The Return of Spectra

October 6, 2009 by Leave a comment

Years ago, I spent some time covering the middleware market closely. One of the resources I found enormously valuable was a publication called Middleware Spectra. Its founder and editor, Charles Brett, is one of the most insightful, and  often provocative, people I know. Over the years we became acquainted, and today I count him among the friends I rely on to help me understand deep issues in areas like complex event processing and similar topics.

Charles and I briefly worked together at Forrester, but we’ve both moved on, and he’s now revived Spectra, with a revised charter. Under the new name Insight Spectra, it aims to be “a focal point for applying common sense to using technology intelligently.” Radical thought indeed. As before, Charles will accept contributions from a number of industry participants (myself included) and I recommend his work highly. To get on his list and receive it electronically, go to www.insight-spectra.com and register yourself via a form at the foot of this page, or email Charles directly at insight-spectra@insight-spectra.com to ask for a copy.

Filed under Event Processing, Research Industry, Software infrastructure, The Computing Life

In Praise of the iPhone Coffeespot App and Starbucks Wi-Fi

September 11, 2009 by 9 Comments

It’s nice when things just work. And when you’re on the road, Wi-Fi is one of those things you really appreciate. I’ve posted before about how well Marriott supports travelers with wi-fi. This brief note is as positive as that one was, but has a few more moving parts. It’s about using Coffeespot, a lovely little iPhone app, to find a Starbucks, and about finding a connection when I got there.

Not much more to it than that. If you have a Starbucks card, and I went for it pretty early on, you’re entitled to two hours a day of free Wi-Fi use. Of course, there are other ways to do this – one of my favorites is the local public library, and in the Valley there are many really pleasant ones with Wi-Fi. In this case, I was in a neighborhood I don’t frequent, and had 90 minutes till my next meeting. And I was certainly ready for a hot beverage in a pleasant location with some electrons and an internet connection on the side.

That’s where Coffeespot came in – a quick touch on the screen, it read my location with the iPhone GPS and showed me where the nearest coffee places (not Starbucks only) might be, and then when I picked one, mapped me to it. 5 minutes later I was logged in – and making productive use of my time by writing this blog post, listening to the awesome remastered Beatles CDs. It only seemed fair to write this and recommend all the participants in this tale of success. Happy travels out there.

Filed under The Computing Life

Lively LinkedIn TDWI Discussions Exemplify Community IP Values

September 4, 2009 by 2 Comments

I’m not normally a fan of blog posts that do little more than talk about information available elsewhere. But I’m going to make an exception, because what TDWI has been able to do of late on LinkedIn has generated a good deal of conversation, information sharing and intriguing conclusions. Kudos to Wayne Eckerson for his efforts at getting this going as well as evangelizing it. Read more of this post

Filed under Data Management, Data Warehousing, On Business Intelligence, Research Industry, The Computing Life Tagged with , , , ,

What’s An Eigenbase?

September 1, 2009 by 12 Comments

The open source community is remarkable in many ways. For me, one of the most significant aspects of it is exactly that: it IS a community. It’s composed of people who communicate and share in deep and productive ways. One of the most interesting manifestations of that spirit I’ve run across is the Eigenbase project, an extensible platform being used by some very creative folks for the creation and continuing development of databases for data warehousing (the LucidDB DBMS) and stream processing (the SQLstream continuous query engine). I haven’t posted about either of those yet but will, and I’m watching their continuing evolution with great interest.

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Filed under Data Management, Data Warehousing, Event Processing, On Business Intelligence, Software infrastructure, The Computing Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why Virtual Conferences Suck

August 10, 2009 by 12 Comments

Lately, I get a lot of questions about “virtual conferences” and how much I believe they will replace the struggling live conference business of today. My answer? In the next 12-18 months we will see a lot of awful failed experiments. Just like the ones we’ve been seeing for the past 12 months or so. Read more of this post

Filed under Analyst Relations, Research Industry, The Computing Life, Vendor image and communications Tagged with

TDWI and Wi-fi on San Diego Bay

August 3, 2009 by 3 Comments

The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) came to San Diego this year, with a sharply reduced crowd but a few intriguing announcements and a crew of attendees determined to get value out of a rich set of educational offerings and informal and formal discussions. I had the privilege of sitting on a panel with analyst and consultant Mark Madsen and Ken Hausman of SAS, hosted by Gaurav Verma, also from SAS, and discussing doing more with less. We did some flash polling using technology provided by Turning Point and gained a few insights from several dozen attendees in the room. Read more of this post

Filed under On Business Intelligence, The Computing Life Tagged with , , , , ,

Would You Pay For Room to Work in the Air?

July 27, 2009 by 8 Comments

Airline travel in coach continues to be difficult for the business user who would like to be productive. On this trip the man across the aisle has a lovely little netbook. Much smaller than my laptop which is admittedly gargantuan with its beautiful big screen. Read more of this post

Filed under Research Industry, The Computing Life

Civilized Discourse and the Blog

June 30, 2009 by 4 Comments

Jon Reed, a consultant in the SAP world, recently posted a blog entry about  some lessons he learned years ago from Hampshire College President Gregory Price.  John feels, and I agree, that these principles of discourse are a model of behavior and belief that we bloggers would do well to emulate. I rarely post about “stuff I saw somewhere else” but I couldn’t resist this one, and I offer it without further commentary. You can read Jon’s original post here. I believe these are words bloggers can live by:

  1. That we value truth and the process of seeking truth as ends in themselves
  2. That we accept responsibility to articulate a position as close to the truth as one can make it, using to the best of one’s ability, available evidence, and the rules of reason, logic and relevance
  3. That we listen openly, recognizing always that new information may alter one’s position;
  4. That we welcome evaluation and accept and even encourage disagreement and criticism even to the point of seeking out for ourselves that which will disprove our position;
  5. That we refuse to reduce disagreement to personal attacks or attacks on groups or classes of individuals
  6. That we value civility, even in disagreement
  7. That we reject the premise that ends, no matter how worthy, can justify means which violate these principles.

Filed under Analyst Relations, Research Industry, The Computing Life

iPhone, Wi-Fi, and MAC Address Filtering

June 28, 2009 by 2 Comments

Bet that title drove everyone away. But this is really pretty simple. I use media access card (MAC) address filtering on my home Wi-Fi network (Talked about it here.) And now I have a shiny new iPhone and I want to use WI-Fi for it (especially for Skype international calls, of course.) Only problem – couldn’t find the MAC address.

So ya gotta love the Genius Bar at your local Apple store. They solved my problem in about 90 seconds. Go to Settings/General/About. Scroll down. It’s called “Wi-Fi address.” And there I was looking at all sorts of network-related things. Silly me. No matter. I opened up the router’s admin software, added the address, and boom! in business. Easy. Now if only Gmail support was push-oriented…

Filed under The Computing Life Tagged with , , ,

3 Months of Blogging: What I’ve Learned

June 26, 2009 by 15 Comments

I just had my 10,000th visit. Way cool – my first post was nearly 17 weeks ago, and for the first couple of weeks not much was happening. It was important to me that I generate content and find readers; I was a newly independent analyst and consultant, and I began with the belief that this social media thing was going to be a key vehicle.  So I asked a lot of friends and mentors what to do, and I got some great advice. The list would be very long if I named everyone, but there are a few I simply can’t fail to thank: Charlene Li, Shawn Rogers, Ray Wang, Curt Monash, Jeremiah Owyang,  and Carter Lusher. There are so many others, but these folks got me going with the key ideas I needed to get straight. Read more of this post

Filed under Research Industry, The Computing Life

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