technology, internet oddities & other random stuff
Business
We’re being told to “embrace knowledge & risk”
Jan 12th
Prof. Martin Curley has got together with some other eminent economists and has written a book called “Knowledge-Driven Entrepreneurship – The Key to Social and Economic Transformation”. The core argument (I think. I’ve only read the press coverage), is that the quickest way to improve society (and by implication get out of this financial mess) is to concentrate on the knowledge economy. Professor Curley says that the west has lost the ability to innovate and take risks.
Risks are manageable if you’re a large corporate, but it’s a huge ask if you’re a start-up. Start-ups need capital and for most of us More >
A pleasant surprise from Adobe
Oct 29th
I bought Macromedia Homesite 5.5 from Macromedia’s web store back in 2005, just after Adobe bought Macromedia. They’ve long since killed off Homesite but it’s never been beaten in my opinion as a HTML/web code editor. I had a need yesterday to make a minor change to a PHP file and I decided to dust off Homesite rather than edit in notepad. I went to my CD wallet and couldn’t find the CD so I thought I was pretty much stuffed. Most of my on-line purchases have been from Digital River and I expected similar treatment (at best) from Adobe. DR expects More >
bendunne.com seems to be a no-show
Oct 19th
Ben Dunne has bought hours of radio air-time on Newstalk over the last month telling everyone about his new website that would revolutionise buying of stuff and doing of things that was coming on the 19th of October. It caught my eye because nobody does a hard launch on the Internet. The accepted wisdom is to soft launch/beta the website first to iron out the kinks and build up some content and then put out the ads. Out of curiosity I took a look at his site today and it’s an empty page for some reason, so that marketing investment is largely wasted. More >
Door Number Three
Sep 23rd
Robert Cringely has an interesting column today @ I, Cringely. He talks about the inability of IT staff to fit in today’s corporate structure. He’s been fired from every job he’s ever had for this reason. He’s also been re-hired several times because of his value to the company. IT is the “Cousin Itt” of industry. We’re “generally useful, though dangerous”.
IT staff, no matter how good, will never be CEOs of major corporations. The one exception, John Reid of Citicorp, just proves the point, because he got fired too. Therefore IT staff are useless employees and no good at being managers.
A More >
