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Four short links: 12 November 2009

By Nat Torkington
November 12, 2009

Fat Free CRM -- open source (Affero GPL) Ruby on Rails CRM system. Bixo -- open source data mining toolkit that runs as a series of pipes on top of Hadoop. Built on Cascading workflow system for Hadoop that hides MapReduce. (via kdnuggets) Andy Kessler's Keynote at Defrag Stank (Pete Warden) -- I'm sorry to hear it, because I...

Vendor Relationship Management workshop

By Andy Oram
October 14, 2009

CRM can offer many valuable benefits, but ultimately the control lies with the vendor. A Vendor Relationship Management workshop at Harvard looked at what it would take to leave control with the customers.

Do the Math on Your Mobile Apps

By Andrew Savikas
September 29, 2009

One of my favorite sources of interesting reading material these days is Hacker News (follow them at @newsycombinator), and this week they pointed me to a piece from Derek...

Environment Variables: On Surplus, Scarcity, Fear & Greed

By Mark Sigal
August 18, 2009

I am big believer that markets gravitate between FEAR and GREED, and that industries are driven by core assumptions about the SCARCITY or SURPLUS of enabling resources. Think about the stock market in terms of the former (it's heavily outlook driven), and the evolution of computing, as afforded by the latter (i.e., the commoditization of processing, storage and bandwidth).

A new definition of oligopoly?

By Rick Jelliffe
August 12, 2009

I wonder whether the recent events would make new definitions for monopoly and oligopoly more relevant?

Content is a Service Business

By Andrew Savikas
July 12, 2009

What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.

Freemium Services and the Economics of Social Networking

By George Reese
July 5, 2009

Social networking sites face a unique economic challenge when it comes to monetizing the value they create. Any attempt to capture a piece of the value they create inevitably damages that value.

Four short links: 2 June 2009

By Nat Torkington
June 2, 2009

TypeKit -- Jeff Veen's new startup, making typography on the web fail to suck. Every major browser is about to support the ability to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page display with the typography you expect. While it’s technically quite easy...

Four short links: 25 May 2009

By Nat Torkington
May 25, 2009

China is Logging On -- blogging 5x more popular in China than in USA, email 1/3 again as popular in USA as China. These figures are per-capita of Internet users, and make eye-opening reading. (via Glynn Moody) The Economics of Google (Wired) -- the money graf is Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its...

Four short links: 8 Apr 2009

By Nat Torkington
April 8, 2009

Bias, RFCs, virus batteries, and a glimpse at life beyond record labels (the last item features profanity, beware): Bias We Can Believe In (Mind Hacks) -- Vaughn asks the tricky question about the current enthusiasm for Behavioural Economics in government: where are the sceptical voices? As he points out, It's perhaps no accident that almost all the articles cite a...

Bonus lessons from AIG: crisis management just sets up the next crisis

By Andy Oram
March 24, 2009

The flap over 165 million dollars in bonuses at a company taking federal bail-out money provides an opportunity to rethink how we handle crises. Start by trusting your staff to set long-term priorities accurately. Ask staff to analyze problems for root causes. Also, ask the people most affected by the problem what they need to fix it.

The Weakness of Commodity Server to Cloud Server Cost Comparisons

By George Reese
March 19, 2009

Though the conventional wisdom on the Internet is that the economic benefits of cloud computing fail for applications with steady usage needs, the reality is that the commodity-server to cloud-server comparisons on which this wisdom is based are flawed. The reality is that the cloud often provides compelling economic benefits even when you have an application with consistent resource demands.

Blame the Credit Card Franchise: Criminals on Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute) Cloud

By Nitesh Dhanjani
March 11, 2009

Amazon EC2 is an extraordinarily powerful infrastructure available to anyone with a stolen credit card. Even if someone is able to use the EC2 platform for a few hours with a stolen credit card, he or she will be able to initiate a vicious cycle that may become impossible to halt.

Free

By Kurt Cagle
February 17, 2009

The paradox of contemporary life is upon us. I paid $2,000 for the laptop upon which I type these words, in addition to a hundred dollars a month paying for online access, yet the editor I'm using is a web page within a free web browser, connected to a server that is running either Linux or Open Solaris, which was downloaded for free from a distribution disk that no doubt someone paid for, albeit at a cost of pennies. Yet the time and energy to creating these operating systems were non-negligible, representing thousands of man years in total dedicated to writing this free system.

At TOC: Cory Doctorow to Publishers: Demand Option To *Not* Use DRM

By Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009

I knew Cory Doctorow would be a great wrap up to the first day morning keynotes at TOC, and he more than delivered. He ended the keynote with a challenge...

XBRL Becomes Mandatory - This Should Be Interesting

By Kurt Cagle
February 8, 2009

The announcement came quietly, a briefly worded memo from the SEC in December that as of the the third fiscal quarter of 2009 (starting in June), companies over $5 billion in assets would be required to start reporting their earnings using the Extensible Business Markup Language, or XBRL. Other companies would be required to follow suit according to whether they use GAAP (which have a one year grace period) or IFRP (starting 2011).

iPhone App Outperforms Most Print (Computer) Books This Holiday Season

By Andrew Savikas
January 7, 2009

Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It's hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice...

Analysis 2009: The Financial Crisis Hits IT Hard

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

The recession that started in January 2008 looks to be four phased. The first phase, The housing collapse, actually started in August 2007. The financial meltdown hit in September 2008, and likely will continue through to March 2009 or...

