weblog

  • An underground spice mandi at Grand Central Station

    It’s amazing the things you’ll find in New York

  • The internet remembers too much…

    Excellent talk (transcript) by Maciej Ceglowski. This is just a brief extract: I’ve come to believe that a lot of what’s wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on…

  • ♦ Marketing to a digital butler: Customer engagement in a VRM empowered world

    In my previous post, I referenced Paul Greenberg’s brain dump of technologies, concepts, and theories that are pulling the CRM community toward a larger market of customer engagement.  CRM innovation is shifting from delivery of technology [footnote] By that I mean taking decade old CRM technology from on-premises to the…

  • ♦ CRM’s evolution toward customer engagement

    Over the last two years, mergers and acquisitions have driven many of the headlines in the CRM world [footnote] Disclosure: I’m back at Oracle via their acquisition of RightNow Technologies, a CRM/CX cloud vendor. [/footnote].  We’ve watched the broadest consolidation that CRM has seen in nearly a decade. At the same time,…

  • Target’s massive security breach exposes security process failures

    …And although there are companies that blatantly violate the standards, security is a constantly changing condition, not a static one. Every time a company installs new programs, changes servers or alters its architecture, new vulnerabilities can be introduced. A company that is certified compliant one month can quickly become non-compliant…

  • Creepy data collection in the modern workplace

    Another pioneering outfit is Sociometric Solutions, which puts sensors in name badges to discover social dynamics at work. The badges monitor how employees move around the workplace, who they talk to and in what tone of voice. One client, Bank of America, discovered that its more productive workers were those…

  • Jeff Atwood’s rant on the sad state of Apps is worth a read

    Nothing terrifies me more than an app with no moral conscience in the desperate pursuit of revenue that has full access to everything on my phone: contacts, address book, pictures, email, auth tokens, you name it. I’m not excited by the prospect of installing an app on my phone these…

  • Cautionary thoughts on the Internet of Things

    The level of hype around the “Internet of Things” (IoT) is getting a bit out of control. It may be the technology that crashes into Gartner’s trough of disillusionment faster than any other. But that doesn’t mean we can’t figure things out. Quite the contrary — as the trade press collectively…

  • David Weinberger and retiring the myth of non-scalable conversations

    If enough people are in a conversation, one of them will be an expert. The larger the crowd, the more unexpected will be the expertise contained within it. Of course, “larger” in this case may mean thousands, or tens of thousands. And, to uncover really obscure expertise, you may need…