Evernote Openbook: Coté's Stash

Numbers, Volume 34

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:02:55 GMT

[Find some Connect IBM numbers]

"I’m looking forward to a future where our ability to succeed in business is governed by the quality of our products and our customer relationships. That hasn't always been true in the past but in the future it will be," he said.

It's an uphill battle for AMD, however. Intel extended its share of CPU shipments to 81.1 percent in the third quarter, while AMD's share declined slightly to 18.7 percent, according to figures from IDC.

Windows 7 - in your face, Apple!

Ballmer noted that "96 times out of 100, worldwide, people choose a PC with Windows."

He added that even in the toughest market--the high end of the U.S. consumer market--Windows is chosen 83 times out of 100.

"That doesn't let us rest on our laurels," Ballmer said. "Apple has picked up a couple tenths of a percent of market share."

Growth means data canters - never mind that cloud hoopla

APAC continues to astound me with its growth. The financial crisis seems to have just glanced by. One lagging indicator of how well an economy is doing is the job market - all the large global banks - Merrill, SCB, Barclays, UBS - have 100s of jobs open in Singapore. We all have known for a while that APAC would be the next market, the difference now is that all the large globals are establishing large physical presence in APAC. They are now installing large datacenters, and are placing executives in APAC. ISVs and our other partners are growing their presence, in particular hiring local talent, replacing the expat personnel that had previously established satellite offices in APAC.

We all the know about the growth rates of China and India, there is a new statistic that came out earlier this week - the World Wealth Report released its annual report which states that the number of millionaires in China now exceeds the number in the UK. The only countries with more millionaires than China today are US, Japan and Germany. The number of high net worth individuals (those with USD1M or more in investable assets) are expected to grow at a ra...

Numbers, Volume 33

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:47:27 GMT

Five Years of Firefox

With more than 330 million users around the world, Firefox currently holds the No. 2 spot in browser market share, accounting for just over 24 percent, according to researcher Net Applications.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer, currently the market leader, holds 64.64 percent, while Safari, Chrome and Opera hold the next three spots with 4.42, 3.58 and 2.17 percent, respectively, according to Net Applications' October data.

Indeed, Firefox's market share is a testament to the magnitude of its achievements over the past five years.

[On the other hand, it seems some folks like diversity:]

"I have three browsers, and I don't think I'm alone," John Barrett, director of research with Parks Associates, told LinuxInsider. "I suspect there's a lot of people who have multiple browsers."

Eating the Elephant at $3 a Piece

just confirmed: Lotus Connections closed 1m licences in 2 weeks- and that was just six enterprise customers. --James Governor

The latest addition to LotusLive is iNotes, a Web-based e-mail service hosted by IBM. A lighter, Web-based version of the LotusLive Notes e-mail application, iNotes works with Notes and Microsoft Exchange. Pricing starts at USD $3 per month per user.

The scalable service is targeted to SMEs as well as large enterprises. IBM is seeing a lot of interest from clients that want a more reliable, secure and private e-mail service instead of relying on one of the consumer options, said Lobo.

Pre Release

There are only about 300 apps in the Palm store to date, dwarfed by the iPhone's 100,000 and Android's 12,000. However, Palm stresses that Application Catalog is still currently in trial mode, and the firm wants to ensure the software platform is mature, and has all the tools in place, before it goes on full release next month.

[This via Mobile Dredge, which is a pretty good source for developer and low-level business related news.]

Too Many Brains

When the global financial crisis hit last year - diminishing trade flows and reducing man...

Numbers, volume 32

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:02:52 GMT

Scaling Languages

Fun facts I learned about Scala today: FourSquare was moved from PHP to Lift in 90days.

Snorkle

Today, Oracle supports more than 345,000 customers in more than 145 countries as a leader in delivering database, middleware, applications, and infrastructure software. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle plans to transform to a systems company by engineering and delivering integrated systems – from applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together, so customers do not have to do it themselves.

