Last week, Paul spoke on a webinar panel hosted by Communitelligence about social networking inside the firewall. Also on the panel were Lee Aase of the Mayo Clinic and Polly Pearson from EMC. I didn’t attend the webinar, but Paul mentioned that Kudos was well-received. We did a follow-up meeting with some folks from EMC,… Read More
Category: general
I Am Not a Good Lead
New this week, cold calls from innovation and strategy consultancies. Maybe it’s a function of a crappy economy, or maybe I happen to be an easy to find contact at Oracle. For whatever reason, I’m now fielding calls from consultancies who want to help Oracle with innovation or Web/Enterprise 2.0 adoption or social media or… Read More
Feeling Lucky?
I always find it noteworthy when a handful of stories about a single company or service pop up within a day or so. Usually, none of them alone is all that interesting, but as a collection, they sometimes form a story that I find blogworthy. This time it’s Google’s Web Search. Totally weird to see… Read More
Had Enough Twitter Yet?
Twitter is exploding. You’ve probably seen the numbers. 1,382% comparing February 2009 with February 2008. More than 50% from January 2009 to February 2009. By all measures, that’s an insane growth rate. Mainstream media has taken note, and celebrities (and impostors) are flocking to Twitter in droves. Pun intended. Do you have a favorite celebrity… Read More
Web Mission is Coming
As he did last year, Paul will be speaking during the Oracle portion of this year’s Web Mission, which runs March 28-April 3. What is Web Mission? Glad you asked, from the about: Web Mission is organized Bronwyn Kunhardt and James Lawn from the market intelligence company Polecat (www.polecatting.com) and by serial entrepreneur, Oli Barrett.… Read More
Ignore Your Competition, Focus on the Stable
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… Read More
I Might Pay for JotNot
There are very few times when I read something and think to myself, I must blog this immediately and tell as many people as possible. This is one of those few times. JotNot is a web service that converts pictures into documents. Send a picture to them by email or upload one to their website… Read More
TED on Play
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),… Read More
I Want VLI
Back in 2006 while on a trip to HQ, I sat in a meeting with some folks from the User Experience (UX) team. I don’t remember exactly what the purpose of the meeting was, but we wandered off topic and were just bouncing ideas off each other. I threw out the idea of a zero… Read More
TweetDeck Adds Facebook, What’s Next?
As is usual during the weeks before and during South by Southwest, there are a lot of product announcements. I’m not quite sure how/when it happened, but SXSW Interactive has become a nexus of startup activity and geekery, e.g. Twitter’s first bump came when the service won the SXSW Web Awards in 2007. So, it’s… Read More
Anatomy of a Spam Attack
Yesterday, I did some browsing of the web analytics for this blog to get comparison numbers for the browser stats I had for Connect. Today, I went back to do a little more digging and some navel-gazing 🙂 We use Google Analytics, which I prefer to Mint for web metrics. It has loads of metrics… Read More
On Browsers
IE6 is like that cold that just won’t go away; you feel well enough to go to work, but it keeps sapping your energy. To many users, IE6 is the Internet. It came with your computer, and it’s the way you get online. Resisting the urge to put online in quotes. Like many web apps,… Read More
Trying Pivotal Tracker
Last week, Rich proposed that we try Pivotal Tracker for Connect. Our work on Connect can be loosely described as agile. We generally meet, either in person or on the phone, to hash out major feature releases, and then Rich and Anthony build and deploy. And I test. Every six months or so, we rinse… Read More
APEX in the Cloud
This post about running APEX in the cloud by Jason Straub came across OraNA last week. I’m surprised Chet didn’t pounce on it, being the APEX devotee that he is. Basically, you can now run APEX on Amazon EC2 for 60 cents. Oracle has recently been rolling out more offerings with AWS, including database and… Read More
Connect Adds Geolocation
Now, we know where you are . . . but only if you tell us. Yesterday, Rich completed the addition of geolocation tracking to Connect. Now, when you OraTweet your location or update your Connect status with the secret phrase “@location” followed by a place (address or city or country), Connect stores your location. And… Read More
Learning from Entertainment
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… Read More
Leave a Comment using Facebook Connect
Just before Christmas, Disqus announced their support for Facebook Connect. At the time I remember being a little disappointed with the decision, due to Facebook’s closed nature and what seemed like a choice for the walled garden of Facebook and against the open web (OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial). I like Disqus; they’ve been responsive when we’ve… Read More
Batman vs. Superman
Here comes a topic for a Friday. I try to torture my wife with this nerdy debate, but she consistently rises above the argument. So, I’m coming to the ‘tubes to get some real discussion. This class comic book nerd debate is really Batman or Superman, not vs. which suggests they’re fighting. It’s styled as… Read More
Freely Available Utilities
The title comes from a phrase that stood out for me in this post from RWW. That post highlights some really sweet data pr0n (TwitterThoughts and World Twitter Map) built by Yvo Schaap that uses the Twitter API for data, Yahoo Pipes for parsing and the Google Visualization API for producing the eye candy. All… Read More
Another Facebook User Revolt is Coming
Today, Facebook previewed changes it plans to make to their site next week. There are quite a few: A redesigned home page with live updates, filters and a universal publishing model (very much like FriendFeed’s). One minor change that’s part of the universal publishing box is changing the verbiage “What are you doing right now?”… Read More