Month: May 2008

Lost phone

Somewhere on the 6th floor of the NYC Googleplex, in the marker tray of a whiteboard, sits a silent Blackberry Pearl plugged into a wall.

I read somewhere that for some Europeans the loss of a phone is considered to be the loss of one’s network, of one’s social circle, an occasion for great angst and loathing.

Me? Happy as can be. Off I go to AT&T tomorrow to get me one of the big boy sized blackberries. The old one, which lost the latch to its battery cover, was ratty with scotch tape and is now dead to me.

Until then, I am a landline kind of guy.

Next haircut …

May 1999, I spent two weeks in Paris, renting a flat on Ile St. Louis behind Notre Dame. Whenever I needed a new book I went to Shakespeare & Company on the Left Bank and bought something from George Whitman, the man in the video above. He was a hoot, a literary legend who let starving writers live in the bookstore in exchange for cooking and sweeping out. Apparently you did not want to get on George’s bad side. Fortunately I managed to stay on his good side, but not good enough to get a demo of his haircut technique.

Note to self …. back FROM school marketing

I wonder if there is any empirical evidence that the end of a school year drives any shopping behavior associated with the return of campus notebooks to the home environment. I have two kids home from college, both carrying Lenovo Thinkpads (A Z60 and an R60) and both need some serious hard disk sanitation work.

Being a cheapskate, lesson learned the hard way: “Max out the harddrive when purchasing a laptop that is going to school.”  The sheer volume of media files, games, and assorted crud is astonishing and will fill all available storage at the worst possible time: namely right before finals when papers need to be written and the mission critical scenario of cramming kicks in.

So, home come these sick and bloated machines and I find myself ready to:

  1. Buy ultrafast, ultra-high volume hard drives.
  2. Buy an external drive with enough capacity to perform the transfer and rebuild of the OS on the new notebook drive.
  3. Potentially replace keyboards if I detect any crud or spillage.
  4. Buy more RAM? Maybe …
  5. Not buy replacement screens like I had to do last summer.
  6. Consider padded sleeves
  7. Even consider NQA replacement plans because I am paranoid and my kids haven’t yet met a notebook they couldn’t accidentally destroy

So, note to self. Push a “Back from School Sale” for accessories and parts.

Whereabout week of 5-19

Monday 5/19- Cotuit

Tuesday 5/20 – NYC

Wed-Memorial Day 5/21 – 5/26 – Cotuit

following week 5/27-29 RTP

First week of June – Bangalore

Break out the yellow ties and suspenders, it’s M&A time in the Valley

CNET goes to CBS for $1.28 billion (thx Chris) — a 44% premium over yesterday’s closing price. Silicon Alley Reporter has the skinny and is blogging the call at 8:30 EST. What can I say? CNET started as a TV show, morphed into an online network, blazed some strong trails in the early days (from developing its own content management system, early moves into video and user reviews, extension quickly from computers to consumer electronics), grew like a weed, ate the traditional tech rags lunches, acquired ZDNet, then, post 2000 bubble-pop, hiccupped a little, soldiered on, the founders (Halsey Minor, et al) moved on, and then, indigniities of indignities, upstarts start picking fights with them.

The sale makes sense, but I never have really figured out CBS and the internet. Sure, there was CBS Marketwatch — a great site in the early days, but that was sold off to Dow Jones. Now Les Moonves is back in the game with a geek content acquisition? One getting the heck challenged out of it by the long tail specialist sites and gadget blogs like Engadget, Gizmodo? We shall see.

Then along came Carl Icahn, eater of companies, who decides to show Microsoft how to do a hostile takeover. Icahn, who is best known for his 1985 assault on TWA, has accumulated 50 million shares in Yahoo and is plotting a board takeover. As someone blogged yesterday, Jerry Yang is hiding under his desk.