Next Week

#ApacheCon by the numbers: 2 days of training, 10 conf tracks, 74 sessions, 3 keynotes, 1 Hackathon, 12 meetups + 1 Big Birthday Bash!

Recession Telemetry

Our latest Intuit Payroll survey findings are out, and the results give me hope. While unemployment figures have reached a 26-year high, 44 percent of the 1,000 Intuit Payroll customers we surveyed said they plan to hire new employees within the next 12 months. Now, don’t get me wrong — we here at Intuit are not uncorking the champagne bottles quite yet. But we do think this is at least one sign that the clouds are beginning to part.

[Via Alex Barrnett.]

Packets, man, packets

Cisco, which is based in San Jose, Calif., has also forecast that by 2013, video will account for about 60 percent of the data traveling across mobile networks.

iCash

According to eBay CEO John Donahoe, shoppers have already spent about $400 million on the popular commerce site using the company’s free iPhone application. Ok, the shopping part of eBay’s business brought in $1.4 billion in revenue just last quarter, but who would have predicted around half a billion dollar in sales a year would be recorded through the eBay iPhone app when it debuted on the App Store?

Rod Johnson on a Mechanical Bll

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 06:11:15 GMT

Numbers, Volume 31

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:01:24 GMT

iPhotoshop

I thought you would like to know that Adobe today announced that its Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone application has been downloaded over 1 million times from Apple's App Store, a milestone reached in less than one week of availability. Additionally, the application has held the No. 1 position for all "Top Free" applications as well as the "Top Free" application in the Photography category for 10 consecutive days.

[From PR email from Adobe. See more about the app.]

James' video

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:29:05 GMT

While at Adobe MAX 2009, I ask James to give his brain-dump on applying usability and "sexy" design to enterprise applications. While it's traditionally been a hard sell - evidenced by how terrible most enterprise applications look - several cracks are starting to form in the idea that paying for pretty isn't worth it for enterprise software.

Here are some highlights and links mentioned:

Making portals prettier
James recalls the internal training app T-Mobile demo'ed from an old Adobe MAX. Getting enterprises to make their inward facing applications look better and be more usable.
Bill Scott's "Looks Good, Works Well."
Adobe buying Omniture - James write-up, my write-up
We talk about FedEx Critical's use of internal RIAs as an internal application (see a write-up in this larger coverage of the Adobe MAX keynote).

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and paid travel and hotel for Adobe MAX.

Numbers, 30

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:00:35 GMT

I hope they're not all full-time

The most interesting tidbit: Laporte’s TWiT (This Week in Tech) network does $1.5 million in revenue per year, doubling yearly. His costs, however, are more impressive: it only takes $350,000 per year to run the business with 7 employees.

[If you watch the video, they do work full-time. Avg. salary of $50,000?]

Multi-platform Households

More than 12 per cent of US homes have at least one Mac, according to NPD's latest Household Penetration study - a rise from nine per cent the research company polled in 2008. But of those Mac owners, nearly 85 per cent have at least one Windows-based PC.

SpiceWorks Continues to Grow

250,000 individual contributions to over 78,000 IT discussions
18,000 IT products and services rated and reviewed
3,000 Windows events have been prioritized & analyzed
1,000 How-to’s and Best Practices
600 Reports
400 Groups organized by industry, technology, and geography/language
100 Scripts to automate IT tasks have been shared and reviewed in just the past 4 weeks since we launched the Spiceworks Extension Center
20 SpiceCorps, local user groups, have been formed from London to LA

Whose Building iPhone Apps

1/2 of the top 10 paid apps of 2008 were built by indie devs, according to Forrester. Today, only 1 app in the top 10 was built by an indie.

New Tech-Ecosystem: Facebook Platform

[From Blake Commagere's GDC 2009 session "Facebook: Is the Cake a Lie?" described as a session to "examine the opportunities that exist, the drawbacks of these platforms like Facebook and what it all means for game developers." Here, he speaks to how frequent changes to Facebook effected his code work:]

Facebook pushes every Tuesday night.
Major API changes in 2 year period that required a patch/release for me: over 30
TOS policy changes that required a patch/release from me: 9
Newsfeed integration has had 5 major rearchitecturings.

