Yahoo! The Sleeping Giant

Last week, screenshots of Kickstart, Yahoo’s lastest foray into social networks surfaced. Not surprisingly, Kickstart is targeted at recruiting, helping college student find an “in” at companies where they want to work and helping companies recruit students. I like this approach, as long as they can keep it clean by ensuring the students are really… Read More

All Your (Oracle) Blogs are Belong to Us

So, about a month ago when I released the Oracle Blogs search engine plugins, Carl asked a very valid question. Why can’t I search all the blogs listed at blogs.oracle.com, regardless of whether they are hosted by Oracle or not? I thought about this, contemplating creating a Custom Google Search Engine and a plugin against… Read More

From the “Don’t Be Evil” Department

As we all know, Google’s unofficial motto is “Don’t be evil”. I’m a huge fan of the ideals behind the statement, but I’m also a huge cynic. IMHO, by going public, Google essentially changed the motto to “Let’s not be poor.” Not that all the hardworking Googlers don’t deserve to be rewarded for their efforts.… Read More

Cage Match: Google vs. Facebook

While Yahoo has spent time and energy over the past year and a half trying several times to talk Facebook into a merger, Google has been curiously silent. Until, they recently snagged Brad Fitzpatrick from Six Apart. Fitzpatrick, known for founding LiveJournal and selling it to Six Apart, wasted no time laying down the gauntlet… Read More

Google Apps Suite Plows Ahead

Business Week has an article today about Google Apps. The suite looks more complete every day. Witness the Postini acquisition, the anticipated release of presentations (a combination of Zenter, Tonic Systems and probably some homegrown mojo too) this summer, the integration of JotSpot features and now, enterprise YouTube. This one jumped off the page for… Read More

Odd News

In case you’ve been wondering, I collect these stories, and when I get a few, I dump them. Like it, don’t like it, tell me in Comments. Details on Taser’s XREP electric shotgun shell emerge From Engadget, cool and frightening all at once. Chinese Youth Killed By Cell Phone Battery Blast It’s supposed to be… Read More

So Much for the Backup Plan

Maybe Eric Schmidt was reading this blog over the weekend. On Saturday, I observed that Eric was being coy when he called the enterprise an agreed that the enterprise was a backup plan for Google, just in case that whole advertising thing doesn’t pan out as planned. Today, Google announced it is acquiring Postini to… Read More

Too Many of Me, Part 2

Ionut Alex Chitu over at Google Operating System has a post about Socialstream, a new kind of social network, created by a project in the Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and sponsored by Google. Don’t the already have a orkut that’s kind of a big deal in Brazil? Anyway, the feature… Read More

Google’s Backup Plan

I read today that Google Apps will soon include the features acquired from JotSpot. Not that big a surprise, but adding wikis and web site building capabilities to Google Apps will make them even more compelling in comparison to Microsoft Office. I hope Docs and Spreadsheets will be graced with these features, too. Anyway, it… Read More

Is a bar chart really the best we can do?

I recently caught a demo of Hans Rosling’s software which provides a pretty amazing visualization framework for understanding relationships between data.  In this demo, Hans analyzes, by country,  infant mortality vs GNP over the course of about 100 years.   Like all great presentations, if forces you to re-think how you view something – in this… Read More

Bigger Big Brother, Part 2

Thanks to Eddie and Steve for weighing in on the discussion I started yesterday. I think fundamentally, we disagree about who has more damaging information. I say Amazon does. Eddie and Steve say Google. My argument is that purchase history (even without exposing credit cards) can be more damaging than search/email/feed reading/documents. I say that… Read More

Googleforce.com Coming Soon?

I can’t keep quiet anymore, so I’m whispering into the blogosphere echo chamber. I think, wait for it . . . Google’s acquisition frenzy isn’t over yet. Nothing like going out on a limb, stunning prognostication. Which company you ask, assuming you’re still reading? How about salesforce.com? How does that strike you? This isn’t a… Read More