Yes, there's a tech bubble: Google Shopping Express proves it
Google has plenty of money to subsidize its service as long as it cares to, but the story quotes one observer saying “There’s no line of sight” to making the service pay for itself. This is a money loser now, and it projects to be for the foreseeable future. But at least GSX, as Google calls it, charges something for its service. The real riddle is companies like Seamless.com and WunWun, which offer free or almost free delivery from restaurants and other retailers in a number of cities. Instead of asking consumers to pay, they charge the retailers a commission and other fees that a recent BusinessWeek articlesaid made Seamless unsustainable for many restaurants.
'The Internet Of Things' Will Change Virtually Everything About How Large Companies Operate
The IoT will be a diffuse layer of devices, sensors, and computing power that overlays entire business-to-business, consumer-facing and government industries. The IoT will account for an increasingly huge number of connections: 1.9 billion devices today, and 9 billion by 2018. That year, it will be roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers, and PCscombined. In IoT research from BI Intelligence, we look at the transition of once-inert objects into sensor-laden intelligent devices that can communicate with the other gadgets in our lives.
Can Strategic CIOs Create a Renaissance Revolution?
Filippo Passerini, Group President-Global Business Services, and CIO at P&G is passionate about creating information democracy across the various business units. His digitize, visualize, and simulate strategy changed the business model and helped managers make well-informed business decisions. There is no doubt that there is a renaissance revolution occurring in the C-suite today and CIOs are leading the charge. Strategic CIOs change the dynamics of the business enterprise by leveraging information and technology in new and innovative ways to create customer value, improve margins, and enhance shareholder wealth...a winning outcome for any business enterprise.
How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too)
Facebook’s “like” and “share” buttons are seen 22 billion times a day, making them some of the most-viewed design elements ever created. Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook’s director of product design, outlines three rules for design at such a massive scale—one so big that the tiniest of tweaks can cause global outrage, but also so large that the subtlest of improvements can positively impact the lives of many.
Ugly Research: Data is easy, Deciding is hard
Tracy Allison Altman over at Ugly Research has a great new white paper – Data is easy: Deciding is hard - in which she quotes me (thanks Tracy). It’s a great paper and makes what I think is the critical point – that you don’t need a data culture but a decision culture. And I would add that you need this at every level – strategic, tactical and operational. The paper has some great advice and I would add a couple of additional thoughts: For decisions you make often – some tactical and all operational decisions for instance – build a decision model so you know how you think you are going to/should make the decision moving forward.
Using Big Data to Optimize Business Operations
Business – and life in general – is becoming data-centric. In order to uphold reliability and preserve reputation, a data center must maintain an unimpeded flow of data at a level not anticipated even just a few years ago. To do that, a data center needs to refine how it values data used in monitoring its own operations so that the flow of information generated in running the facility does not flood or overwhelm IT and management capabilities.
The Dark Age Of Enterprise Software Is Ending
We all need to realize that it’s a whole new ballgame. And just like the insular, glacial world of baseball, this new age of software is a tectonic shift in the enterprise that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. For our enterprises to succeed in this new world, we need more than just shiny new software. We must change long-held cultural, political biases about “how we do things here.” In making critical decisions, enterprises too often rely on perceived rather than rigorously analyzed historical patterns. They let competing entities argue their positions, too often giving power to the loudest voice in the room.
Defining F5's role in software defined networks
With regards to F5 specifically, the company does have a broad set of software defined application services (SDAS) today. BIG-IQ is an architecture for managing F5 SDAS elements and can be used to provide simplified abstractions to the control or orchestration plane. This can be useful when integrating a number of heterogeneous components. This is why the F5 Synthesis partner ecosystem is so broad today and is an SDN “whose who,” including Cisco, VMware, Big Switch, Arista, Oracle, Splunk, Rackspace, and the list goes on. F5 is also one of the few vendors that’s playing both sides of the VMware/Cisco card. Clearly, the SDN wars are heading down a path where there’s a defined Cisco camp and VMware camp.
Hunting Concurrency Bugs
The bug was in the JVM, rather than my code. I've been waiting since 2010 to publish it, because a malicious coder could insert this into his code and jam up your application server. Since you cannot connect JConsole or jstack or JVisualVM to it, nor can you generate a stack trace with CTRL+Break or CTRL+\, it can be quite tricky to discover where this is coming from. As Java programmers, we often think that all bugs are in our code. But the JVM was also written by people and we all make mistakes. The only reason that there are less bugs is because more people are using the JVM than your code and so the bugs tend to get rooted out more quickly.
Early interest in LTE-connected cars is strong
It's clear GM is fully backing the idea of a connected car. While Audi actually had the 4G LTE-connected car on the market, GM will have the broadest selection of connected cars, with 30 models hitting the market this year. Chan said the goal was to further expand 4G LTE-connection in the car lines next year. Beyond the consumer, Chan said she sees an opportunity to sell its 4G LTE-connected car service to businesses that deal with vehicles, such as the trucking industry. GM has opened up its software programming to allow businesses to create apps that take advantage of a connected car.
