Mary Meeker and why the US tech economy will continue to roll

Each time Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker updates her web analysis, everyone listens. No surprise — her famously detailed decks are compelling enough to grab your attention and hold it for 100+ slides. Early on, she points out what I thought was the biggest takeaway from this round…that while the World economy stumbled a few years […]

Big Data: the shift from ocean to stream will hit you like a tsunami

So the fabled Mary Meeker powerpoint tome hit the internet at the D11 conference this week and if you have the patience to wade through the stats the messages are pretty clear: it’s a wearable, shareable future for mankind. But there’s a shift in how people are willing to share now. Share it. Delete it. […]

Is Big Data in the Trough of Disillusionment?

Big Data is showing the first signs of heading for Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment as a spate of voices, some very well known, like Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile and other prescient books, begin to question the hype. I’m going to show you why Big Data is in the Trough in some ways and beyond that and […]

Your prospects don’t care about your sales process — maybe you shouldn’t either

One of my friends thinks ‘Sales’ is about talking. Another person I follow on Twitter thinks it is about ‘convincing’ the customer. I wince every time I hear someone characterize an engaging, fluent, fast talking, bloke as ‘sales material’. Sales, as you might agree(especially if you are in sales yourself), is really not any of […]

Email addicts…pick up a phone!

Email is probably the worst way to accomplish anything that really, really counts. You know the scenario…there’s work to get done or a problem to be solved and rather than anyone having an actual conversation, it ends up being done through email. All too often, email is being used for one or more of the […]

Big Data’s lies, damn lies and statistics

I had a chance to sit down with Bruno Aziza from SiSense today to talk about the challenges of marketing Big Data solutions in a landscape fraught with hype and hyperbole. Bruno has a great perspective as a former Microsoft marketer who now works for a fast-growing startup. He knows the challenges and benefits of […]

My life is not for sale

The following is a first guest post by Hailey Taylor. I love the “Vlog Brothers”…Hank and John Green. John is my favorite author and Hank is just really smart. Hank talked recently about how companies get valued and the bidding wars for Tumblr and other social sites. It made me laugh because I knew exactly […]

Is your technology past a heavy burden to carry around?

Gartner’s AADI Conference kicked off this morning at the Park Plaza in London with the keynote Gartner Keynote: Integrate the Past. Embrace the Present. Shape the Futuredelivered by Gartner’s Andy Kyte and David Mitchell Smith. Kyte and Smith talked about the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information) that is driving both change and uncertainty. […]

Gartner tells us where Cloud integration is headed

Gartner’s Massimo Pezzini spoke this morning at the AADI Conference in London on the topic of why integration is even more critical in the ever-expanding world of cloud computing. Pezzini started out by commenting that application integration was a science that we were finally beginning to master just as the game changed with the arrival […]

The technology that will enable the Internet of Things

We’ve heard so much about the Internet of Things (IOT) being the next enormous step for both the Internet and for Big Data. For those who don’t know, the IOT is about getting devices and sensors (things) connected to the rest of the world in much the same way people are today through the Web […]

Is your loyalty program simply a transaction?

As customers we all know the difference between a financial transaction and a shopping experience. Even though retailers understand this, the vast majority of today’s customer loyalty programs involve earning points through purchases in what can best be called transactional rewards. From a member perspective, they are undifferentiated and become just a kaleidoscope of plastic cards which […]

Microsoft attacking competition rather than beating them

If you had a chance to visit the Scroogled website, you already knew that Microsoft’s latest strategy has been to attack Google in ads designed to tear down Google’s business methods. It smacked of sour grapes from a failed Bing, and “I can’t beat them on quality or marketing.” This was even before they released their latest […]

A new user’s assessment of Asana’s productivity tool

This review was a collaboration between myself, Ron Webb, and John Tesmer (@johngtesmer). One of the teams I work on recently started a test of Asana, a product touted as “…the next big step in productivity”. We were looking for tools to help us manage the work we do on a regular basis. I’ll put […]

Got a goal? Live it every day

I just completed one of the most inspiring runs of my life. Not fast.  Not far.  But it left me with a lesson I’ll carry forever. So how does this relate to business?  We’ll get there.  Just stick with me… Running with a purpose This morning I shared a pre-dawn jog with Kathy DeFrancisco on […]

A link to our identity

Yesterday, I was going through my backlog of LinkedIn invitations, and I had a feeling of fatigue. Description: Overachieving, Highly Successful, Proven, Results driven, Strategic, Consultative, Solutions-Oriented, Problem-Solver, Goal-Oriented, with expertise in new customer acquisition, profitability enhancement, pipeline development and process improvement. Brings me to a conference I spoke at. The topic was “The Customer […]

Class of 2013: Think more like the Class of 1973

LinkedIn is running a series on commencement speeches and advice as older, more experienced people are imparting wisdom for the class of 2013. As someone who was supposed to graduate in 2013, this still somewhat applies to me and I thought I would contribute my own thoughts. Anecdotally speaking I was supposed to graduate in […]