Stories

End of a Busy Week at SAP SAPPHIRE 2009

May 15, 2009

Finished up a very busy week yesterday at the SAP SAPPHIRE 2009 conference in Orlando, FL. Haven't had much time on my hands to do any blogging or much of anything beyond just managing registration at SAPPHIRE. The show was a success. I feel good about it. It was my first on-site with the company and it is our largest event of the year. We had several technology successes including Airport Registration at the Orlando Airport and Self Check-In Kiosks. Both were ...

Too tired to Blog...

May 9, 2009

Haven't had much time lately to blog. Currently getting ready for the SAP SAPPHIRE event in Orlando.

Amazon EC2 Recovery

May 6, 2009

I just finished a recovery of an amazon EC2 instance that failed. It failed not due to anything related to the Amazon EC2 instance. It was something Java related in the ColdFusion environment, and still trying to figure out. Anwyays, as soon as I saw I couldn't recover the services necessary to run the application I quickly deployed a new instance from the AMI I had created of the production isntance a couple weeks ago. Once up I copied all web site files. This frustrated me a...

Google Sites Indexing

May 5, 2009

I started doing some research on cloud computing a couple weeks ago. I have been watching the Google search results for my name to see how long it took for this research to float up in my profile. It showed up at #28 now. I have seen other pages too show up below that. I am interested in seeing how quickly you can launch a site using

Stimulus Money Tracking

May 3, 2009

I have seen a lot of press about how the stimulus money is being spend and tracked. I have come across many ideas for how this should be tracked. I have gone through all 50 states recovery web sites as well as many of the federal agency web sites. There is definitely no rhyme or reason to how thiis money and projects are being tracked. I see several organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation, Read more →

Small Business Content Chain

May 3, 2009

I am spending an hour or two each week and working with my mother and her business partner on growing their small business. Last weekend I spend some time in Ashland coming back from California and helped them talk through their business. We identified some problems in their supply chain, however they are making great strides in documenting and streamlining this process. Wher...

Recovery Money Investment Data Feeds

May 3, 2009

I am seeing more and more data available at the Recovery.org web site. The site provides some great overview of money distributed, but it takes forever to really dive into specific aspects of where the money is being spent at the local, state or federal level. What I would like to see is on this Investments by Agency page, in addition to available and paid out amounts by agency is...

Mobile Application Development

May 3, 2009

Watching the recent explosion in growth around IPhone applications and seeing the potential for other mobile application development on Blackberry, Android and other platforms...I can't help but think how this is the future of computing. I see many useful business and fun applications on the I...

Education of Politicians Around Cloud Computing

May 3, 2009

I am a big advocate for educating politicians and our leaders on cloud computing and what it can do to save money and open up our government for more involvement by the public at large. I am amazed at how many leaders are already in the know about cloud computi...

Security in the Cloud vs. ISP

May 1, 2009

I have had several talks with small businesses about their comapnies infrastructure and what the next steps are. When I bring up cloud computing, the first question I get is in regards to security. How secure is our data, our apps? Valid questions and cloud service providers have a lot of proving to do here in alleviating the concerns of small and medium sized busin...

My Google Profile

May 1, 2009

I was waiting for my Google Profile to float up in my listings. I watch the top 20 Google search results for my name fairly often. It is important to me what shows there.

Google Cloud Enterprise Integregation

May 1, 2009

Google continued maturing their cloud offerings for the enterprise world yesterday with a Google Apps LDAP integration tool. Google Apps Directory Sync now lets businesses and schools with an LDAP user directory system transiti...

Best Flash Image Slideshows

Apr 30, 2009

I am always looking for quality flash slidehows and image galleries to display products, people and nature pictures. There are some gr eat paid solutions out there. I just stumbled across what I would consider the best assortment of FREE flash image galleries. Take a look: http://www.paulvanroekel.nl/picasa/

Recomendations for Government Transparency

Apr 29, 2009

I used up all my mojo on my last post, and really can't write much on this topic right now, but I have to at least share this posting I found tonight: Recovery Recommendations From I School Faculty Sent to the US Government It is the best recommendation I have read regarding how to change the Government and spend some recovery / stimulus money. I will write more about it later, ...

GUI for Amazon SimpleDB

Apr 29, 2009

I really love the Amazon SimpleDB tool. The concept is great. Many of the web applications I build use only very basic database functionality. I have come across many companies that use SQL Server and pay the license but they only use 10% of the functionality. They use it for Simple Storage. So I have really advocated for the movement to Read more →

Evolving Our Government

Apr 29, 2009

Lately I am very interested in the Government usage of social media and cloud computing (SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS<...

Doing One Thing Well - Web Site Sharing

Apr 29, 2009

I am always talking about how many software and service providers out there should really focus on doing one thing and doing it very well. This is a personal goal of mine as well. I cam across another web service this evening that I would put into that category. It is called ShareThis. The provide web site sharing tools that are plug and play. They also provide advanced tools like API, Reporting and more. Very well...

Cloud Computing Opportunities

Apr 29, 2009

I have been spending time researching different aspects of cloud computing and opportunities out there to evangelize about it. I was researching Recovery money going to the National Science Foundation. As of today it isn't flowing quite yet. Then I got curious of other project funding opportunities there are with the National Sc...

SaaS and the Future

Apr 26, 2009

Was reading this post on, 90% of SaaS companies and Most I.T. Major Players will not exist in present form by recession's end. I really can't speak to how much the recession and current economic crisis will affect <...

Open Platform for Your Small Business

Apr 26, 2009

Reading various posts about application development platforms for IPhone, Blackberry, Vodafone, Android and many others. Being a big fan of Wikinomics, Crowdsourcing and all those visionary 2.0...

Mobile Phone Applications, Directories and Platforms

Apr 26, 2009

I was just reading about Research in Montion and their innovation in Fast Company and about their applicaiton directory in Business Week. I was also reading about Vodafone in Business Week. ...

Mobile Application Platform Development

Apr 26, 2009

IPhone applications are a success, no arguement here. With this success there are a lot of of mobile providers mimicking this. We saw the recent release of the Blackberry application directory and we see other mobile carriers talking of the same. Having a platform dev...

Financial Gains of Cloud Computing

Apr 26, 2009

I read probably 10-20 articles daily about the cost savings of cloud computing. So many of them. This is definitely an area of consideration when making the migration to the cloud for your business. However I would like to see more analysts talk about the efficiency gains regarding performance and generally meeting the demands of your customers. There are a lot of savings and improvements in this area. This is the biggest area of benefit I see for companies after making the mi...

Finally caught up on inbox...

Apr 26, 2009

Was able to find a couple hours today to read everything in my inbox regarding my cloud computing research. Thanks for those of you who responded and are getting involved. It was a busy week for me preparing for the SAP Sapphire event in

Data Center Preparedness

Apr 26, 2009

I have talked before about data centers supporting the cloud and green data center construction strategies. I have heard comments on the amount of data center infrastructure we have is adequate for the next round of cloud growth. I tend to be an optimist, but I thi...