Quote for the day:
"Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching." -- Thomas Jefferson
Google has plenty of money to subsidize its service as long as it cares to, but the story quotes one observer saying “There’s no line of sight” to making the service pay for itself. This is a money loser now, and it projects to be for the foreseeable future. But at least GSX, as Google calls it, charges something for its service. The real riddle is companies like Seamless.com and WunWun, which offer free or almost free delivery from restaurants and other retailers in a number of cities. Instead of asking consumers to pay, they charge the retailers a commission and other fees that a recent BusinessWeek articlesaid made Seamless unsustainable for many restaurants.
'The Internet Of Things' Will Change Virtually Everything About How Large Companies Operate
The IoT will be a diffuse layer of devices, sensors, and computing power that overlays entire business-to-business, consumer-facing and government industries. The IoT will account for an increasingly huge number of connections: 1.9 billion devices today, and 9 billion by 2018. That year, it will be roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers, and PCscombined. In IoT research from BI Intelligence, we look at the transition of once-inert objects into sensor-laden intelligent devices that can communicate with the other gadgets in our lives.
Can Strategic CIOs Create a Renaissance Revolution?
Filippo Passerini, Group President-Global Business Services, and CIO at P&G is passionate about creating information democracy across the various business units. His digitize, visualize, and simulate strategy changed the business model and helped managers make well-informed business decisions. There is no doubt that there is a renaissance revolution occurring in the C-suite today and CIOs are leading the charge. Strategic CIOs change the dynamics of the business enterprise by leveraging information and technology in new and innovative ways to create customer value, improve margins, and enhance shareholder wealth...a winning outcome for any business enterprise.
How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too)
Facebook’s “like” and “share” buttons are seen 22 billion times a day, making them some of the most-viewed design elements ever created. Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook’s director of product design, outlines three rules for design at such a massive scale—one so big that the tiniest of tweaks can cause global outrage, but also so large that the subtlest of improvements can positively impact the lives of many.
Ugly Research: Data is easy, Deciding is hard
Tracy Allison Altman over at Ugly Research has a great new white paper – Data is easy: Deciding is hard - in which she quotes me (thanks Tracy). It’s a great paper and makes what I think is the critical point – that you don’t need a data culture but a decision culture. And I would add that you need this at every level – strategic, tactical and operational. The paper has some great advice and I would add a couple of additional thoughts: For decisions you make often – some tactical and all operational decisions for instance – build a decision model so you know how you think you are going to/should make the decision moving forward.
Using Big Data to Optimize Business Operations
Business – and life in general – is becoming data-centric. In order to uphold reliability and preserve reputation, a data center must maintain an unimpeded flow of data at a level not anticipated even just a few years ago. To do that, a data center needs to refine how it values data used in monitoring its own operations so that the flow of information generated in running the facility does not flood or overwhelm IT and management capabilities.
The Dark Age Of Enterprise Software Is Ending
We all need to realize that it’s a whole new ballgame. And just like the insular, glacial world of baseball, this new age of software is a tectonic shift in the enterprise that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. For our enterprises to succeed in this new world, we need more than just shiny new software. We must change long-held cultural, political biases about “how we do things here.” In making critical decisions, enterprises too often rely on perceived rather than rigorously analyzed historical patterns. They let competing entities argue their positions, too often giving power to the loudest voice in the room.
Defining F5's role in software defined networks
With regards to F5 specifically, the company does have a broad set of software defined application services (SDAS) today. BIG-IQ is an architecture for managing F5 SDAS elements and can be used to provide simplified abstractions to the control or orchestration plane. This can be useful when integrating a number of heterogeneous components. This is why the F5 Synthesis partner ecosystem is so broad today and is an SDN “whose who,” including Cisco, VMware, Big Switch, Arista, Oracle, Splunk, Rackspace, and the list goes on. F5 is also one of the few vendors that’s playing both sides of the VMware/Cisco card. Clearly, the SDN wars are heading down a path where there’s a defined Cisco camp and VMware camp.
Hunting Concurrency Bugs
The bug was in the JVM, rather than my code. I've been waiting since 2010 to publish it, because a malicious coder could insert this into his code and jam up your application server. Since you cannot connect JConsole or jstack or JVisualVM to it, nor can you generate a stack trace with CTRL+Break or CTRL+\, it can be quite tricky to discover where this is coming from. As Java programmers, we often think that all bugs are in our code. But the JVM was also written by people and we all make mistakes. The only reason that there are less bugs is because more people are using the JVM than your code and so the bugs tend to get rooted out more quickly.
Early interest in LTE-connected cars is strong
It's clear GM is fully backing the idea of a connected car. While Audi actually had the 4G LTE-connected car on the market, GM will have the broadest selection of connected cars, with 30 models hitting the market this year. Chan said the goal was to further expand 4G LTE-connection in the car lines next year. Beyond the consumer, Chan said she sees an opportunity to sell its 4G LTE-connected car service to businesses that deal with vehicles, such as the trucking industry. GM has opened up its software programming to allow businesses to create apps that take advantage of a connected car.
Quote for the day:
"Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching." -- Thomas Jefferson