FRUS: Vol II, Vietnam - 1965 White House memos about Vietnam

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:07:41 GMT

The State Department web site below is a permanent electronic archive of information released prior to January 20, 2001. Please see www.state.gov for material released since President George W. Bush took office on that date. This site is not updated so external links may no longer function. Contact us with any questions about finding information.

NOTE: External links to other Internet sites should not be construed as an endorsement of the views contained therein.

FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES 1964-1968
Volume II, Vietnam
January-June 1965

DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Washington, D.C.

Political instability within South Vietnam;
U.S. retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam
January 1-February 11

81. Memorandum for the Record/1/

Washington, February 7, 1965.

/1/Source: Johnson Library, John McCone Memoranda of Meetings with the President. Secret. Prepared by Colby. For another record of this meeting, see Document 80.

SUBJECT
NSC Meeting, 7 February 1965

PARTICIPANTS/2/
The President, Mr. Reedy, Mr. Cater, Mr. Valenti, General Clifton, and others

Secretary McNamara, Under Secretary Vance, General Wheeler

Under Secretary Ball, Assistant Secretary Bundy, Assistant Secretary Greenfield, Ambassador Thompson

The Speaker
Senator Mansfield
Representative Ford
General Carter, Mr. Colby

/2/Also attending were Moyers, Bromley Smith, Mann, Dillon, and Rowan. (Johnson Library, President's Daily Diary)

1. The first part of the meeting was devoted to editing the White House release/3/ on the evening's developments. General Taylor had recommended that the reference to the Tonkin incident be taken out as it was only a one-time activity. State agreed with this position. It was decided, however, to leave the reference in a modified form.

/3/For text, see Department of State Bulletin, February 22, 1965, pp. 238-239.

2. Senator Mansfield suggested that the release give particular emphasis to the President's resolution to avoid any wider war and that it indicate that we are prepared to bring t...

From The Best and the Brightest

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 05:38:54 GMT

But the Saigon years would not be happy ones. After all those years learning control, discipline, making those the touchstones of his life, Max Taylor was now confronted why the wild irrationality, the deviousness, the maliciousness and venality of the South Vietnamese. To was somehow unfair; people who are about to be saved from the Communists should feel some element of gratitude, and at the very least the gratitude should surface in the form of knowing they were being saved, and more important, wanting to be saved.

Numbers 29

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:46:10 GMT

Mobile: It's gonna be big, bro'!

The big finding is that mobile access to the Internet has jumped 34 percent compared to last year, and it looks like women, teens and, yes, seniors make up the bulk of that increase. The mobile Internet: not just a place for 20-something men anymore. Darn.

Windows Mobile, the numbers saga continues

Windows Mobile now runs on 27.7 million smartphones and is projected to be in use on some 67.9 million smartphones in 2013, iSuppli said today. The 2013 forecast means that Windows Mobile would have a 15 percent share of the global smartphone market by then, second to the Symbian OS, which would have a 47 percent market share.

[Meanwhile, iPhone numbers can be a bit shaded.]

Texas VCs

The amount of venture capital invested in Texas in Q3 totaled around $363.97M, according to an analysis by Texastechpulse of venture deals in our venture database. According to our analysis, investments were up from the $282M invested in Q2 of this year.

VCs in General

Overall, venture-backed liquidity (the combination of mergers, acquisitions, and initial public offerings) added up to $2.7 billion, down 49 percent from the same period last year, VentureSource says. It’s even a drop from the $3 billion of venture liquidity earned in Q2.

The New Tech Trade Rags

Since May, the TechCrunch network has added nearly 3 million additional readers and 6 million pages views. Our September audience stats now stand at more than 10.5 million unique readers (7 million from our sites and 3.5 million from RSS) and more than 22 million page views.

Numbers 28

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:35:08 GMT

SaaS office

The study's main finding is that about 1-in-5 companies reported that Google Docs is "widely used" in their workplace, however possibly as a compliment to Microsoft Office.

