James Governor's Monkchips

Back in 2004 I wrote post called The Death of Consumer Electronics. Wishful thinking of course. My central, hopeful, argument is that we’re actually content creators, not consumers. What exactly do you consume when you take a digital photograph and post it on Flickr? Sure you can sit and watch a TV show or DVD, [...]

Everyone else seems to have gone with the Sunset, so I figured why not call out Sunrise instead… while some Sun technology is going to get nuked, and some people too, there are still plenty of solid assets to consider when parsing what Oracle is going to do.
One advantage of being a couple of days [...]

I saw a Facebook update that really caught my attention just now. We don’t hear enough about black inventors, so thanks to Zena, the Cookie Princess, for today’s “Black History Fact”.

No matter how you like your pancakes, you have all of these African-American inventors to thank for helping you enjoy them: Norbert Rillieux [...]

I read the Financial Times most days. Over the last 18 months or so the news has been mostly bad, so I have to say today’s tech digest made for very pleasant reading. You don’t need a sophisticated sentiment analysis engine to see a trend here….

Lenovo profiting from recovery

Chinese PC maker Lenovo reports [...]

I am here at Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando, sitting in the press room. John Fontana from Network World just walked in and and asked me what I thought of the event so far. My reply:
“Well I am not saying Lotus has all its ducks in a row, but at least it has plenty of them [...]

I am sure many of you are already facing prediction fatigue, but I have to take my hat off to Jonny Bentwood, the very model of a modern AR/influencer man, for
a. rounding up a bunch of analyst firm predictions for next year.
b. helpfully editing three sets of redmonk predictions from Coté, Stephen, and yours truly [...]

I like to give people plenty of notice, and I am very good at admin, which explains why I am posting this invitation now. We’d love you to come. Never mind co-working, this is co-partying.
Where?
Held at the Horse and Groom pub, 28 Curtain Road, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3NZ
3pm – midnight
Nearest tube: Liverpool Street – Map
The [...]

I just got back SAP’s Influencer Summit for 2009 in Boston. The company seem to be finally emerging from what can only be described as an annus horribilis. 2009 was not a good year for SAP. Sales are down, perceptions are more negative than they have been in a long time because of potential maintenance [...]

I went to an EMC analyst event yesterday to find out more about the firm’s cloud strategy. Unfortunately I left with the impression that the company really needs to get its story straight. Cloud is an extremely nebulous term, and as such must be treated with care in marketing, but also product development.
EMC was keen [...]

The logo above is nothing to do with us.
RedMonk was incorporated in November 2002. The name RedMonk was my idea. Stephen was happy to go with it. I looked around the web at the time, and it seemed noone else was actually trading under the name. So we went ahead. At first, like any [...]

I just got back Connect 09, IBM’s annual Software Group (SWG) analyst event. After a couple of days of intensive briefings and discussions across the entire IBM Software portfolio its hard to know where to start in summing up what I learned. Our man in Austin, Coté, has already put together some sweet roundups of the [...]

Earlier this week I was lucky enough to present to Canonical customers and prospects about what’s going on with the enterprise Cloud market. I was a little nervous because Simon Wardley was on the same agenda, and his cloud presentation is a masterpiece. Luckily he came after me though.
My basic thesis is that Amazon Web [...]

Too big to fail? The obvious way to remove systemic risk is to distribute risk by taking single points of failure out of the equation. Small is beautiful. How did we kickstart the economy after the 1980s fall? Pulling apart huge conglomerates like Hanson, for one. The same needs to happen now to really get [...]

As we rush to purchase Apple products and services on Cupertino’s monochrome treadmill of shiny shiny I can’t help thinking the open web community is losing something vital - a commitment to net neutrality and platform openness.
If a single company can decide what plays on the network and what does not, in arbitrary fashion, how can that be [...]

