James Governor’s Monkchips

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 [...]

I saw a tweet from @glynmoody today, referring to a link at the Londonist.”It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why [...]

Great question from Tom over on the Greenmonk blog.
Not sure he correlated the question with this slightly bizarre incident he also wrote up, in which Google rebuts a claim about how energy intensive it is. Plausible denial against academic research that hasn’t even been peer-reviewed? Weird, or perhaps just a sign of things to come? [...]

RedMonk is a developer advocacy company. Plenty of other firms focus on CIOs or lines of business, but we tend to give most attention to what I call the Make Side – the people that do the work and decide on implementation rather than those that sign the cheques.
I really dislike the characterisation of software [...]

Realising that the pointer embedded in my last post was not very findable. So I am going to reblog my own content:
TwitterTIpz 1: whatever your company, brand or product a great way to get unvarnished views and reviews of your product is the Twitter Search engine. Its the mother lode of modern word of mouth. [...]

Lumigent recently got a new CEO- a guy called John Capobianco. He is refocusing the company in some interesting ways. What I find most refreshing about the Lumigent GRC story is that its all about compliance hardening existing applications. Lumigent’s strategy is to work with packaged applications vendors to harden their apps for compliance purposes-reporting [...]

Yesterday I went down to Blackfriars to meet with Santiago Gowland, Unilever’s vice president for sustainable development, with global responsibility for the Unilever brand. Joining us were Richard Cox of Salt, a PR company, and Duncan Williamson from SAP. I should say at this point that James Farrar, SAP’s vp for corporate citizenship, introduced me [...]

I thought I would ask Matt Biddulph if there was much Asymmetric Follow on Dopplr (a service that by its nature tends to encourage slightly stronger ties – you don’t necessarily want to share your travel schedule with thousands of complete strangers, or to meet up with people you aren’t already somewhat interested in).
He came [...]

Amazon CloudFront is a new distributed caching mechanism, designed to get data closer to the user. Amazon says:
It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.
Which is nice and all- but I need [...]

Stephen wrote an awesome long form post on the subject, so I don’t need do. He was responding to Tim. Here is what I would do.
At best go private at worst go back to SUNW as a stock ticker.
Focus absolutely all of innovation efforts on a new core value proposition – The Storage Is The [...]

First we had 15 Ways, then we had 16 Corrections, then 15 Ways I am Wrong, and now we have 3 Ways. What would Martin Luther have done?
Staffing Software Talk takes a very hard-boiled and boiled down approach:
For those of you not already plugged into this latest addition to tech jargon, you can read more [...]

Last Thursday I was supposed to be moderating a discussion about standards at the second Cloud Camp London. I had to pull out at the last minute, because of some prior family commitments I should never have considered breaking. To cut a long story short Benjamin Ellis stepped in and saved my bacon. Not only [...]

My post 15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing has had a lot of play – 24 trackbacks and counting…
A lot of the commentary so far has generally approved of the angle I took, though clearly there are strong dissenting voices. Before I proceed to one of them I just want to point [...]

Voting in a new president helps solves some US image problems, but doesn’t deal with many of the the core issues facing us today. We need to be very careful to manage our own expectations at this point. The oceans have not stopped rising. Barack Obama is not the messiah. Of course he is not [...]

There has been a Groundswell building around the Current Cost meter, driven by the IBM Hursley messaging cluster, with distinguished inventor and Llama lover Andy Stanford-Clark as a driving force. His house twitters his energy and water consumption!
The electricity home hacking cluster has already been called out in a Guardian podcast by Jemima Kiss.
Anyway [...]

I mentioned the second London CloudCamp on November 13th earlier, but I didn’t include any information about the agenda. I should have done because the backbone of the event- scheduled lightning talks – look really interesting and somewhat enterprisey. I understand that this time around we’ll actually be giving red cards to people that talk [...]

The theme that spoke to me most directly during SAP CEO Leo Apotheker’s keynote on Tuesday morning at TechEd 2008 was a new concept he introduced called Timeless Software.
The idea behind timeless software, as I understand it, is that different parts of the software architecture need to evolve at different speeds – your ERP backbone [...]

I know just how hard Nick Hortovanyi has worked to deliver IBM technology into the Australian SMB market, and what a thankless task it’s been. Just because his company is called Toast doesn’t mean he should be treated like it.
One particular comment today in a piece about how the hardware VARs always got the love [...]

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I am not a fan of FUD, but I do like begrudging pragmatism, which is why I enjoyed this Fatal Exception piece from Neil McAllister.
I reported recently on the physical challenges of getting data back from a cloud once you’d stored it there, but here Neil, pointing to a review of cloud computing services, focuses [...]

Given that I am at an Adobe analyst show today I really need to post this soonest. Better do that right now in fact…
 
We recently stumbled upon a new microconference format (as opposed to a new microformat conference), when I ran an event intended to encourage cross fertilisation between Adobe and SAP’s respective developer communities. My service level, under the terms of [...]

“The idea of cloud computing — designed around an architecture whose natural state is a shared pool outside the enterprise — has gained momentum in recent months as a way to reduce cost and improve IT flexibility. But the use of cloud computing also carries with it security risks, including perils related to compliance, availability, [...]

Great little video here from Eclipsecon 2008 with Cote and friend of Redmonk, Neil Bartlett. In case you haven’t heard of OSGi its time you did – its becoming an increasingly important standard, driving the rise of the Stackless Stack. It ties enterprise and client-side middleware together, with a compelling development model through Eclipse-based IDEs.

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Over breakfast on March 13th, we started to work out 15 Ways To Tell Its Not Cloud Computing. It was a good discussion, there is often plenty of truth in humour (just as there is often a kernel of truth in a rumour). One of my partners in crime that day, Alexis Richardson of Elastic [...]

 
I had assumed Twitter was using designs it had paid for for its Fail page, but apparently not. Courtesy of John Wilson’s comment on my last blog about Twitter, a couple of hours ago, came news the famous whale is a stock shot from here.
Yiying Lu is the fantastic designer behind the image we all [...]

I am always interested in community spanning, and one of the most interesting community mashup dynamics of recent times has been SAP meets scripting language hackers, exemplified by this SAP T-Mobile case study I wrote up. So what does this have to do with Adobe? Well, Adobe Flex is making a nice home for itself [...]

When Ron Bieber twittered this article headline I thought that’s a smart idea. So I followed the tinyurl. Immediate confirmation of the quality of the link came from the fact it was at the signal vs. noise blog (note to any software company – emulate 37Signals three-legged approach for success in community and attention building).
Its [...]

Its always nice to receive recognition for what you do, particularly when
a. its a surprise
b. its voted for by your customers
So this morning’s coffee sure tasted great. The Institute of Analyst Relations has been running a survey to see what AR people think of the firms they work with. RedMonk achieved 3rd position in US [...]