IDC surveyed 262 people, a significant number of whom are senior managers at various sized businesses, which points to rapidly increasing interest in Google's cloud-based office application.

A similar survey by IDC, a sister company of Computerworld 's parent company, IDG, in December 2007 found that 5% of those surveyed reported that Google Docs was "widely used" at their workplace. IDC's most recent survey, done in July, found wide use of Google Docs in 19.5% of the companies surveyed.

Browser Share

There are now more users running some variant of Firefox (50.6 percent) than not running it, according to the latest statistics from the exo.performance.network.

[Meanwhile, from Google-land:]

[W]hile Chrome currently has just under 3 percent of the browser market currently, a year from now, they’re planning to have at least 5 percent. More importantly, 2 years from now, if Chrome doesn’t have at least 10 percent share, Google will be “exceptionally disappointed,” Chrome Engineering Director Linus Upson told Reuters. And Google’s own internal projections for the browser are even higher, apparently.

Creeping Bing

The new search engine, which was first brought out in May to do battle with rival Google, saw its share of the search market grow by 22.1 percent from 9 percent in July to 10.7 percent in August. The results made Bing the fastest growing search engine in the top 10 list, according to the Nielsen Co.

Mainframes, you know you want 'em

According to a study out today of 300 users by researchers at IDC nearly one-half of said they plan to increase annual spending on mainframe hardware and software over the next five years. Only IBM mainframe users were included in the survey population, IDC noted.

...

And IBM’s mainframes haven’t been immune to the economic downturn. This summer IBM reported that System z mainframe server revenue decreased 39 p...

On studies, from The Best and the Briggtest, pg. 437

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:23:31 GMT

Baby T-Shirt Ideas

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:49:55 GMT

I Farted
Got any free Samples?
Pull my Finger
My mom is Tired
I'm an accident

I just had an accident
I'm with stupid [also a good maternity shirt]
Free Poop

Poop on Board [on background of old "Baby on Board" sign]

My Dog Loves Poopie Diapers

Burp Me

I love my baby-back ribs

Nice boobies!

Toothless

My legs don't work

I forgot the punchline

I'm more of a night-owl [from Tom Raftery]

Sleep is for wimps [from Tom Raftery]

Numbers 27

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:03:07 GMT

Pharma Supply Chain

[From a recent IBM study of "executives at pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device and consumer health care industry companies who are responsible for planning, logistics, procurement and coordination throughout the life of a drug or medical device":]

64 percent reported rising customer demands such as requests for designer drugs or specialized packaging as a major challengeMonitoring risk to prevent counterfeiting, drug and device recalls, or even the loss of intellectual property, is a priority for 75 percent of executives, as margins become slimmer and supply chain complexity rises. Three-quarters have risk and performance initiatives such as surveillance programs, anti-tamper devices and specialized labeling, but with mixed results.46 percent consider vendor-managed inventory for their customers extremely effective but only 4 percent use it to ensure they are precisely meeting customer demands for products65 percent collaborate with suppliers on demand planning but only 31 percent do so with customers, often resulting in an overstock of supplies or missed sales targets

[Seems boring, sure, but the thing to pay attention to here is the consumerization of IT in non-IT industries, namely, more closely linking the supply chain (getting products from factory to customer hands) more closely with customer demands, if not on a daily basis, much shorter. As a thought-exercise, how would a Facebook or iPhone application where you "click to refill" effect the drug supply-chain. If AT&T can't take it (see below), I bet most pharma supply chains can't either.]

"The tubes are clogged!"

Mr. Sharma compares the problem to water flowing through a pipe. “It can only funnel so much at a given time,” he said. “It comes down to peak capacity loads, or spikes in data usage. That’s why you see these problems at conferences or in large cities with high concentration of iPhone users.”

When thousands of iPhone owners descended on Austin, Tex., in March during South by Southwest, an annual technology and music confe...

Numbers 26

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:34:41 GMT

[Snow Leopard spread?]

