
Apple launches ResearchKit – secure, private, open source medical research
Apple announced a new initiative at its Spring Forward event yesterday – ResearchKit. What is ResearchKit? Apple’s SVP of Operations, Jeff Williams, described it as a framework for medical researchers to create and deploy mobile apps which collect and share medical data from phone users (with their permission), and share it with the researchers. Why […]

Transforming Data Into Action – Part Two
In part one of this series we looked at big data and transforming it into smart data, or data that is contextual, relevant and delivered to the right people / person at the right time. One of the other interesting and growing use cases in the business use of data is something called small data. […]

It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source: Thoughts on the Hortonworks S-1
It took me a week or so to get to it, but in this post, I’ll take a dive into the Hortonworks S-1 filing in support of a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of their stock. While Hadoop and big data are unarguably huge trends driving the industry and while the future of Hadoop looks very bright indeed, […]

Technology for Good – episode thirty four with Salesforce’s John Tascheck
Welcome to episode thirty four of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode our guest was SalesForce SVP of Strategy, John Taschek. John and I are both longtime members of the Enterprise Irregulars, but this was the first time John and I had had a conversation outside of email! Some of the more […]
Thoughts on MongoDB’s Humongous $150M Round
Two weeks ago MongoDB, formerly known as 10gen, announced a massive $150M funding round said to be the largest in the history of databases lead by Fidelity, Altimeter, and Salesforce.com with participation from existing investors Intel, NEA, Red Hat, and Sequoia. This brings the total capital raised by MongoDB to $231M, making it the best-funded database / big […]

Firefox MASSIVE FAIL – frequent, incompatible upgrades and instability
For years, I have been a dedicated Firefox user. Before Chrome, Firefox was a browser that really met my needs. Firefox was faster and more flexible than Internet Explorer. Firefox was innovative, supporting tabs, add-ons, standards, and multiple platforms. Over the years, I customized my Firefox environment to meet my needs, with add-ons that made […]

Activiti Update 2013: New Functionality And New Partners
I had a briefing on the latest version of Alfresco’s Activiti BPM a couple of months back, but decided to wait until the news about their new partners – BP3 and Edorasware – was released before I posted. This strong showing of enterprise support partners is crucial for them following the defection of camunda from […]

Stick A (Open Source) Fork In It: camunda BPM Splits From Activiti
At the end of 2012, I had a few hints that things at Alfresco’s Activiti BPM group was undergoing some amount of transition: Tom Baeyens, the original architect and developer of Activiti (now CEO of the Effektif cloud BPM startup announced last week), was no longer leading the Activiti project and had decided to leave […]

On The Importance of Design at IBM: Love and Margins.
At the end of last year my founding partner dropped a quite outstanding post – The Importance of Software at IBM. In it Stephen analysed IBM’s 2011 financial results through the lens he has been using for most of the year (the end of the age of Software-only business models). It should surprise nobody that Software is […]

Enterprise Headlines and Highlights, 2013-01-04
Highlights from the world of Enterprise Software and Solutions over the past two months (or so): Salesforce.com had a strong Q3. NetSuite had a strong Q3. HP did not. Workday had its IPO. It’s doing well, with a market cap just over $8.5 billion and a constrant stream of innovation. Lots of IT failures recently, […]