Forbes.com | "Google and Wal-Mart…" 02/27/2005
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Forbes.com – Magazine Article: “Google and Wal-Mart have become huge successes in vastly different ways. But the yin and yang have this in common:
� Each company has a simple mission. Wal-Mart’s is ‘always low prices.’ Google’s is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ These companies know who they are.
� The brand and the mission statement of each are aligned. Picture Google and Wal-Mart in your head. There’s no confusion about what these companies do.
� Each company’s offerings are dirt-simple to use. Shopping at Wal-Mart does not take a heroic intellectual effort. But neither does using Google, even though the search engine behind the curtain is the product of a prodigious intellectual feat.
� Both companies are technology leaders. The previous editor of FORBES, Jim Michaels, likes to call Wal-Mart the world’s preeminent tech company. It pioneered the use of bar-code scanners, slick supply chains and inventory management tweaked to local purchasing preferences. The Bentonville, Ark. giant never sleeps. Now Wal-Mart is pushing into RFID chips. Wal-Mart’s aggressive use of technology puts the lie to a recent Harvard Business Review article, ‘IT Doesn’t Matter,’ that says it’s okay to sit back and let others lead. Google, meanwhile, continues to attract the best tech brains in Silicon Valley.
� Both companies exploit the cheap revolution. Google’s search engine runs on 100,000 cheap servers and a form of free Linux software. Wal-Mart searches the planet for low-cost production. It buys 10% of the goods China exports to the U.S. “
IGDA | Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work 02/27/2005
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IGDA – Articles | Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work: 6 Lessons: “It comes down to productivity. Workers can maintain productivity more or less indefinitely at 40 hours per five-day workweek. When working longer hours, productivity begins to decline. Somewhere between four days and two months, the gains from additional hours of work are negated by the decline in hourly productivity. In extreme cases (within a day or two, as soon as workers stop getting at least 7-8 hours of sleep per night), the degradation can be abrupt.”
Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled 02/23/2005
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Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled: Weblications: “You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to develop web-based applications. You don’t have to do licensing deals, or get shelf space in retail stores, or grovel to have your application bundled with the OS. You can deliver software right to the browser, and no one can get between you and potential users without preventing them from browsing the Web.”
Shorter hours in software | CNET News.com… 02/22/2005
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Shorter hours in software – page 3 | CNET News.com: “‘There’s nothing to be gained from the extra hours,’ he said. DeMarco argues that there are limits to how much people can churn out without adequate breaks, and companies with cultures of long days tend not to run meetings in a disciplined fashion.
DeMarco’s logic makes perfect sense to Fog Creek Software founder Joel Spolsky. It would be rare to find Fog Creek’s five full-time employees working more than 40 hours a week, Spolsky said. Despite–or perhaps because of–these traditional hours, revenue at the maker of bug-tracking software has more than doubled every year since its inception five years ago. “
Apostolic Letter The Rapid Development to those Responsible for Communications 02/22/2005
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Apostolic Letter The Rapid Development to those Responsible for Communications: “To those working in communication, especially to believers involved in this important field of society, I extend the invitation which, from the beginning of my ministry as Pastor of the Universal Church, I have wished to express to the entire world �Do not be afraid!�
Do not be afraid of new technologies! These rank among the marvelous things inter mirifica which God has placed at our disposal to discover, to use and to make known the truth, also the truth about our dignity and about our destiny as his children, heirs of his eternal Kingdom.
Do not be afraid of being opposed by the world! Jesus has assured us, “I have conquered the world!” (Jn 16:33)”
CMO | Creative Marketing Destruction | Add Water and Blog 02/18/2005
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CMO | Creative Marketing Destruction | Add Water and Blog: “‘We’ve got a content management system that would have cost $200,000 two years ago. The best part: I did it myself, in a week, over the holidays, while eating donuts,’ says Andy Sernovitz, WOMMA’s CEO.
What’s happening with Sernovitz and WOMMA is just the tip of the iceberg. As blog publishing tools continue to improve, things are going to get messy and disruptive for the traditional Web site lobby. Don’t shoot the messenger!”
Xen lures big-name endorsements | CNET News.com: "… 02/18/2005
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Xen lures big-name endorsements | CNET News.com: “‘Two or three months ago, it wasn’t on anybody’s radar. Now it’s going to make a big change in how everyone uses Linux,’ said Chris Schlaeger, vice president of research and development for Novell’s SuSE Linux.
The change illustrates what can go right in the world of open-source software: a project can trigger a cascade of cooperation by multiple interested parties. When it works well, as in the case of Linux, that cooperation can lead to a unified, fast-developing project rather than proprietary, mutually incompatible competitors. “
Windows gets a splash of Indigo | CNET News.com: "… 02/15/2005
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Windows gets a splash of Indigo | CNET News.com: “‘One of the common misconceptions is that these are server technologies. Fundamentally, the vision Microsoft has for distributing computing is not just forcing everything through a server or through the Web,’ said John Montgomery, director of marketing for Microsoft’s product division. ‘You need the technology on the desktop as much as the server.’ “
ClickZ Experts | Strategic Advertising Issues: CLUTTER 02/11/2005
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ClickZ Experts on Strategic Advertising Issues: “This explosion of information and applications on the Web has led to a conundrum. In a word: clutter. We may know what we’re looking for and that it’s out there, somewhere. We may even have found it in the past. But we can never seem to find it when we need it. Applications are difficult to remember and use. Information is difficult to find. Moreover, the two don’t integrate, so making use of the information even if you do find it is hard. Witness our ‘dependency’ on search.
