Photo Credit: FoxTongue
I watched a recent interview with Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose the other day. In it, he was questioned as to how he, against the odds, “beat” the various etailers of the day pushing books online. His answer was fantastically elegant and straight forward. He is fanatical about aligning his organization to his [...]
I am spending some cycles these days thinking on the integration of play and work. I happen to believe that there is some real magic to be had here for organizations and for firms looking to supply the next generation of software. Sure making work a game seems a bit out there (I get that), [...]
Photo Credit: Timothy Hamilton
I recently watched this excellent video of Nick Fortugno at the Meaningful Play conference in 2008. If you are into designing games with a message behind them it is worth a watch.
Among other things, he highlights the basic split in entertainment between “form” and “content”. Form being the mechanics used to convey [...]
Play is our natural state. It is healthy and fun. In that state, we are engrossed and engaged. Time, as they say, “flies”. As we grow up and put aside childish things, we lose this connection to our natural state and a strong division between play and work emerges. In fact it is worse than [...]
Defrag 08: Is that Good?
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social_networking oracle)
I presented the above at Defrag 08′ in Denver yesterday. The idea was to take some
known concepts around understanding networks and apply them to how we manage a
community. This is new ground for us at the lab, but based on the reaction [...]
I am a bit of a closet designer. No I don’t have the funky glasses, but I appreciate great design and get a good laugh at poor design. Sometimes I run across designs that I just don’t understand. Here are two of my recent gems:
The first is this novel coffee mug from [...]
There is a common thread in driving change. No matter what you are working towards, or where you are doing it - change is hard. You’ll run into challenges on time, budget, resources, personalities, vision, objectives, and more. Sometimes you’ll want to throw in the towel. We have all had those [...]
Do you have a vision for how technology can transform what your company or department does, but no one will listen? Do you spend your day “evangelizing” the merits of social networking behind the firewall but finding it fall on deaf ears? Do you find yourself explaining how a wiki works to everyone who emails you [...]
The family and I decided last Friday that we all deserved cheeseburgers for dinner (ok, my 4 year old daughter decided, but let’s pretend I had some say in the matter. We decide on Chili’s and commence to enjoy a fantastic heaping helping of saturated fat and salt. On the bright side, the [...]
Yesterday in Denver, Jake and I had lunch with a few nice folks from NewsGator, one of which was Jeff Nolan. As you may know, Jeff writes Venture Cronicles. In friendfeed, I noticed that Jeff had posted to his blog, so I went to have a read and ended up reading several posts. [...]
Every year I attend the Under The Radar conference held at the Microsoft Silicon Valley location. The organization is flawless, the companies interesting, and the facilities are wonderful.
If you don’t know, UTR is a showcase for start-ups that are not (yet) in the limelight. In fact, this is where many launch to the [...]
I am not sure why the power (or danger) of the global economy never really hit me before, but I was checking out elance.com as it was mentioned in a recent book I read. If you don’t know, elance is a services marketplace. Anyway, I searched on there for design providers. Guess [...]
Blogging is tough. Some do it well (like Jake) and others don’t spend the time to make it happen (like me). I have found very few that keep it up. It is just another thing that takes up time.
Here is what I think makes it work for a person:
1. [...]
Ok, per Rich’s post. Here goes:
1. I like lots of things, but nothing as much as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I run Norcal BJJ Academy and it consumes me. I had my first introduction by being soundly beaten by someone I outweighted by 50lbs over 9years ago. After that rather [...]
Written by Paul.
Also tagged under Uncategorized.
Google recently launched Knol. It is essentially a Wikipedia where authors can build up a personal brand. In addition, they can even monetize pages they author via, surprise surprise, Google Ads. Personally, I think the concept is brilliant. It plays on everyone’s need to feel special and that can’t hurt participation.
As [...]
Written by Paul.
Also tagged under Uncategorized.
Ok, this post may not be what you expect from our blog, but I had to share two great examples of excellent customer service that I experienced recently. It is my opinion that excellent service is ever important in this time of low switching costs and doing it right has approximately zero marginal cost.
Example 1: [...]
Written by Paul.
Also tagged under Uncategorized.
Today is a big day for Oracle and our team. We have been cranking pretty hard for the last 6 weeks to get here. Where are we you ask? We’ll, I like to think of it as camp. Y’know in those everest trips how the teams have to reach a series [...]
Written by Paul.
Also tagged under Uncategorized.
As I was sitting down with the family enjoying some Baskin Robbins (Peanut Butter Chocolate rules!) last night I began to wonder why all this cool new “2.0″ stuff didn’t originate in the existing companies providing software to enterprises?
Since the new web is a lot about enabling people to share information, it seems likely that [...]
Written by Paul.
Also tagged under Uncategorized.
As I sat this week at the Gartner conference, I had the opportunity to hear Andrew McAfee speak about Enterprise 2.0. One of the things I enjoyed hearing live was the 9x problem. He has written about it before, but the phenomenon is that we tend to overestimate the value of current solutions [...]
Written by Paul.
Also tagged under Uncategorized.
Last weekend I was at my nephew’s 8th birthday party. As luck would have it, my sister had placed out a few jars of candy with a pen and paper so the kids could guess the number of items in each jar. The usual suspects of jelly bellies, gum, and mints were all [...]
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