Hey, I’m a geek.  I’ll admit it.  An alpha geek, mind you.  So I love the latest geek gadget as much as the next guy.  Consider a RAID array to replace your hard disk that is so powerful you can load and open every single MS Office application in half a second.  Whoa!  I gotta get ...

With software-as-a-service (SaaS) becoming more and more popular in the content management industry, everyone seems to have an opinion on the pros and cons of SaaS as a model. There's truth. There's fiction. There's gazing at the crystal ball. Let’s have a look at a recent version of the most ...

I know you may not be feeling this way depending on where you live, but Spring is in the air.  How do I know? Easy, my anniversary has just passed.  For the 19 years I have been married, I know that once my anniversary is over it will soon be Spring.  Sort of my own bird like instinct maybe.  Wh...

I’ve been connecting to my customers over the internet to do maintenance for years. Meanwhile, I’ve been burning rating CDs for my insurance client to distribute to their agencies. Recently, as they all got online, we made the rating software available as a download. Yesterday, I was str...

One of the toughest stories to sell mainstream consumers when attempting to convince them that software as a service (SaaS) is a better way to get their software is that their data will be secure. The cloud does go down, and it’s hard for people not used to trusting that their data will be saf...

These are confusing times at best, and depressing times at worst for some.  Patterns are hard to come by.  I spend a lot of time keeping my ear to the ground via networking.  I look for underlying trends and try to make sense of what they mean for strategy.  Often the pressures of the bad econom...

Yesterday, in my short overview of the Web 2.0 practices of the main UK architecture, engineering and construction trade weeklies, I said that Architects' Journal only appeared to have one Twitter user. Today, it seems almost the whole architecture profession has been somewhat slow to try out Twitte...

I read a very surprising story in JJ Cramer’s investment newsletter today (sorry, I’d link, but it’s inaccessible paid content, but there is more here too).  Trinity is a company that builds wind power systems.  At one point it was vying with GE for dominance of the space.  I re...

Open source Java projects: Terracotta - JavaWorld - In this Open source Java projects installment, Steven Haines introduces Terracotta, an enterprise Java clustering solution. Find out why Terracotta, unlike traditional clustering solutions, doesn#039;t make you sacrifice an iota of reliability in t...

Like President Barack Obama said, it’s about getting up and dusting ourselves off. He also mentioned risk taking, and doers, and creativity. In software publishing, as much as anywhere, the web continues to change the business landscape. Retail markets go down in a double-whammy of technolog...