Still, the quest for new and better ways, and thus the evolution, continues. In the middle of the Web’s second decade, a third wave of innovation is occurring. Having moved from document access to application access, the third wave is about simplicity, context, and unification. How does the consumer Web become fundamentally easier to use? That’s the next burning question — and challenge.”
The Long Tail: Briefly noted: RSS publish and subscribe 02/10/2005
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The Long Tail: Briefly noted: “I’ll start with a fantastic post on RSS by Kevin Laws, a venture capitalist who helped me articulate and think though the original Long Tail theory. RSS, as you know, is a really big deal and an important step in maximing the potential of the Long Tail. The key element of the publish-and-subscribe model is that it allows readers to indicate an interest once (by subscribing to a feed), and then get relevent content when it’s published, without any thought or effort required.
Kevin descibes this with the best analogy I’ve heard yet for RSS: Tivo for the Web”
John Battelle’s Searchblog: Searchblog Print?!: " … 02/10/2005
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John Battelle’s Searchblog: Searchblog Print?!: ” The price is a bit steep (a bit under $30 – I get about a third of that), but it has something like 100K words, all of them exceedingly wise, of course, and it’s an excellent example of one-off printing – no inventory, no backend warehouses, it’s online to print, and it’s direct.”
Seth’s Blog: So, what will it take to succeed?: "I… 02/10/2005
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Seth’s Blog: So, what will it take to succeed?: “If it’s not money or brilliant programming (see below) what will characterize the success of tomorrow’s Net?”
VDH’s Private Papers | Aiding and Abetting the Enemy 02/09/2005
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VDH’s Private Papers::Aiding and Abetting the Enemy: “What about the media’s portrayal of the enemy? Why do these ruthless murderers, kidnappers and thieves get a pass when it comes to their actions? What did the the media show or tell us about Margaret Hassan, the director of C.A.R.E. in Iraq and an Iraqi citizen, who was kidnapped, brutally tortured and left disemboweled in streets of Fallujah? Did anyone in the press show these images over and over to emphasize the moral failings of the enemy as they did with the soldiers at Abu Ghuraib? Did anyone show the world how this enemy had huge stockpiles of weapons in schools and mosques, or how he used these protected places as sanctuaries for planning and fighting in Fallujah and the rest of Iraq? “
Watch the video and believe… even if they are French 02/06/2005
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Watch the video and believe… even if they are French:
Gates Pins Hopes on SharePoint 02/05/2005
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Gates Pins Hopes on SharePoint: “Gates told keynote attendees to expect Microsoft to more tightly integrate SharePoint with other Microsoft technologies and point products going forward. He said to expect SharePoint and ASP (Active Server Pages) to ‘become closer,’ and SharePoint and SQL Server to become more entwined as well.”
Slashdot | A Theory of Fun for Game Design 02/04/2005
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Slashdot | A Theory of Fun for Game Design: “If you’re planning on entering the field of game design, A Theory of Fun won’t help you to storyboard a plot, model a texture, or develop a code base: if you’re looking for the technical aspects of game design or deep academic consideration of the field, other titles will hold more for you. The intended audience of this book is quite wide, and Koster does an excellent job of making everyone feel included in the conversation that occurs between the pages. While game players and professionals new to the field alike can get a lot from what he discusses, the reader who may benefit the most from Theory of Fun is the seasoned game industry worker”
Microsoft + Verizon: Most underrated victory? 02/04/2005
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Microsoft + Verizon: Most underrated victory? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com: “Already, each of the major cellcos in the U.S. offer phones that include Microsoft’s cell phone operating system. That by itself hasn’t dramatically changed the outlook for Microsoft’s technologies, since so few of those smart phones are actually in end users’ hands. But, if you ask me, given that there are many more cell phones than there are computers, for Microsoft to have scored a major U.S. cellco at the service level (the name for Verizon’s streaming media service is ‘VCast’) for its media platform is a coup of untold proportions.”
God Bless the English 02/04/2005
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God Bless the English 
Will Moxi fail? | Engadget | www.engadget.com: "He… 02/02/2005
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Will Moxi fail? | Engadget | www.engadget.com: “He says Moxi is doomed to fail because it tries to do too much and that the average person is likely to be overwhelmed by all of its functionality; he even lamely trots out that old cliche of how the average person can�t set the clock on their VCR (c�mon Phil, you can do better than that!). It�s funny, they used to say the same thing about TiVo � that it was too complicated for anyone to use � but now Swann�s complaint is that Moxi isn�t enough like TiVo, and that Comcast should be marketing it as a digital video recorder rather than this all-in-one digital entertainment hub. We�d be inclined to agree with him, except that the Moxi isn�t meant to be the only fancy digital set top box that Comcast offers to its subscribers, it�ll simply be the one that the power users go for. “
ACM: Ubiquity | Czerwinski on Vizualization 02/02/2005
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ACM: Ubiquity | Czerwinski on Vizualization: ” I’ve always been interested in lots of different problems. The one thing I will say has remained a consistent and solid research interest has been research on attention, multitasking and task switching. I’ve studied that since my earliest days on my dissertation. But when I met George Robertson, a 3-D and information visualization expert, he took me into a world where spatial cognition was really important, as were many perceptual cues. And I really had to learn the literature in depth in that area and come up to speed and become an expert myself to help him as he created these fabulous designs “
