Innovations Software Technology

While Steve Jobs deserves full credit for incredible achievements not only at NEXT and Pixar, I believe what enabled him to succeed at Apple was his application of the "Apple Brand" to the iPod. Apple Computer always had a cult-like group of followers who were willing to pay a remarkable premium for Apple's Macintosh line of PCs. Moreover, such people (and I was one of them) would not hesitate to vehemently evangelize the Apple vision and brand to any poor soul foolish enough to approach or befriend. For example, when I moved to New York City in or around 1993, I told a friend that I would simply not work for any company that had not chosen Apple as their computer platform. As a result I worked for firms like Ernst & Young (at the time Apple's financial auditor). Yet several years later I found the burden of wearing the Apple "hair-shirt" too great and decided to ... (more)

The New ROI: A Return on Innovation, and Using Data to Do It

What do you get when you mash - for an entire weekend - the innovators of a globally respected brand like American Express with companies like Foursquare, Etsy, Mashery, Hyperpublic, NYC Open Data, Ordr.in, Constant Contact, and General Assembly? You get innovation. What do you get when you add roughly 100 freelance developers to the mix, spinning up new data and application concepts in amazingly social, self-organizing teams? You get the business of innovation. And that is why American Express OPEN Forum launched its first Open APIs at the "Reinventlocal" Hackathon this past wee... (more)

Software Innovation from the Ground Up

One of the things that struck me at RedMonk's Analyst Conference was how much innovation was being driven by very small groups of software developers - and how those innovations are enabling even more innovation by lowering the technical and financial barriers to the creation of new software. This is one of two articles about the RedMonk conference - "Innovation to Shake Up the Software Industry" gives additional insights into and examples of software innovation at the analyst conference I just attended. Dr. Innovation from Harvard There's some very exciting research out there by a... (more)

The Cloud is a Radical and Transformational Change

Thank you Mike Vizard for your discussion of why cloud computing will drive more custom application development. This is the point that seems to keep getting skipped in the many theoretical considerations of whether “the cloud” is hype or revolution. People are talking a lot about data center consolidation and reduction of IT expenditures, or shifts from capital expenditures to operating expenditures, and frequently in a tone that questions whether this even represents a material improvement. But in so doing, they are missing the real value gains; the cloud is about a radical an... (more)

Specialty Cloud and the Rise of the Green Data Center

Last week I had a brief meeting with Yoram Heller of hot cloud player Morphlabs and we talked about the next wave of cloud innovations.  Of particular interest was the concept of specialized software suites that ride on top of the commoditized cloud platforms that have so far captured most of the popular interest in cloud computing. It is possible, if indeed likely, that most forms of dedicated hardware or appliances in the network will be replaced by powerful instances, workloads and or/ boutique platforms that transcend the physical and technical boundaries that have been in p... (more)