I like Wikipedia a lot. But it infuriates me than while major incumbents in any sector are “notable” enough to be worthy of an entry, small firms, or new ideas, are not. Its bizarre that while RedMonk is cited repeatedly in the knowledge base, when people have tried to create an entry for us it [...]

I received a mailer yesterday from IBM that it’s going to roll out its IBM Client for Smart Work, a bundle of IBM applications and the Ubuntu desktop, in the USA. That’s right- just a couple of weeks ago the strategy was aimed squarely and solely at Africa. But then…
The IBM Client for Smart Work [...]

Earlier this week Adobe [client] announced support for Flash on the iPhone. Kind of.
The story has been covered pretty extensively by both Adobe haters and fanboys.
What do I have to add at this point? Not a great deal. But one thing struck me pretty strongly. Having argued in the past that Adobe could open source [...]

I mentioned Morro in a recent post about fun with viruses and the beauty of the cloud, but as a UK resident I did not have access to the software. Well now Microsoft Security Essentials is available everywhere: it is a free, integrated engine for Antivirus, Antispyware and Antimalware.
First thoughts? Great stuff. Really. The first [...]

I just wanted to announce that a long term project is now coming to fruition. I am contributing to, and will help to manage, the Responsible Enterprise 2.0 community and blog. Basically – we see our thinking as related to Social Design, Gov 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and Web 2.0. Changes in working practices, changes in [...]

Yesterday our client Adobe announced its intention to acquired Omniture, the web analytics company for $1.8bn, which at about six times revenues is a bit of a premium in a down market. But Omniture’s customer list is pretty amazing. The move came out of the blue, but does it make sense?
As Cote explains in his [...]

I went to an SAP event last week to hear what some SMB customers had to say about the vendor. I was pretty impressed with their openness in talking about experiences using SAP products including BusinessOne, ByDesign and All-In-One (you didn’t expect SAP’s portfolio to be elegant, did you?)
Dennis Howlett did a great summary job [...]

More excellent discussion is emerging on my thread about enterprise applications and user interaction models. Today I got a comment from Leisa Reichelt and its so good I decided to publish it in full as its own post. Leisa is one of the leading lights in user experience (UX) services in London. Most recently she [...]

Rather than writing a once and future post I wanted to jot some thoughts down about legacy portals and what to do with them. Portal reskinning is a growing business – both Deloitte and Accenture, for example, have built practices dedicated to using Adobe technology to make existing enterprise applications and their portal front [...]

First off I should say Ubuntu is a client. With the economy the way it is I don’t need to apologise for posting a job. Especially when its working at a great company.
Ubuntu Server Engineering Manager at Canonical
I can think of a few people might be interested. What’s good about the Ubuntu OS? Well its [...]

I am taking some time off and will be attending to email and stuff sporadically over the next couple of weeks. For anything that really can’t wait please address it to our operations manager marcia @ redmonk.com
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Sys-Con once accused my friend Aral Balkan of “cihad”. Well… Aral may not have been a man on a mission before, but he certainly is now. According to Wikipedia, one definition of Jihad is
“to struggle to improve one’s self and/or society”
So let’s see. Aral has been threatened and bullied by Sys-Con. The full sordid story [...]

My colleague Stephen O’Grady wrote a seminal feature some time ago – Speed is a Feature. I often return to this this piece for its cogent argument around user urgency. Stephen often reprises the argument too- here talking about boot times for Google Chrome OS devices.
When it comes to speed as a feature, as a [...]

A couple of weeks ago I went along to a Microsoft briefing on Trusworthy Computing. Say what you like about Microsoft’s record on security, but the simple truth is that the firm has made huge strides in building and configuring more secure systems. One of the most important aspects of Microsoft’s strategy are its efforts [...]

Yesterday I lucky enough to go the inaugural Activate event, organised by the Guardian newspaper.
“an exclusive one-day summit providing a unique gathering for leaders working across all sectors to share, debate and create strategies for answering some of the world’s biggest questions.”
At the risk of getting carried away Activate felt like a seminal event, perhaps [...]