Sad state of affairs …

…at the Harris-Teeter supermarket. Having given into the need to get a Harris-Teeter (why are names like “Teeter” and “Cooter” so southern? Harris-Teeter is now Harris-Cooter) VIC card (don’t ask: it’s one of those plastic barcode discount-getter cards) I went to the Courtesy Desk and filled out a form. As I put pen to paper I realized the following things are securely stored behind the Courtesy Desk and not out on the shelves.

  1. Canned crabmeat
  2. Lottery tickets
  3. Tobacco
  4. Infant formula

The last made me sad and I thought about people so strapped for cash they have to steal baby food, enough so that management has to hide it away and guard it.

Facebook as a quick and dirty corporate collaboration tool. It Depends.

On the face of it, Facebook groups would seem like one of those cheap, quick, and effective ways to build quick cross-enterprise communities. Set up a group, invite attendees, guide the non-users in how to establish an account, and then control membership.

The alternatives would be a paid account like 37Signal’s most excellent Basecamp, but that is less quick and less dirty than a Facebook group, which to my eyes has a lot in common with the Web 1.0 world of Yahoo Groups. One could also think about any number of wiki solutions, but let’s say the requirements come down to an virtual team room for a collection of four to 400, heck 4,000 users all united in some cause that requires a fast, familiar, and cheap platform.

Facebook would meet that bill except for one vital detail: not everybody can use it.

It’s blocked, along with some other social networks, by many corporate network admins. Right there game over. I was pretty surprised to be in a meeting today, to hear Facebook proposed, and then watch it get shot down in less than one minute as first one, then two, then three seriously senior IT people said their organization’s blocked Facebook. I would argue that no big deal, the platform was, after all, designed for college kids to check each other before attempting a hookup. Having old farts and suits invade it as an enterprise collaboration system was not its intention.

So, the old issue of cross-organizational collaboration is still with us. How would you solve it? Rules are: open platform, open APIs, no fee, no onerous set-up. Needs a file sharing/library including rich media hosting. Must be secure.

 

All Things Cahill – Shark Jumping?

All Things Cahill » Blog Archive » Social Media – Shark Jumping?

Jeremiah’s Tweet that Avenue A has trademarked “social influence marketing” prompted me to ask rhetorically if the shark had been jumped. My good buddy Mark Cahill posted:

“What I am finding is that most of the people I am finding in my general circle on Twitter are social media types. That’s to say, folks that attend a lot of conferences, and have generally drank fully of the social media Kool-Aid. The thing that calls it all into question for me is the number of people who are generally ex-online marketing folks now using strange titles like “Social Media User Guru” or something equally ludicrous. It reminds me of a networking group I once attended that turned out to be a room full of sales people, each hoping to sell something, and none realizing there weren’t any real customers there.”

Amen Mark. Lots of sharks chasing very few fish I think.

Big thanks for the well-wishes

Half-a-century. Old fart. AARP. Etc.

Thanks to everybody for the birthday wishes. I’ve seen it blogged before, but it is truly amazing the impact of birthdate registration has on the automation of the experience.

Highlight of the day was just now when I strolled into the Durham Gold’s Gym, swiped my barcode thing, and the clerk’s PC played “Happy Birthday”, a cartoon cake popped up next to my name, and the man, instead of saying: “Here’s your towel” said “Happy birthday.”

Reel-Time, the Internet Journal of Saltwater Flyfishing used to wish me happy birthday, but it’s dead because SOMEONE forgot to renew the domain.

LinkedIn, Plaxo, The Ladders, Facebook, random financial newsletters, and my sister all emailed me today to say Happy Birthday.

Everytime any one IM’d the sentiment to me, I replied with “f%&k you” because that’s the nice guy I am. How did I spend the day? In a windowless ballroom with our Customer Advisory Council. Highlight was failing to perform 120 pull ups and dips at the gym as the CrossFit workout of the day insisted I must.

Ah. All I want now is a Red Sox game and an empty inbox.