes a list of The 50 Most Influential Management Gurus. Harvard Business Review is the media sponsor and McGraw Hill is the video sponsor. The list contains many well-known names. I have listed some of them: * Jim Collins (Good to Great & Build to Last), * Michael Porter (Competitive Advantage), * Marcus Buckingham (First, Break All The Rules & Now, Discover Your Strengths), * Don Tapscott (Wikinomics), * Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point & Blink), * Gary Hamel (The Core Competence of the Corporation), * Seth Godin (Purple Cow), * Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence & The Pursuit of WOW!), * Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat), * Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) and * Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) However, what I find most interesting is that the list has eight people of Indian origin!

Are You Doing Enough For Free in 2012?

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 06:00:00 EST

About a year ago, I wrote a post about do'ers vs. did'ers, where I highlight that the most important people to identify during an industry transition are those that are doing new things. The people taking chances, learning new things and sharing them back with communities.

Microsoft’s Second UI Innovation

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:45:00 EST

Critics have always accused Microsoft of copying UI from Apple. As Chris Madden in this interesting post point out that Apple fans state that: “…every Mac OS feature and icon eventually shows up in Windows (and in fairness many do)…” First time Microsoft came up with a revolutionary UI design was when it created the Ribbon. Like most revolutionary design it was thoroughly criticized. Here is one such post – I am sure if you search you will find many more. It was different and if you keep all your previous learning aside, it was much more intuitive. I think they did one big mistake of not putting the “File” tab. What is more interesting is that Microsoft revealed the complete story of how they went about creating the ribbon. The story is fascinating and I strongly recommend that you listen to it. Here is the link for the complete presentation and here is the link to the presentation.

Turning Tablets into Mobile Workstations – Powered by the Cloud

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:30:00 EST

Interview with Martin Frid-Nielsen, CEO of Soonr at AlwaysOn, Venture Summit in Half Moon Bay. We are here to tell our story. Our biggest challenge is to continue to accelerate growth. When you talk about tablets and apps that enable the mobile workforce to be more productive, that's an easy sell. The challenge is to continue to spread the word. We are very excited about a new mobile app, Soonr Scribble, we just announced with Samsung for their new Galaxy Note device, a tablet that comes with a stylus. With Soonr Scribble, business users can easily annotate any document or file stored in the cloud with a stylus. So, for instance, if you receive a document for review, you can easily mark it up, highlight or redline it using the pen.

Cloud 2.0 – Social Cloud Computing

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:14:00 EST

There are many 2012 predictions describing the major trends for the new year, and my personal favourite is this one, due to the headline quote of: “2012 is primed to be the year of social.” Absolutely. Although social media has been a buzz trend for quite some time, as has Cloud Computing, both share the reality that actual adoption is still in its earliest days and relatively low. While many businesses and individuals have accounts and profiles on sites like Twitter, Linkedin et al, most have not yet deployed any social enterprise software for their own use internally. Hence Cloud vendors like Salesforce.com are key to this wave of growth. Via their recent acquisitions they now offer a “Social Enterprise Stack” that will radically transform how enterprise IT is applied to run organizations.

Has Apple Done Samsung a Favor?

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:30:00 EST

Has Apple, by filing so many patent / IPR violation suits against Samsung in so many countries, marked Samsung as its equal? For those of you who read Harry Potter, here is the parallel. Remember the prophecy? … “…The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches…Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies…and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not…and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives…the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies…” …and what Dumbledore tells Harry that “Voldemort singled you out as the person who would be most dangerous to him — and in doing so, he made you the person who would be most dangerous to him!”

Gartner’s 11 IT Predictions for 2012 to 16 – What Does It Really Mean?

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:00:00 EST

Gartner release 11 IT Predictions for 2012 to 2016 on 1 December, 2011. It covers the usual gamut of technologies – Cloud, Social Media, Mobile, Outsourcing, IT Budget and Security. The new addition to this list is “Big Data.” Typically, such predictions points to disruptions that may happen in the near future. This is what they are really trying to say. China, India beware – your bread-and-butter market is going to shrink

The Next Web Architecture

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:04:00 EST

I was listening to Roger McNamee’s predictions of technology investment trends and came across two new terms – Hypernet and Hyperweb. The first term is where the Internet is overlaid with smartphones. He says that smartphones are now 50% of the web devices and growing. The second term refers to the software infrastructure for the Hypernet. The current infrastructure of mostly “index search” (read Google) is not going to work for the Hypernet. We need HTML5. Here are his ten hypotheses for tech investing. These are interesting and thoughtful hypotheses and like any predictions they are unknown in terms of velocity (when would it all happen), but certainly we see several of these at play even now.