The Week in Virtualization Conferences

This week saw both VMworld and the RedHat Summit. The RedHat folks told me they'd settled on and announced the date before VMworld, and I'm pretty sure they'd have liked to avoid having it during the same week as VMworld is currently the virtualization conference. See Stephen's report from VMworld.

In the numbers world, though, how about attendees? RedHat didn't too bad considering (I was there, and it seemed well populated):

From John Fontana:

RedHat this week began to weave together that message at its annual Red Hat Summit, which attracted 1,500 attendees.The addition of KVM, a hypervisor that is part of the Linux kernel, is key to that process."

From Timothy Prickett Morgan:

There were 12,500 attendees at the VMworld virtualization fest in San Francisco this week, and apparently half of them were peddling software to help companies cope with virtual machine sprawl or otherwise manage virtualization in the data center or on the desktops.

The Smart Phone Numbers Game

AdMob released their mobile metrics report for June and Android usage continues to grow. Request from the Android operating system grew 25% month over month. This now gives Android a 5% worldwide OS share and marks the first time they have pulled ahead of Windows Mobile.

Via James.

SMB Survey from Spiceworks

Some highlights from their report:

These findings were uncovered in a Q3 2009 survey of over 1,000 IT professionals, which was designed to investigate current technology purchasing, usage and staffing trends among small and medium businesses (SMBs) worldwide. The survey was fielded in July and August.

Small and medium businesses are squeezing an extra year out of their hardware. The average planned lifespan of hardware, which includes desktops, laptops and servers, increased 26 percent from 40 months to 50 months.

57 percent currently use one or more “cloud computing” services. The three most popular cloud computing services in use or on the purchase list include anti-spam (43 percent), hosted ...

From A Management System for Information Business, 1985

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:13:54 GMT

Kim likes this wine

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:38:10 GMT

Collected Writing Tips

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 16:02:12 GMT

Numbers 25

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:48:59 GMT

These boomers need to revolt

Unemployment for middle-aged workers like Mr. Blattman is the highest it’s been since data was first collected 60 years ago. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, joblessness is worse for men over 45 (7.7 percent in July) than women the same age (6.9 percent). And while the middle-aged are still more likely to have jobs than younger workers, once people Mr. Blattman’s age are laid off, finding a new job is harder. In 2008, laid-off people over 45 were out of work 22.2 weeks, versus 16.2 weeks for younger workers.

GPL Duck Hunting

I just noticed that in the first week of August, the GPL version 2 open source license dropped below the 50% share mark for the first time since we started tracking this data in 2007. Up until this point, a majority of open source projects were using the GPLv2 license. GPLv2 share has fallen pretty steadily. In July 2008, GPLv2 was used by 57.7% of all projects. Today it stands 8% lower at under 49.6% (which means roughly 100,000 projects). During the same period, LPGL 2.1 is down about 1% and GPLv3 is up 3.4%.

[Email from Eran Strod, Black Duck Software.]

Broadband in the USA

The study also pointed to the relatively slow rate at which the average U.S. broadband speed rose in recent years, gaining only about 1.6 Mpbs since May 2007. That was a much slower increase than was seen in the U.S. states with the fastest speeds.

California, perhaps the nation's most high-tech-friendly state, ranked only 11th among the 50 states, well behind the national leaders. Still, the state's 6.6 Mbps average put it ahead of where it was two years ago, when it ranked 22nd among states, with barely more than 3 Mbps.

Delaware residents now enjoy the nation's fastest broadband at 9.9 Mbs, nearly twice the national average -- and up more than 5 Mpbs since 2007. At the lower end of the speed range, sparsely inhabited states such as Idaho, Alaska and Montana were well below the national average, clocking in around 2.5 Mbps.

Tech Style

Over 1000 UK consumers aged between 18 and 5...

"Loosing" China - from The Best and the Brightest

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:13:18 GMT

Places to Have a Small Training Session in Austin

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:20:15 GMT

The criteria is: for around 25 people, in a walking around part of town (only downtown, campus, and South Congress, really).

