opinions and other important stuff
Last week I published a short article in Computable magazine (online version) on the trouble of license management. The article is in Dutch. For a Google translated version, click here.
Licentiemanagement veroorzaakt slapeloze nachten | Opinie | Outsourcing | Computable.nl
(License management causes sleepless nights)
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I have wmpoweruser.com in my favorites. For example today they feature:
awesome site.
Image by bigdigo via Flickr
After some serious time off, I am now back into blogging. And I promise to start using Twitter a bit more. My daughter went abroad for a year, I started work with a 600+ inbox and am already preparing 2 whitepapers and a round table on cloud computing in the public sector. We concluded the mid-year review of the team (we did good, thank you) and I read Rick Merrifield’s book “Re-Think”.
And…I dumped my HTC Touch Pro. Instead I bought a Nokia E72 (and I could not resist putting a nice picture of it on my blog).
You will probably understand why I moved away from Windows Mobile 6.x; It is an awkward and certainly not finger friendly operating environment. I already enhanced it with SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 (very nice by the way – I can recommend it to all Windows Mobile 6.x users), but after almost 2 years the phone and battery were seriously worn out.
I have thought about waiting for Windows Phone 7, but who knows when that will launch in my region? Signs are not good.
So I spend some time looking at other possibilities. After almost 2 years of experience, I feel that a touch screen keyboard does not do it for me, I wanted a real qwerty keyboard and not a slide out keyboard. The phone had to be reliable in business use and the software had to be either awesome or very reliable. Given the current situation with trolling on intellectual property (think Oracle and Java), I had some doubts on Symbian; but you might think that I am completly missing the point here.
I have chosen Nokia, and specifically the E72, because I expect it to fits my needs. The verdict after 1 week of usage:
Now I just need to stop trying to tap on the screen – it is not a touch phone….
Your thoughts?
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On February 10, 2010, I blogged about Siri and called it “the next chapter of the web”? Well it seems I was not alone in thinking this was a big thing. On April 28, 2010, Apple announced they bought Siri for a undisclosed amount of money (educated guess? between 100 and 200 million dollars).
Some will say this is about Apple going into the ‘search business’ – but I believe it is not that what interests Apple. Their strategy is to create platforms that integrate the web and Siri does exactly that. I have seen the term API-broker or info-orchestration. This kind of strategy allows Apple to build the best platform and have the information infrastructure to make it profitable. With so much experiences in online stores with mini-transactions, we can see a new business model emerging.
In fact, is there really a lot of difference in bringing entertainment content or any other content to a web store? Buying a new song, movie, theater or restaurant reservation is basically all the same. The combination, presented in a very user-friendly way to the consumer brings added value and access to millions of users will reinforce the value.
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Colleague Steve Nimmons has created a blog entry about integrity in social networking. It is on the Atos Origin Blog.
Steve writes:
“…the more I am connected within the ‘graph of others’ the more likely that my recommendations and interests show up in the Social Search results of others…”.
He then argues that this process can be manipulated to a certain extend, but probably the algorithms of search engines will understand manipulation and prevent false connections.
His piece is an interesting read, but does not mention the fact that we are seeing a lot of “de-friend-ing” at the moment (check out the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine). I believe that building large personal networks is a fun game (“how many followers do you have?”) and was a trend in past years. It certainly is now mostly a phenomenon to build attention, distribute news very quickly and a personal hobby from celebrities and PR people.
For opinions and thought leadership, people are now looking for trust and relationship in quality, not in numbers. Something does not have more truth to it if more people say so. The introduction of Google Buzz shows that it is at least necessary to distinguish between different types of networks. Many people are already doing that by using LinkedIn for business and Facebook for private relationships.
I agree with Steve that complex Social Graphs do hold an element of danger for manipulation. You can build a false persona of get robbed of your (highly respected and influencing) personality. Owners and managers of social networks should be very aware of these dangers and put measures in place to protect their users.
Read Steve’s post here.