Jason Thibeault's Blog: From My Pen, page 62

Visual: The Power of Pinterest

The wonderful people at TechCrunch have posted a great infographic about Pinterest. Who’s using it? Why? How? Etc. Great insight (compiled from ComScore data and other sources).

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Forget your Product: Get Customers to Engage with your Company

There are lots of ways that marketing is changing because of digital but most importantly, it’s about engagement at scale. Prior to digital, the only ways that companies were able to synchronously engage with customers was phone and meet-and-greets (i.e., events at retail locations, etc.). Neither of those methods really scales. But with digital (real-time chat, blog comments, social media), companies are able to have multiple conversations with customers at scale. Which is what makes storyte...

Is Context Coming of “Age?”

Robert Scoble (a technology pundit that I admire) has been coining the term, “the age of context.” Although I don’t necessarily agree with the term (too many ages, too often; we are in the Post-Industrial Age in which “digital” or “information” is a subset of which “context” is a further subset), Robert is spot on. It’s all about awareness. Applications, gadgets, services. All of them aware of each other and making their data available for consumption. You ready for this wild ride?

What is Con...

The Cloud is Growing(Gobbling) Up

I am not quite sure what defines a mature market but if it is M&A activity then cloud is definitely maturing:

http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/11-07-12-the_cloud_computing_market_grows_up

Although I am not entirely in agreement with James’ opinions in the post above, I will agree that the cloud market is maturing. Companies like Piston Cloud Computing and EngineYard and CloudFlare are all making it wickedly easy for companies to employ infrastructure-as-a-service (I lump platform-as-a-se...

Data Visualization is Poetry…Even if it is Self Flattering

Although this is total marketing speak, presenting data and information graphically has so much more impact that just stale old bullet points or slideware. Thanks VMWare.

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A note about the image used for this post on the home page:

Looks Del.icio.us is a collection of different Delicious bookmark visualizations. They’re created with a python-based graphics library and layout engine. The image used is from a blog post at Webdesigner Depot talking about data visualization.

Coding Cloud Apps in the Cloud

Cloud9 recently announced their cloud-based development environment. Although this does more than assist developers to create cloud-based applications, it is a very ingenious and innovative approach to the Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/07/cloud9s-web-based-real-time-co.php

Being a developer and working with cross-functional and cross-continent teams, creating a collaborative environment when building code can be tough, especially if practicing...

Sometimes We Forget…

The Earth is moving all the time beneath our feet. I think we often take for granted that the sun rises and sets because the planet we live on is turning. But when you get a chance to see the heavens from the perspective of this motion, it puts things back into a sublime perspective.

Temporal Distortion from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.

Successful Software

In order for software to be successful, I think it needs to capitalize on two things.

First, software must exploit existing consumer behavior. Asking users to “re-learn” or spend time learning something new will kill adoption and usage.

Second, software must employ existing technologies with which the user is comfortable. So, mobile software should make heavy use of SMS rather than asking a user to download/install a specific application.

Data Analysis for Everyone

There is no question that data, and the ability to create business decisions and actions from its analysis, is the next big business frontier. With the amount of data that is being produced everyday through e-commerce, user interaction with web and mobile applications, and the increasing connection between traditional retail and information systems, the ability for a business to create actionable results from its data may be the defining factor in tomorrow’s economy.

In a recent post by GigaOm...

How-To: Improve Your Writing

Some great tips on improving your writing by reducing repetition and practicing cohesion of language:

http://www.dcielts.com/ielts-writing/cohesion-and-avoiding-repetition/

From the article:

This lesson shows you different ways you can improve the cohesion of your writing and avoid repeating words – killing two birds with one stone. These are extremely important skills to master and the good news is that much of the language you need here is simple language. Simple is very often best.

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This par...