Am I sad that I’m not able to go to this year’s Comic Con like I was able to last year? Yes. Thankfully, Google, in its infinite wisdom, must have sensed my sorrow and not only decorated their home page with a Google-ified version of DC’s Justice League, but they released a whole suite of [...]
Working on tech strategy for 18 months ingrains a thing or two in your head about strategy for tech companies, so I thought I’d lay out, in one blog post (which may itself turn into a series) the major lessons I’ve learned about how strategy in the technology sector works. To understand that, it’s important [...]
My consulting experience has been pretty atypical so far. Most consultants rotate between cases and roles every couple of months. Me? Up until about a few weeks ago, I had been doing corporate strategy work for the same technology client for 18 months (which is a long time – hence the picture of the old [...]
While all of my friends were playing their Super Nintendo (and later, their Gamecubes, Playstations, and XBoxes), my parents disapproval of video games meant that I continued to play classic games on my Famicom (which to the uninitiated, is the Japanese name for what is essentially a Nintendo Entertainment System). It helped that I wasn’t [...]
One of my favorite aspects of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts are Snoopy’s attempts at novel-writing and his classic opening sentence: It was a dark and stormy night… This was, of course, immediately followed by some comically ingenious sentence which made it immediately obvious that Snoopy, although quite creative (and talented! how many dogs do you know who can [...]
A week or two ago, I had a conversation with a couple of coworkers about the use of blogs/social media to gather information about subjects (and hence justify why I spend so many hours on Google Reader). They were fairly skeptical of the ability of blogs to do the same job that the New York [...]
I had the pleasure of upgrading my Blackberry to use the latest version of RIM’s operating system (version 4.5) last Friday. I had intended to do it myself, but I discovered that if your Blackberry is connected to a Blackberry Enterprise Server (i.e. can you check your corporate calendar/email on your Blackberry? If so, then [...]
Over on Bench Press, my buddy Anthony pointed out one great aspect of Qualcomm’s legendary engineer culture – apparently they have a great tradition of making April Fool’s videos. This year’s will warm the hearts of anyone who’s done biological/life sciences-oriented research: I particularly like the last guy who lays on the cutting edge [...]
I love gadgets (I just don’t have enough money to buy them). It’s no wonder that over on Xhibiting, I post a lot about cool gadgets. And its no secret that I’m chained to my Blackberry. But, I stop short at preferring smartphones to women (HT: Dilbert) Sounds like somebody needs a Blackberry patch… (Image [...]
Yesterday the partners on my case relayed the terrifying information they had learned when they met with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace about computer security — which is to say there is none. Warning: this is not uplifting at all: An estimated 60% of computers have Russian/Chinese bots (probably both) on them, [...]