Stephen F. Austin Hotel - https://twitter.com/loribaldwin/statuses/3410940568
Jordan recommends this Apple training place on 6th and Congress: https://www.caerian.com/contact.php

Austin Tweetup

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:01:11 GMT

Mark Cathcart (@cathcam)

Charlie Wood (@cwood)

Sara Graham (@letswrestle)

Cody Powell (@codypo)

Joshua Baer (@joshuabaer)

Michael Wilde (@michaelwilde)

Numbers 24

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:29:32 GMT

Bat Belt, UK Edition

One in four Brits admit to owning at least two mobile phones, with respondents citing privacy, contracts and handset subsidy as motivation.The study was carried out by Opinium Research for moneysupermarket.com and involved asking 2002 people if they owned more than one phone and, if so, why. Eight per cent reckoned a second contract was necessary to get the package they needed, while six per cent wanted to get their hands on the latest hardware and 13 per cent wanted a second phone for privacy reasons.[And, as your bat belt expands, remember these tips from Officer.com:]Make sure your tools are in good working order. Test your pepper spray periodically to ensure that it functions properly by spraying a short burst toward the ground (in a safe direction). Test the batteries in your TASER and inspect the cartridges before every shift. If you carry an expandable or collapsible baton, make sure it will open when you deploy it. Last but not least, ensure that you are thinking tactically. Remember that the final weapon is the brain.

Zenoss

The Zenoss Core project recently hit the 1 million downloads mark on SourceForge. That means on average someone downloads Zenoss every 90 seconds. These downloads have translated into over 1M managed servers & network devices, and 75K active end users from over 23K organizations across 175 countries . Needless to say we’re thrilled with the up-take over the past 27 months.

HP Numbers

Broken down, HP's enterprise business sunk 23 per cent to $3.7bn, with enterprise storage and server both dropping 21 per cent respectively. Software revenue declined 22 per cent to $847m and HP's printer biz took a 20 per cent slide to $5.7bn.

The otherwise slumpy quarter was offset by HP's services unit which increased 93 per cent to $8.5 million. But as mentioned, that's primarily a result of the EDS acquisition.

Numbers 23

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:26:23 GMT

Spring is "Everywhere"

The Spring Framework is widely used in the enterprise Java market. From my own experience, many WebSphere customers use the Spring Framework on top of WebSphere. But many WebSphere customers use the competing EJB open standard in place of the proprietary, but open source, Spring Framework. The most recent Eclipse user survey results found that of the 436 respondents building server-side applications, 47.5 percent were using the Spring Framework and 38.3 percent were using EJBs. Customers clearly exhibit a need for choice significantly higher than the proclamations of Spring's enterprise Java domination would suggest.

Cloud Predictions

Gartner predicts the cloud-computing market will grow at more than 20% per year, from $46.4 billion in 2008 to $150.1 billion in 2013. Business processes - which made up 83% of that market in 2008, will continue to make up its bulk. The most common cloud-based functions currently are advertising, e-commerce, human resources and payment processing applications, Gartner says.

Acquia Mo'

As you might remember, Acquia opened for business in October 2008, less than one year ago. In less than one year, Acquia now supports over 250 enterprise customers across a wide variety of markets. In the last six months, we've quadrupled our customer base and now help support open-source solutions in places where proprietary software once predominated. Places like The Economist, Intuit, WEEI, Sony Music, Adobe and more.

"Got me feeling, like, whao"

CC Media Holdings -- which owns San Antonio-based Clear Channel Communications Inc. -- reported a net loss of $3.7 billion on $1.4 billion in revenue for the second quarter.

That compares with net income of $282.3 million on $1.8 billion in revenue for the same period a year ago. Revenue was down 21 percent between the two quarters.

IT Jobs

The IT jobs market turned around in July with the United States gaining 7,400 IT-related jobs just one month after losing that many.

Department of Labor statistics show the U.S. economy on the whole lost...

Red-Hot Republican

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:11:29 GMT