I Heart TripIt

So, I’m going on vacation tomorrow for a week. Keep reading if you care. Coincidentally, I’ve been messing with two travel-targeted social networks lately, so it’s fitting that my last post before a trip would be about TripIt and Dopplr, less so. These are niche networks, an ever-more common phenomenon; as horizontal social networks like… Read More

The Long Tail of Meetings

This tweet from friend of the ‘Lab Michael Krigsman triggered my inner economist. Even though I’m essentially a geek, I studied economics in college and have always been fascinated by supply, demand, utility and especially modeling that stuff with a nice tidy graph. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of Chris Anderson and his… Read More

Because We Care

Here at the ‘Lab, we listen to you. When you wanted more, we gave you more. So, when I got a suggestion from Jim, I listened. Jim wanted us to provide email subscriptions to this blog, like Steven Chan does, so that he could stay informed when new content is available, on his terms. This… Read More

Thoughts on Microsoft-Yahoo

I’ve been thinking about the proposed Yahoo-Microsoft merger since the news broke on Friday. As a closeted economist and enterprise apologist, the offer’s value really jumped off the page. Microsoft is offering $44.5 billion in cash and stock for a business that generated just under $7 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2007. Microsoft’s Office… Read More

OracleCommunity.net Arrives

Lost in the frenzy of last week’s travel to the Bay Area and the Marketing 2.0 Leader Summit, I neglected to mention Eddie’s brand-spanking new OracleCommunity.net, a “social network for Oracle people” hosted on Ning. I know I’m late to the party, since OraNA tells me it’s been covered here, here, here, here sort of… Read More

I Need Your Help

I wrote about the Marketing 2.0 Leader Summit earlier this month, and Justin provided a more in depth description. I found out Friday that I am to be a facilitator for the two-day event, which means working with a team of 11 others on an idea that will be judged against the ideas of the… Read More

Amazon SimpleDB and the Lazyweb

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. Amazon released the latest offering in their AWS suite last month, SimpleDB. I tagged this and subsequent analysis posts for later consumption, and I’m just now getting back to it; a post from Web Worker Daily yesterday on LongJump and their new Database-as-a-Service offering jolted my… Read More

Oracle Tweeters

Inspired by a post from Rick Turoczy, the Silicon Florist, in which he spread Twitter goodness across the Portland area and beyond, I’ve decided to attempt something similar for Oracle Tweeters. Rick’s post yesterday accounted for about 25 new Twitter friends in the Portland/Washington area. We were sharing storm news last night as the wind… Read More

New Oracle Digg Clone

Matt Topper, a friend of the ‘Lab, launched an Oracle Digg clone on Friday at ora-click.com. He’s using Pligg, an Open Source Digg clone, as the backend, with a nice 2.0-style front end. I could live without the ads, but I know power/ping/pipe aren’t free. We toyed with Pligg a while back when we were… Read More

2008 in the Crosshairs

Now that I’ve sang “Auld Lang Syne“, waxed sentimentally on 2007 and wiped a tear, here comes the companion piece, 2008 predictions. I’m not a huge fan of predictions, unless I happen to be right. I still think Google will acquire Salesforce.com; that’s my story, and I sticking to it. But, in the spirit of… Read More

It’s That Time of Year

To usher out 2007, it’s time to do the retrospective. Cue the music. Looking back on this past year elicits “wow” moments for me. This time last year, I worked in a different team, Fusion Financials Strategy; I was neck-deep in the requirements for Secure Enterprise Search integration into Apps. I lived in a different… Read More

New Web, New World

In the past, I’ve blogged about Twitter exchanges I’ve had with Craig Cmehil who works over at SAP. Yesterday, he, Ethan Jewett, who is an SAP BI consultant at an SAP and Oracle partner, and I had an interesting discussion about how to drive new web innovation internally. That conversation begot my post and one… Read More

Publish Your Blog to Twitter

I’ve noticed that a lot of people use Twitter to promote their blogs and the blogs of their colleagues and friends. Twitter is a social network, so this is expected behavior. I find myself clicking on the TinyURLs in tweets out of curiosity more often than not. A tweet like this one from James Governor… Read More

Shout Out from Sweden

Johan “The Killer App” Myrberger has a nice post on AppsLab today. He says some nice things about AppsLab and how we’ve influenced his views of Oracle. This line is classic: I must admit I don’t know much about Oracle as a company. I know they have a database product, but apparently they do much… Read More

More on the Blog Council

Following my post Friday on the newly minted Blog Council, I got a response in comments from Andy Sernovitz, who runs the overseeing authority of the council, GasPedal. Apparently, they reached out to Oracle and Sun when the council was formed. Anyway, joining the council falls under Justin’s jurisdiction, not mine. I’m just a blogger.… Read More