This post by the Effective CIO was just too good not to quote at length, concerning as it does the real benefits water cooler conversation.
A happy team is constantly communicating with themselves, in matters both large and small. As changes occur and problems arise, they go out of their way to make sure people [...]

Its easy to scoff at Twitter. But the online service is having a real impact on businesses. Dell, for example, claims to have sold $3m worth of kit using the service. Sure that’s a rounding error compared to its revenues, but its the kind of rounding error that would make any company executive smile.
One interesting [...]

First off I want to say how much I enjoy EMC Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis’s blog. Crazy job title, really smart guy, its one of the few tech blogs I keep up with these days [kudos to EMC comms professional Matthew Buckley - his weekly email roundup of blogs always catches my attention].
Chuck says [...]

IBM Impact, Big Blue’s annual service oriented architecture (SOA) shindig for customers and partners held in Las Vegas this week, was a model of Big Company corporate messaging. The broad story was pretty technical – but with IBM’s Smart Planet agenda at work – there were also plenty of broad business and societal perspectives to [...]

I recently posted about Tivoli Pulse, but it seems I also had some other notes in the hopper. For example – I found these facts cited by IBM pretty interesting. I think you may too.

Over 78% of data centers were built before dotcom era
Data centers use 10-30x more energy per square foot than office space
For [...]

When Dion Hinchliffe pointed to an article this morning – Killing Innovation with Corner Cases and Consensus – I assumed I knew what it was about, and wanted to read more.
However upon reading the post I realised Steve Blank was describing a different phenomenon than the one I had in mind.
As we were plotting [...]

I should have mentioned this before, and i probably would have if Chris had written this before….

HomeCamp is the home hacking, automation and green technology community.  Think smart meters, monitoring and graphing energy usage.

The first event was held last November at Imperial College and was sponsored by Greenmonk and CurrentCost where [...]

One of the big dangers in the social media space is groupthink. We see ourselves as cool kids and arbiters of fashion. We have our dedicated followers, so we must know what is going on, right? But the kind of people that swear by the latest service with a missing vowel are weird. We’re outliers. [...]

One of my clients Zend, the enterprise PHP stack and services player, was interested to know what reporters in the UK it should be talking to. These are the name I suggested, in no particular order. They are all very solid technically.
Tim Anderson – scary thorough, totally gets enterprisey, even UML
Adrian Bridgwater – came out [...]

So Apache is ten years old today. The project that changed the world, proving open source could “move up the stack”. Indeed Apache became first the de facto standard web server pretty much right from launch (I would love to know how many web pages Apache has served in that time!). While other open source [...]

There are any number of importance influences in the history of electronic music- but Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire hold special places in the pantheon. Daphne Oram was the driving force behind the creation of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1957, a white hot crucible of electronic music innovation throughout the 1960s, which has been [...]

For some reason I didn’t post this at the time. I think I meant to clean it up first. But it seems pretty solid, so what the hey…  There are other better write ups out there, but this was my first take.
Imperial College on a Saturday morning. That in itself is unusual. Being a family [...]

I can’t think of anyone I have sparred more with on issues of intellectual property management over the years than Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, IP and Licensing. Well actually Jason Matusow, another Microsoft IP maven, probably wins that prize, but that’s by the by.
The simple truth is that I take [...]

A few months ago I wrote a piece about the awesome work being done at Microsoft with its ESP platform, which I described as ” the single coolest initiative I have seen from Microsoft in the 13 years I have been watching the firm”.  Others agreed- it was one of the most commented on and [...]

There is nothing more pleasing than hiring someone and watching them grow into their role. Tom Raftery, the newest member of our small but perfectly-formed team, is really building some momentum. Tom leads our sustainability research and content services, and is beginning to ratchet up the quality. But we need you guys onboard- like everything [...]