Author: Jake

Eric Burke published this cartoon back in early 2008, and it’s stuck with me for a long time as something that is simultaneously hilarious, sad and maddening. I started my career in development building those eye-chart apps with fields and labels all over the place, complete with the obligatory button bar. Enterprise apps are complicated. Whether… Read More

I mentioned a while back that I’m using my iPhone more frequently as a game console, and I know I’m not the only one. The iPhone makes a perfect gaming device for me because it’s portable, to entertain me wherever I go, and it’s already another device, meaning I don’t have to lug extra gear.… Read More

From the “we’re-a-for-reals-product-team” department, comes an announcement: WebCenter 11g Patch Set 1 has just been released. Peter Moskovits has a rundown of all the new features over on his blog, and there are plenty, including the introduction of the People Connection service, which adds the social networking layer to WebCenter. This service was at least… Read More

There’s a very scary story floating (h/t Gizmodo) around about a man framed by a virus that compromised his computer, then downloaded child porn and acted as a server, all unbeknownst to him. Let that sink in for a minute. The man was eventually able to clear his name, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on… Read More

So, now that we’re really a product team and all, rolling into WebCenter development and working full-time on enhancements to the internal rollout of WebCenter 11g, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to add real content from time to time. I’m hoping that as we learn more about WebCenter and use it… Read More

Augmented Reality (AR) is a phrase you’ve probably heard lately, and you’ll probably get tired of hearing over the next few months. For the uninitiated, AR apps install to your mobile phone and layer content to views of your, erm, regular reality. Sounds weird, right? There have been several iPhone apps released over the past few months… Read More

The release of Twitter lists and the new “listed” metric has me thinking about reputation and how its applied to people in consumer web examples. I had an interesting chat with my pal Kelly (@verso) about the listed metric Friday. She doesn’t see it as immediately useful since there’s no way to determine the impact… Read More

Right, wrong or indifferent, we all use the following and followers metrics to make quick judgements about a person’s reputation, and now, Twitter has provided another dimension, the listed metric. This added dimension provides a much needed, albeit flawed, way to determine a user’s mojo. I use mojo here loosely to represent a user’s authority,… Read More

There’s been a fair amount of debate among the early adopter crowd lately about the place of syndicated content in relation to Twitter. The debate has been renewed in light of the general release of Twitter lists, which allow people to create and follow bunches of Twitter users en masse. Since many people use Twitter… Read More

I’m finally getting around to penning that post on Brizzly I’ve been threatening for a week. Not that anyone noticed. It’s been eerily quiet in the comments lately. Anyway, at OpenWorld, Rich turned me on to Brizzly and provided an invite. I’d heard about it over the Summer, but for whatever reason, it didn’t stick.… Read More

Rich provided a sweet tip this evening that I wanted to share. PuSH Bot, the weekend project of Mihai Parparita, combines the PubSubHubbub protocol with XMPP to create an easy way to subscribe to any feed served by PuSH via IM, meaning you’ll receive updates in your favorite IM client. Sweet! Oh, and there are… Read More

So, finally, Twitter has finally dropped a grouping feature, called Lists, at least to some users, including @oraclemix and @theappslab. Rich (@rmanlan) had them earlier in the week, too. Guess who’s out in the cold? Yours truly (@jkuramot), or at least I was when I started this post. Now, I’m in the club too. I,… Read More

No one likes to admit failure, especially when duplicity is involved. The intertubes is rife with scams and hoaxes, and I’m pretty sure everyone reading has fallen for at least one at some point. Case in point, today, I tried to download the bogus beta version of Chrome OS. Yes, it’s a hoax, so don’t… Read More

So, we’ve got a lot going on lately, what with the move and all. We’ll try to keep the content rolling despite real work. Rich attended Startup School 2009 over the weekend, and although he didn’t find much to blog about, you could try to rally him into a post by commenting or pestering him… Read More

A few weeks ago, I announced that our team was moving to WebCenter development. Since then, several people have asked what our role would be specifically, many of you in person at OpenWorld. Now, I can tell you, since I finally know for sure. We’ve been charged with the internal rollout of WebCenter 11g, which,… Read More

The good thing about having a blog without a narrow focus is that I can blog about pretty much anything. And I do. Case in point, auto-tuning. Until a few months ago, I wasn’t familiar with the practice of auto-tuning, which applies effects to people’s voices. I guess it’s usually applied to singer’s voices to… Read More

I’ve been playing foursquare regularly for about a month now, and even though I was teased by several people (you know who you are) at OpenWorld last week, I’ll continue to play. /me thumbs nose If you’re not familiar, foursquare debuted at SXSW this Spring, and it’s currently the latest shiny object of the early adopter… Read More

The big show is over for another year, and San Franciscans are happy for the return of that critical block of Howard between 3rd and 4th. As with every year, my show was pretty much over after Tuesday, leaving me with a couple sessions and lots of work to get done. Oh, and our annual… Read More

Wow, so it rained a bunch today, and it was windy. Like a tropical storm or something. Not the best weather for me, being umbrella-phobic and all. I nearly had my eye poked out a dozen times, not a good day to be anti-umbrella. Anyway, here we go. Tuesday, Day 2: Woke up to rain… Read More

Even though many of you are either here in rainy San Francisco or are following OpenWorld via its many virtual channels (#oow09 on Twitter, OpenWorld Live, OraNA (and @orana), etc.), I figured I’d give you a list of what I’ve been doing. Sunday, Day 0: Landed around 11:30 in Oakland. Spent 35 minutes in the… Read More