TM Forum Management World Americas - Cloud Summit
I delivered a Summit Keynote at this conference on Nov 9, 2010: Lessons from an Early Cloud Adopter – How the Washington Post Company has Developed its Cloud Strategy

My talk is very well covered in David Carr's blog posting on Forbes.com.

Pic: Fall sunset scene I captured as I walked our dog.

Eric Schmidt
Attended a keynote address by Eric at the CIO Summit hosted by Sierra Ventures. A few thoughts that stayed with me:

• Google TV - Google has developed an OS for televisions. If successful, we will finally have Internet Browsing capability on televisions
• Andriod continues to grow fast. The free licensing policy has attracted a lot of device manufacturers. I believe that this poses a real threat to Apple. For now, iOS is a significantly better user experience.
  
• Voice translation Eric talked about a demo where an English speaking person conversed in (near) real-time with a German speaking person to buy shoes. The is in in its infancy but, give it a few years, and we might actually be able to speak with anyone in any language.
• Instant Search speeds-up an already blazingly fast Google search. Up next "read our mind"!
• 4G on mobile devices will open opportunities for a whole new set of businesses and functionality. Verizon is planning a major splash soon and AT&T will follow suit. Get ready to buy new devices and spend more. I am so happy about my iPad / MiFi decision.
• Enterprise revenue continues to be a tiny part of revenues at Google. A few years ago, Eric was surprised that Enterprise customers would even consider GMail.

Very interesting!

Interviewed on Internet Evolution Radio
Half-hour interview by Nicole Ferrao on IERadio.
Talked about a wide range of topics:

• Media in the digital age
• Supporting collaboration within the enterprise
• SAAS and software technology in general
• etc.
  

Personalization vs. Privacy
It seems that the internet has collected enough information on all of us to successfully read our minds without typing a Google search! I was just reading about another interesting technology (Solariat) that reviews questions in social networking conversations and identifies conversations elsewhere on the web that might have an answer - Look, no search!

Everyone I know tries hard to maintain their privacy: What should be my facebook settings?, etc. Organizations worry about how not to cross the line with their customers. The fact that each one of us has a different "line" for each question makes the decision very hard and complex. Any generic decisions applied across a large number of consumers are bound to not satisfy anyone.

One answer would be to give a user an easy enough way to control their "lines". However, marketers (read $$) seem to have more sway over the privacy decisions at internet sites than the non-paying consumers. Did you read who won when Microsoft was evaluating default privacy settings in IE (wsj article)? Why am I not surprised?

The pic has nothing to do with the post ... a couple of interesting wines we tried recently ... sharing a bit of personal info :-)

My Podcast
I was recently interviewed by Peter High of Metis Strategy. We covered several topics that are front and center for me. I enjoyed my conversation with Peter a lot. Here is a link to the podcast. We discussed:

• Cloud Computing
  
• Collaboration (Enterprise 2.0) in a decentralized organization
• Leveraging the digital media environment
• Skills IT professionals need for the future
  
• The future of mobile technologies’ impact on media

I checked out a few other interesting podcasts on the Metis website.

Bubbly
Voice Twitter is becoming big in India and in other countries!

They a monthly fee for users to follow their favorite celebrity.

Here is an article on Mobile Beat.

The Power of Data Analytics
Interesting article on how TaKaDu is leveraging data analytics and data correlation of existing data from water utilities to help identify water leaks.

Link to an article on GreenBeat describing what the company does.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference
The conference agenda is really interesting. I will be on a panel on June 14th - here is the link. It is IBM-centric but I expect a broader discussion on leveraging on-demand collaboration solutions within the Enterprise.

Recorded Future
Interesting article on allthingsd regarding a cool search technology that lays out future events on a Time-line. Cool idea.

Have setup a few alerts. Let us see how it works.

Just realized that I have not posted for over a month and a half ... need to try and post more frequently!

Match-making at the Call Center
Infoword reports that IBM and Assurant Solutions will match Call Center reps with callers using real time analytics. Very clever, especially, if it is well executed!