Technology Predictions...for 2020

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 05:00:00 EST

This time of year everyone starts making technology predictions. So rather than making my own predictions for 2012 I thought it would be more fun to predict what 2020 could look like. Don’t worry even the Mayan’s don’t believe in the “End of the World” 2012 prophecy so I am fairly confident humans will still [...]

Nextdoor Wants to Bring Back That Sense of Community

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:37:00 EST

If you are like me, social media is already a large part of your life. I spend at least some time each day checking in with my friends, regardless of where they are in the world. Most of them do not live near me, or at least in not in my immediate vicinity. There is a newcomer to the social media world that wants to take a different approach to social and connect you to your neighbors, and only your neighbors. Nextdoor.com, founded by San Fransisco based entrepreneur Nirav Tolia, is looking to bring back the sense of community that many people have not felt in their neighborhood for years. Nextdoor allows members to start pages for their own neighborhood, and you must actually be a part of it to participate. You must enter a verifiable address to within the neighborhood to be a part of it. Neighbors can then exchange all kinds of ideas – advice for good, cleaners, babysitters, and dog walkers; plan community BBQs and garage sales; or coordinate trick-or-treating times for Halloween. Nextdoor is all about connecting you with the people that are closest to you, literally.

What We’ve Got Here Is a Failure to Communicate

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:15:00 EST

Fans of Paul Newman will recognize his character’s famous line in Cool Hand Luke. Never in the history of electronic communications do we have so many choices and yet experience so many communication failures. This was made clear to me recently when I tried to get in touch with a “friend” of mine. I put the word in quotes because I mean it in Facebook terms: someone that I may or may not have met f2f, but want to stay in touch. Let’s call this friend Bob for simplicity. My go-to communication method is email, so I first tried to send Bob a quick email to answer a question. Sadly, I have 9,000 contacts in my Gmail but Bob is one of the many of them who have moved on to another email address. The mail came back undeliverable. That wasn’t a good sign. But even if it got through, it doesn’t mean anything these days: there are lots of folks that ignore their emails, or have bad spam filters, so sometimes they don’t see them even if the address is correct.

Good Times at WordCamp Detroit 2011

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:00:00 EST

Another year, another WordCamp here in Detroit. I was excited for it to arrive and I’m definitely sad to see it go. I love WordCamp almost as much as I love WordPress. It brings together my favorite things: WordPress and my fellow like-minded geeks. This year I was able to bring along my possy, which included my assistant Jen (and long time BFF), my fellow internet marketer Rachel, and our collective friend Megan who is completely new to WordPress. Good times. This year’s WordCamp was hosted at the Detroit RenCen building. Yes from the image below, you can see the building(s) are as cool as the name. Not only was the RenCen luxurious, the staff was superb.

Backupify Names Top 10 Cloud Computing Experts to Follow on Twitter

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:15:00 EST

Thank you for the honor of being on your Top 10 List! Backupify is the leading backup provider for cloud based data, offering an all-in-one archiving, search and restore service for the most popular online services including Google Apps, Facebook, Twitter and more. With one account you get centralized access to all of your information, stored securely, easily searchable, and ready for restoration or transfer at a moment's notice.

The Art of Listening

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:30:00 EST

One of the first tips I got when entering the workforce was "You have two ears and only one mouth for a reason!", meaning that in conversations with customers you should spend twice as much time listening as you do talking. Point was to avoid becoming like a radio with only one button: "Send". Over the years I learned that above also applies to "new media" such as email, blogging, tweeting and podcasting. You need to use the receive button at least twice as much as the send button. Although less obvious, I am trying to maintain this ratio also as an analyst. Maybe not in every single conversation - our type of analyst inquiries are not like psycho-analysts calls where the analyst just keeps asking the patient repeatedly "and how do you feel about this?" - but overall it still makes sense to allocate substantially more time to input (also from colleagues, peers and even competitors) than to output. With modern management techniques increasingly focused on managing a workforce that is increasingly spread out and that maintains work hours outside the traditional nine to five, it may – across many industries - feel increasingly difficult for individuals to maintain this balance of input versus output (as only the latter seems to gets measured and formally acknowledged nowadays).

Managing Enterprise Group Mail Content

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:56:00 EST

How many times, we have seen that one of the easiest way of cleaning up your mail box is to delete all the enterprise announcements and group e-mails? Are we getting bombarded with too many policy change mails, group emails and announcements? After a few days of the email bombardment, are our brain gets conditioned to just ignore them?

Taking Aim at the US Broadband Deficit

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 22:42:00 EDT

In a global economy moving ahead at Internet speed, can the United States afford to allow ourselves to continue sliding our ability to deliver the basic tool of communications, this “Fourth Utility” of broadband communications to our citizens? During his October 6th speech on Universal Service Fund (USF) and InterCarrier Compensation (ICC) reform, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski admitted the United States has not adequately fulfilled our obligation to deliver broadband Internet and communications services to all areas of the country. Genachowski noted “harm from not having (access to) broadband – the costs of digital exclusion – already high, are growing every day.” He continued “The broadband divide means economic opportunities denied for ordinary consumers who lack broadband access; educational opportunities diminished; health care access reduced; and public safety compromised.”

