"platform plays" entries

Google Android: on Inevitability, the Dawn of Mobile, and the Missing Leg

If for no other reason than the 'Anyone but Apple' crowd needs an alternative, there is an 'inevitability' meme associated with Google's Android initiative. But, is their success in the market really inevitable? Over a year after Android's launch, the jury is still out.

Importance of Innovation in Finance & BarCampBank

“Progress is not the mere correction of evils. Progress is the constant replacing of the best there is with something still better.” -Edward Filene Two years ago, when we were organizing the first BarCampBank in the US, many people found it hard to believe that banks & credit unions could a place for meaningful grassroots innovation. Even crazier was…

Experience Syndication: Powered by Zappos

I have been thinking a lot about the new Powered by Zappos service. According to Zappos: Powered by Zappos (PBZ) is a feature Zappos.com offers to its partners where we design, host, fulfill and own a partners web site. Our goal is to provide Zappos customers as well as our partner's customers with the best possible service experience. By building…

The U.S. iTunes App Store

With the iTunes App store now over a month old, I decided to look closely at data from the U.S. store over the last three weeks. While sales numbers are not publicly available, Apple publishes overall as well as category-level rankings. There are currently just over 1,800 (paid and free) applications in the App store, double what it was three…

Facebook Growth By Country and the Slowdown in App Usage

With the Facebook Developers conference slated for later this week, I thought it would be a good time to give a brief update of a previous post on Facebook demographics. What follows are recently published number of users by country and region, along with growth rates for select regions and countries. Over the last four weeks, the fastest growing regions were South America, Central America and the Carribean:
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An ESB for the Web?

I spend a great deal of my time encouraging "enterprise people" to think more like "web people." Focus on adoption, use platforms to enable emergent capability, build the "generative enterprise," and that sort of thing. So, imagine my surprise when I saw the web acting a bit like the enterprise with the launch of Gnip. As the web moves toward…

Nokia to buy and open source Symbian

Nokia have announced their intentions to buy Symbian and open source it. It's being seen widely as a response to Google's Android, also an open source mobile operating system. I think it's easy to confuse "open source operating system" for something that will provide all the benefits of the Linux development model. As always, "open source" covers a wide range…

Video of Rich Wolski's EUCALYPTUS talk at Velocity

Rich Wolski gave a truly impressive talk at Velocity about an open-source software infrastructure for cloud computing called EUCALYPTUS . The API is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, and the underlying infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. Watch and learn……

Hyperic CloudStatus service dashboard launches at Velocity!

Javier Soltero just launched CloudStatus during his Hyperic sponsor session today at Velocity. CloudStatus is a public health dashboard for web services like Amazon's EC2/S3, and Google's App Engine. Javier called to tell me about this last week after I declared that "Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory". This comes right after Amazon and Google had visible outages, and couldn't have…

Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory for production services!

Google App Engine went down earlier today. GAE is still a developer preview release, and currently lacks a public monitoring dashboard. Unfortunately this means that many people either found out from their app and/or admin consoles being unavailable or from Mike Arrington's post on TechCrunch. Google has a strong Web Operations culture, and there are numerous internal monitoring tools in…