May 2007

The edge

May 30, 2007 General

Folk who know me also know I hold strong opinions in a loosely formed way. My question – if I think a company is talking nonsense…do I call them out as BS merchants or as bullshitters? Does it matter or do you get the point? It’s kinda important because while I want to remain independent, I also want to make sure readers are clear about my position on specific issues. That’s an issue that’s becoming increasingly important as this medium develops. Example – a very good friend and I had a ‘spirited’ debate this evening on a point of principle. We agreed to differ but…I still think he’s defending a crappy position. See what I mean?

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Service launch – 5-7th June

May 29, 2007 Innovation

Teaser warning. Next week sees the public beta related to a project I’ve been working on for a while with three other people. We’re putting into practice many of the things we’ve learned in the last 2 years from the social computing community which means (among other things): I’m attending the 5th June London Geek Girl dinner hosted by Google. Rosie Sherry is [...]

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BDO calls Big Four foul

May 29, 2007 Tax and Ethics

Jeremy Newman, head honcho at BDO is having a tough time. Following a pitch where he thought his firm had priced itself into a deal, the parent company put the pitch back to a Big Four player which was able to reduce its price from £600K to within 10% of BDOs bid. Jeremy asks: …is [...]

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Is Facebook your future desktop destination?

May 29, 2007 Innovation

Last week, the geek world went Facebook crazy. This week, the UK is following suit. If you’ve not seen Facebook yet then it’s worth a look if nothing else to understand viral effects. As a backdrop, Facebook started out as a college community creation project which has since opened its doors to the world. Last week, [...]

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PayPal Europe moving to Luxembourg

May 26, 2007 General

I use PayPal as a convenient way to collect the modest advertising revenues that help keep my site going. Today I received notification that PayPal is offshoring its EU operation from its current UK base to Luxembourg. The accompanying Q&A says: What is the change to PayPal and my account?PayPal was granted a bank license with the [...]

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The industry analyst is dead – good

May 26, 2007 General

Brian Sommer’s devastating indictment of the analyst community will likely raise the hackles of a few people I know. It’s been a long time a-coming. I’m with Brian that it’s about time analysts delivered value. The landscape has changed and there is a much richer set of resources from which to poll advice. So it [...]

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Analysing the differences between saas and on-premise

May 26, 2007 General

I’ve never found it particularly easy to provide an all round analytical justification for saas. That’s largely because I’ve tended to respond to some of the gibberish that gets written rather than sit back and think it all through as a coherent whole. Today I have a slam dunk riposte. Written by my close colleague and all [...]

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Winweb hits 200,000 registered users, almost open source

May 25, 2007 General

Winweb‘s CEO Stefan Topfer called me unexpectedly this morning after having been off the northern grid for some months. Among other things he said the company registered its 200,000th user yesterday. WOW. More interesting still, Winweb is perilously close to adopting an open source model for the basic application plus an advertising model that returns 90-98% [...]

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Jimmy Wales on Colbert Show

May 25, 2007 Asides

Librarians are hiding something… - Jimmy laughs along with Stephen Colbert’s parody of Wikipedia. Worth getting through the ads Technorati tags: comedy, wikipedia, stephen colbert

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iPod cost to civil service £440 each

May 25, 2007 General

Giles Smith at TimesOnline has a story about senior civil servants being issued with 30 GB iPods: …preloaded with a set of 50 short “leadership lessons”, which is obviously going to take up a fair amount of space in the memory… Giles reports the cost as £8,800. Assuming he is right then what on earth [...]

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