Crowdsourcing Your Next Job

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 14:52:05 EDT

WikiOrgCharts.com just launched a new ‘smart' job and people search feature that aggregates web results and combines them with a visual of the company organization chart where the job is available. The new feature allows job seekers to see beyond Indeed listings and find connections through their LinkedIn and Facebook social networks for contacts who already work for the company they want a job from. Crowdsourced databases like LinkedIn and Crunchbeat get a lot of traffic and attention these days, but they still lack features that WikiOrgCharts addresses. WikiOrgCharts is the first web platform that allows users to pool their business contacts and to collaboratively map the relationships that exist within a company into an easy-to-access organizational chart. The HTML5 site allows org charts to be constructed, modified, searched and openly shared between Internet users, along with real-time social information from Twitter and other sources. Users that log into WikiOrgCharts using their Facebook or LinkedIn accounts bring their friends' and colleagues' information with them.

B2B Websites NOT Great At Demand Gen

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:30:00 EDT

A new study on an often overlooked subject is fresh off the presses: Demandbase and Focus.com 2011 National Website Demand Generation Study. The B2B company website is growing in importance as buyers spend more time researching and selecting the information they use during a complex buying process. Demandbase CEO, Chirs Golec, sums up the situation nicely in the press release:...

Kindle Fire, Google and Patent Dispute

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 01:49:00 EDT

Every analyst is discussing how Amazon’s Kindle Fire going to affect Apple. They are discussing, why it is going to be the first real competition for iPad – how at US$ 199, it is a killer pricing – Why Apple might launch a 7 inch rival – Why 7 inch is not a viable Tablet – Why Kindle Fire is a Game Changer etc. Bloomberg reported that Amazon’s shares rose by $5.50, while Apple fell by $2.25 and Barnes & Noble (maker of the Nook e-reader) declined 91 cents, or 6.9%, to $12.30. Here is an interesting result of a user poll conducted in Cult of Mac. The question was “Does Apple have anything to worry about from the new Kindle tablet?”

Google+ and Mobile Productivity for the Enterprise

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:30:00 EDT

Mashable reports that Google has improved its IOS Google+ app: The search giant follows Tuesday’s Android update of Google+with a similar refresh to its iOS version, now available free on the App Store. What’s new? Like its Android cousin, the iOS version of the Google+ mobile app now supports Hangouts, letting groups communicate with each other using front-facing cameras on the iPhone 4 and iPod touch. In addition to Hangouts, the app offers better control of its various notifications, and a renamed Messenger (formerly Huddle) that now lets users attach photos to chat threads. Other niceties include the ability to +1 in comments, improved +mention support, a map view in Profile for places you’ve lived, and various reliability improvements.

The Real News Is Not that Facebook Serves Up 1 Trillion Pages a Month...

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:00:00 EDT

There’s some amount of debate whether Facebook really crossed over the one trillion page view per month threshold. While one report says it did, another respected firm says it did not; that its monthly page views are a mere 467 billion per month. In the big scheme of things, the discrepancy is somewhat irrelevant, as neither show the true load on Facebook’s infrastructure – which is far more impressive a set of numbers than its externally measured “page view” metric. Mashable reported in “Facebook Surpasses 1 Trillion Pageviews per Month” that the social networking giant saw “approximately 870 million unique visitors in June and 860 million in July” and followed up with some per visitor statistics, indicating “each visitor averaged approximately 1,160 page views in July and 40 per visit — enormous by any standard. Time spent on the site was around 25 minutes per user.”

Are We Falling Back on IT Innovation?

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Smartphones, tablets, and the cloud – are they true IT innovation? Or, As Bob Lewis suggests, are they consumer innovation or port of one or more of the dozen earlier innovations to these new platforms? It is very difficult to know the true disruptive potential of any innovation when you too near to the time when the innovation happened. Only on hindsight, when several years have passed, can you really say that “yes; that was a disruptive innovation”. Each one of the innovations in that list (for that matter such list) falls into the category where the true disruptiveness was realized several years after the initial innovation. It also takes several years for the innovation to mature. So, we should judge smartphones, tablets and cloud five years down the line.

How to Pursue Your Innovative Idea

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:15:00 EDT

Are you familiar with the words “Intrapreneur” or “Intrapreneurship”? According to Wikipedia: Intrapreneur = A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation. Intrapreneurship = The practice of a corporate management style that integrates risk-taking and innovation approaches, as well as the reward and motivational techniques, that are more traditionally thought of as being the province of entrepreneurship.