Posts tagged ‘Amazon’
My Favorite Thing (Uh, Device) of 2011
Greetings one and all! This is my last post of 2011 and as promised, I will reveal (drum roll please) my favorite thing of 2011. But before I do (really, did you think that for once I would not bury the lead?), I must tell you a bit about the personal side of my life (and yes, I am breaking my very own rule of keeping my personal stuff off the Net).
Here it goes: I am an avid reader. I love books—all books, fiction, non-fiction, you name it and I’ve probably read it (or tried to anyway). My favorite fiction genres are: mystery, thrillers, police procedurals, action and adventure, historical, and of course, the classics. My favorite nonfiction categories are: marketing (duh), politics, privacy, business and technology (SCM, big data, BI, analytics), and history (World War I and II and anything to do with Hawaii—I am part-Hawaiian after all). (more…)
Roundup: About 4 Tech Giants, All Things Private, Social Media Stats, Maps, and Big Data!
Greetings one and all! It’s been a while since I posted about the more interesting articles, blogs, videos, etc., that I have come across and I thought that now is as good a time as ever to cover some interesting items you may have missed in the past few weeks. The topics are far ranging, thoughtful, illuminating, and at times, contentious, but that’s why they are interesting. So without further ado, let’s get to it!
Four Tech Giants Battle It Out
If you haven’t already, set aside some time to read Fast Company’s take on the (coming soon) great tech war of 2012. The combatants? Apple, Facebook, Google and, Amazon. The prize? Us—I think! This thoughtful piece by Farhad Manjoo looks at how these four goliaths will battle it out on the technology innovation field to, essentially, win the hearts, minds, and wallets of all of us:
“Think of this: You have a family desktop computer, but you probably don’t have a family Kindle. E-books are tied to a single Amazon account and can be read by one person at a time. The same for phones and apps. For the Fab Four, this is a beautiful thing because it means that everything done on your phone, tablet, or e-reader can be associated with you. Your likes, dislikes, and preferences feed new products and creative ways to market them to you. Collectively, the Fab Four have all registered credit-card info on a vast cross-section of Americans. They collect payments (Apple through iTunes, Google with Checkout, Amazon with Amazon Payments, Facebook with in-house credits). Both Google and Amazon recently launched Groupon-like daily-deals services, and Facebook is pursuing deals through its check-in service (after publicly retreating from its own offers product).”
Weekly Roundup: Privacy, Security, Amazon Reviews, Infographic Resumes, and the Comma!
Folks, I am neck deep in writing “stuff” this week (from my final McKinsey health care post to working with Terence on another chapter for our upcoming Ebook—yep, shameless plugs strike again!) but so many great posts and articles came through my “inbox” this week that I just have to “talk” about them. If you have some time over this long weekend, every single one of these items is worth a thorough read.
Privacy is Every Where and No Where
One of the most thoughtful posts on privacy in the digital world, courtesy of John Jordan, came out today. John’s use of real world examples to illustrate his own angst on the topic made me stop and think:
“Does it matter that a person’s political alignment, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and zip code (a reasonable proxy for household income) are now a matter of public, searchable record? Is her identity different now that some many facets of it are transparent? Or is it a matter of Mark Zukerberg’s vision—people have one identity, and transparency is good for relationships—being implicitly shared more widely across the planet? Just today, a review of Google Plus argued that people don’t mind having one big list of “friends,” even as Facebook scored poorly on this year’s customer satisfaction index.” (more…)
To Cloud Or Not To Cloud
When we started PatternBuilders, we made what was then an unusual decision: to avoid multi-tenancy as I talked about here. However, we also decided to avoid the cloud because we wanted to have predictable costs and felt that given the high level of expertise we had internally with managing data centers, we would be better off investing in top tier colocation facilities. This made a lot sense given the security sensitivities of our initial target markets: internal IT at the Fortune 500, large retail suppliers, and hospital groups. It was also an economically viable choice because our business model provisions hardware and bandwidth for each customer after the sale to manage cash flow. We also knew that we would be able to reduce both the cost and maintenance headaches of separate customer provisioning by aggressive use of virtualization technology, much like the cloud server vendors Rackspace, Amazon, and others do today.
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Data Security and You: There’s Got to Be a Better Way
A non-rant rant on data security.
Have you ever had one of those days when you throw up your hands and simply say, “There’s got to be a better way!” Well, this is one of those days. Recently, Jenn Webb, in an O’Reilly Radar piece, asked the following:
“How much convenience are you willing to give up for security?”
Webb was talking about Google’s 2-step verification process (I remembered reading about this a couple of months ago) which essentially “jumps” the user through a number of “hoops” to ensure more secure access to Google applications. I ended my comment on the article with the following: “Google, could you have made this any more difficult for people operating in the real world to use?” And once I clicked Submit, I thought I was done. Nope. The more I thought about this, the more I felt a rant coming on. I mean, really, how hard is it for companies like Google (and many others) to come up with a user-friendly way to ensure secure access? They certainly have the money to do it and by all accounts, they definitely have the engineering talent to do it. So what’s the problem? (more…)
Data Privacy in the Age of Big Data: Ebook Coming Soon!
How the players, regulators, and stakeholders are changing the privacy landscape.
As Mary mentioned in the previous post, we have a big announcement to make: we are co-authoring a series of Ebooks for O’Reilly. The first in the series will focus on the data privacy landscape as it is today, including:
- The technological innovations driving big data and analytics, and how those innovations are forcing us to reexamine and often re-invent our ideas around data ownership, privacy and security.
- The rise of data collectors, aggregators, and marketplaces, their methods of capturing and monetizing data about you, and how that impacts your privacy.
- How the worldwide regulatory and legal landscape is evolving as governments try to balance the security and convenience benefits of these technologies against their potential for abuse.
- Why the music industry and other large copyright holders have become leading figures in the battle against consumer privacy.
- How governments use and abuse their citizens’ digital data.
People often ask why we spend so much time writing about digital privacy issues. First, as a company that is on the forefront of creating sophisticated tools to analyze digital data, we are acutely aware of the powerful technologies and techniques we—and companies in our industry—are developing. And as I wrote here, we think a lot about what we can do to ensure that our tools and expertise are used in ways that are ethical and positive. Helping our customers and the public be proactive about privacy issues is one of the best ways to do that. (more…)
Big Data Big Analytics 