Successful Workplace

The 139th Kentucky Derby will be held today at Churchill Downs and a sizable chunk of the world will be watching as this 2-minute long race crowns a champion. So much build up and hype surround this one race…these two short minutes, that it pulls in people who have nothing to do with the sport. The favorite […]

Larry Ellison declared famously in 2009 that, “All that cloud is is computers in a network.” He also used the words “fad”, “nonsense” and “gibberish” on the record when dismissing cloud. But times change and so has Larry’s opinion. Even cloud’s most vocal opponents are starting to realize that cloud computing offers something entirely new: […]

This week at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, I had a chance to sit down with Alistair Croll, founder of Solve for Interesting. I had been vaguely aware of the site 23andMe that tests and individual’s spit to help customers, “learn valuable health & ancestry information.” Not only can they tell you which of 22 […]

There are just no young people on LinkedIn. Young people complain that there are no jobs when they get out of college, but the fact that they aren’t on LinkedIn makes me think they aren’t trying very hard to look. They certainly aren’t doing what they can. Who failed to give young people the memo […]

Texting in meetings is considered by many to be unprofessional and rude. If there was any doubt, asking that question recently on LinkedIn released a torrent of emotion that made it clear that some people feel very, very strongly against it. After watching weeks of emphatic responses and a few descriptive comments on how texters […]

The results are in. Elon Musk has posted a damning response to the NYT test drive report by John Broder which basically points out one glaring fact: it was all a lie. In his blog post, A Most Peculiar Test, Elon lays out counter-arguments for each point that Broder brought up in his review after examining […]

We watched the Mars Curiosity landing tonight at http://www.nasa.gov. It was fascinating to see cool professionalism erupt into tears and cheers when a one-ton, nuclear-powered vehicle sent back the first picture from the surface of Mars. It all happened four miles away at JPL in our hometown of Pasadena. We even knew a controller in […]

We used to know the purpose of information before we stored it. In fact, the mere act of defining the storage and retrieval patterns was what made it ‘data’. Going one step further, anything we didn’t store was by definition not usable. Those days are coming to an end. Unstructured information is a fact of […]

It took us a while to get there, and we had to get mobile first, but apps are about to explode as the best way to do business. It just makes sense to have light-weight, purpose-built functionality that’s highly specific to the various tasks within roles in the organization. We’ll look back someday in the […]

Retail has gone through enormous stresses in the past decade, with more to come. Just the normal ups and downs of local and global economies, supply chains and personal taste are a huge challenge. Add to that mix the increasing maturation of concepts like e-Commerce, Big Data, RFID and mobile. Each of these would be […]

The following is a guest blog by Simon Hall from Newbury, England. In Simon’s words, “Sales and selling have been my life. I’ve never been more excited than I am now about what the future of technology and business can be.” We’ve all heard Big Data can help us to find the proverbial needle in […]

Informatica’s (INFA) stock took a serious nose dive, falling nearly 28% last Friday as the company warned that they would have revenues well below expectations. This doesn’t come as a surprise. The market for traditional databases and their associated applications should be expected to drop in the age of the Internet, Big Data, Cloud and […]

The single biggest barrier to innovation is the cost of trying, especially the cost of trying and failing.”Failure is not an option” may be a great mantra for moments when life itself depends on success.  The rest of the time, failure should be just a process step, usually followed by evaluating and trying again. This […]

I’ve watched this Ted talk below about 5 times and it is making me think of my kids, my work, and my relationships.  It reminded me of the experience I had with my oldest, Zoe, and the way she was ‘taught’ history.  She is not alone and this problem isn’t confined to schools. At minute […]

The following was first posted on the Harvard Business Review. The hype around Big Data is growing to deafening proportions, fueled by the prospect that tools now exist that can let small businesses reap the benefits that companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook so obviously enjoy from mining vast quantities of all sorts of data. […]

The best part of the current startup landscape is that we have no way of knowing what will and won’t work. In fact, the situation is the same for established organizations. Between social, mobile, cloud and an Internet that now reaches billions of people, there is enormous change on the horizon. We know from recent […]