Some thoughts for a New Era

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

This particular look forward is definitely longer than what I have written in years past, and for those of you who have managed to wade through the admittedly voluminous text I both admire your fortitude. This has been a hard...

Sustainability, Boxing Day, and Open Source Software

By Kurt Cagle
December 28, 2008

Boxing Day, celebrated on the day after Christmas, is a British holiday that's migrated to Canada, and is slowly beginning to make inroads even into the United States. It had its beginnings in the late 18th century, when the landed lords of England, after having given one another presents after Christmas Mass began an interesting custom. After having received new dresses, dress suits, hats and so forth, they would go into their wardrobes and childrens' play rooms and find those things that they no longer wore or used or played with, presenting them as gifts to their servants and staff, a custom which eventually extended to giving inexpensive gifts and trinkets to their tenant farmers and needy villagers.

Throwing Money at Problems: More Thoughts on Bailouts

By Kurt Cagle
December 15, 2008

Government absolutely must play a role in dealing with companies that are too big to fail ... it must prevent them from reaching that point. Until that happens, real reform in business will be slow and problematic.

Expanding The O'Reilly Forums

By Kurt Cagle
December 13, 2008

Forums have become an integral part of many communities over the years - as a webmaster on a number of different social sites, I found that the sites tended to live or die on the strength of their forums more than on any other component of the site. They provide a way for people to express their feelings, to communicate with one another, to explore deep concepts (and silly ones) and to learn, and as such they often form the vibrant backbone of communities regardless of the subject matter expressed.

Bailouts, Burnouts and Non-Linear Innovation

By Kurt Cagle
December 10, 2008

Think fractally, think non-linear, and help those of your linear friends, neighbors and political representatives who can't conceive that tomorrow will not be like today to understand that linear thinking is a dangerous, deceptive illusion.

Book Publishing's Scale Issue

By Mac Slocum
December 9, 2008

In a post looking at the future interplay of content, gatekeepers and consumers, David Nygren touches on a key issue for large book publishers: scale. Mega Publishing Conglomerates Go Bye-Bye:...

Why Jerry Seinfeld Probably Cost Microsoft a Lot More than $10 Million

By Nitesh Dhanjani
November 10, 2008

In this article, I want put forth a case study to demonstrate how capturing feelings on the social web can allow companies to measure the reputation of their brand.

The desktop 3D printer

By Mike Loukides
October 30, 2008

Yesterday, Andrew Sheppard pointed me at a desktop 3D printer for under $5000. That brought back some memories... In the early 80s, I worked for Imagen, the company that made the first laser printer that sold for under $20,000, the first laser printer that sold for under $10,000, and the first laser printer that sold for under $7,000. We didn't...

Short Gas Supplies Lead to Short Tempers, Long Lines and Telecommutes

By Kurt Cagle
October 1, 2008

While Hurricane Ike has long since faded into the ether, its effects on the economy continue to mount. One of the more significant (and unexpected) - Ike hit a number of oil refineries and gas distribution centers hard enough to know them offline for the last couple of weeks.

Black Monday, 2008

By Kurt Cagle
September 29, 2008

At one point, the stock market fall was so rapid that several financial sites web service update servers were overwhelmed and crashed as people refreshed their browsers second by second to watch the carnage. At the end of the day, the damage was significant - the Dow down 672 points (6.2%), the S&P down 94 points (7.8%) and the NASDAQ down a staggering 200 points (more than 9.1%). In Canada, the TSX closed down 750 points, and it's likely that the selloff in Asia and Europe will be just as brutal.

Paulson Plan Will Prove Devastating to IT

By Kurt Cagle
September 24, 2008

On the 20th of September, Henry Paulson submitted an architectural plan to Congress to provide a foundation for keeping Wall Street functional and prevent the credit markets from seizing up, a task which he has been engaged in pretty much non-stop for at least the last year (since the markets started to crack in August 2007). This architectural plan, one that would involve potentially trillions of dollars and affect the lives of tens of millions of people, was not 1000 pages of detailed analysis, not even a hundred pages of recommendations and "to be filled in with details later". It was 2 1/2 pages long.

Bad Finance 101 - A Programmer's Guide

By Kurt Cagle
September 16, 2008

O'Reilly's focus has long been on programming issues (or programmer issues) and that focus remains very much in place. However, it is worth understanding how the grief playing out on Wall Street will have a very significant impact upon the IT industry within the next four to six months, even despite the fact that up until now the contagion seems largely to have remained contained in the financial sector.

Time to Stop "Blaming the SysAdmin" or "Geekonomics"

By Anton Chuvakin
August 14, 2008

This rant/post comes due to my finishing the book "Geekonomics"(book site) - my earlier impressions here and here. The way the book ends, BTW, just kicks you in the balls, hard (look up what Mr Petrov did on Sept 26,...

Yochai Benkler, others at Harvard map current and future Internet

By Andy Oram
May 16, 2008

Harvard's world-renowned Berkman Center for Internet & Society is celebrating its tenth anniversary with a conference called Berkman@10. The center is a conglomeration of many people, both lawyers and non-lawyers, who study the Internet and add their efforts to empower its users. In my opinion, the most salient contribution of the Berkman Center is its devotion to new research instead of pure theory. I'll report here on today's sessions, which were organized as a fairly conventional symposium (although as loosely as one could run it with 450 attendees).

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