Disqus - Latest Comments for awilensky

Re: Let's Get On With It

awilensky — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:28:19 -0000

I would pay for AVC. That's one out of 400 feeds that I skim everyday.

Re: Pay Attention to GM This Week

awilensky — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:53:43 -0000

Too big to fail, too stupid to succeed.

Re: Pay Attention to GM This Week

awilensky — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:52:43 -0000

For the money we poured into this moribund company, we could have built a new industry from scratch around the new innovators like Tesla, Bright, and others. No amount of tweets and posts from any big three source would ever have credibility/

Re: Ollie

awilensky — Sun, 31 May 2009 21:06:43 -0000

Mrs. Wilson:

Is that dog smiling? Don't tell me he's not smiling.

Re: ShareMe -The Mobile Future : Weblog

awilensky — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:35:49 -0000

That would be a coup for them.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/05/early-adopters-and-finding-next-shiny.html

awilensky — Mon, 18 May 2009 09:26:18 -0000

Louis, I think this syndrome is now clustering around "real time streams". Everyone is writing posts and real articles about the messianic coming of real time updates; when it is hardly proven that real-time steams are advantageous or not.

I always thought that relevant and contextual was the real need, but now that everyone and the brother is streaming real time updates, that is the shiny new thing. ech.

Re: Facebook raises $150 million more to cash out employees

awilensky — Sun, 17 May 2009 12:58:26 -0000

I'm asking about facebook. It's gone, now what? How is the world or work changed?

I might say that losing a utility like Linkedin might have more real world impact than losing FB to its non-business model.

Re: Facebook raises $150 million more to cash out employees

awilensky — Sun, 17 May 2009 08:40:36 -0000

What are you 12? How would your life or career be materially affected if there were no Facebook? We are all acting like this is a mission critical utility.

Re: Facebook raises $150 million more to cash out employees

awilensky — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:55:11 -0000

If Facebook were to disappear overnight, who would really be the poorer?

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/05/every-piece-of-infrastructure-carries.html

awilensky — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:18:33 -0000

You are worried about Friend feed and URL shorteners? We have an entirely new regime of hosting services (cloud, SAAS, PAAS), that is in the process of trying to convince the fat part of the mid market that they can eschew commodity servers in the closet down the hallway, and roll out capital line of business onto elastic cloud services. Now, this will be a conundrum. Until the industry can make an convincing argument (other than keeping completely duplicate systems and comm links), the SME is going to be a tough sell. These are mission critical use cases - POS system, a mid range distributed rapid replenishment system, etc.

Many of the venture-backed cloud start ups have not addressed the survivability issues, and as a corollary, the insure-ability issue. There is not one specialty business underwriter that would touch these under capitalized, thinly equipped, and unrated services. The industry is offering minor alternatives for otherwise existing managed services where the actual, functional differences are virtually indiscernible. Managed services for legacy AS400 applications are far better cases for outsourced remote services.

In order for the industry to thrive, it must address the doubts of the SME, until the outages can be indemnified, there will be no major buy in from the SME. What you can't insure, you can't rely on; someone has to underwrite and price risk - even if the answer is SELF insurance.

FriendFeed is down? Please. Cry me a river.

Re: The American Express Blues

awilensky — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:38:36 -0000

One of my best buddies us an IS analyst for the financial industry. He knows the in-out of Amex's centralized scoring and fraud detection center, and many of the key personnel, he claims, have turned over.

Re: Twine Gets Google Reader Inspired Makeover

awilensky — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:50:54 -0000

I have really tried to use the service, and after several weeks my opinion is that it adds nothing to my on-line experience.

Re: The Power Of Passed Links (continued)

awilensky — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:09:08 -0000

I meant that it figures that what was found to be most often used is the most unwieldy. It take more clicks and the shared links are harder to manage - which doesn't seem to matter to most people, but mean everything to me.

Re: The Power Of Passed Links (continued)

awilensky — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:57:59 -0000

It figures the least effective way to share links is email, that is used by all of my friends and family. They just can't be bothered to go to delicious, and wont use the share me widgets because the mode is too obscure. A instant click share for twitter would be best.

Re: Selling The Company Back To The Founders

awilensky — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 13:39:32 -0000

Yep, the batting average is around 50%, but some buybacks of the family shop also result in zombie companies that kind of never thrive, never die. Sometimes the children who apprenticed with dad and the uncles worked in some capacity, but never had the industrial and account relationships, and that goes for the former corporate buyers, too.

I was involved in one buyback, in the support role as a consultant who knew most of the systems for the real time rapid replenishment supply chain system. The corp buyer messed things up by pushing SAP down the businesses throat.

http://bizcast.typepad.com/clients/2008/07/high...

http://bizcast.typepad.com/clients/2008/07/high...

When the boys came back, they borrowed big, they couldn't operate the new ERP (no hard feelings, neither could the previous buyer), and they needed a rollback to the previous systems fast. Not so easy as one would think.

It took years to get reestablished, and I am sure that if they had a do over, they would nix that buyback, and as you say, seperate emotion (and fealty) from logic.

Re: Selling The Company Back To The Founders

awilensky — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 11:07:28 -0000

The buyback is a whole 'nother thing, isn't it? It happens somewhat more frequently in mid-sized, family owned businesses that sell out to larger, publicly held corps. Here in New England, there was a spate of buybacks of mid market companies in manufacturing, industrial verticals, service companies, etc. They seemed to fall within the gross revenue pre acquisition range of 90-400M /year. They were bought by the likes of UT, Textron, what have you. Some of the sons and daughters took the wild chance of buying the business back when the inept management of the conglomerates alienated the top talent at these firms; talent that was carefully nurtured over years, and these selfsame businesses groomed for retention.

Not all of the buybacks were successful, a few were - I wish I had the names handy, but these were all local or regional stories. One was a large-ish industrial process control service and parts company bought by Johnson Controls, ruined, and bought back for a song by the sons who then rehabilitated the business. The founder, their dad, though aging, was still alive and was an old client of mine in a different, smaller business.

Re: Social Media Consulting and Strategy by a Social Interaction Design Specialist: Social capital on twitter: analytics of flow

awilensky — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:33:06 -0000

Spot on:

The current tools tally up mentions and then try to quantify the metrics, in the most misplaced and futile way. what good is this quantification and these false "tone" metrics? Does a Tweet conversation persist to a users blog entry, do the comments endure? Is there a growing momentum?

None of the current tools addresses these things, and I am glad, Adrian, as one of the leading thinkers in REAL Social computing, that you have seen this for a long, long time.

Re: ShareMe -The Mobile Future : Weblog

awilensky — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:40:05 -0000

Write as if no consequences.

Re: Only Ten Years Too Early

awilensky — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:28:30 -0000

Web TV made the concept work with a bang. There were numerous thin client boxes on the makerket that always seemed more expensive than a Dell at the low end. Wyse and Kimtron, and others had sort of a VAR business with Citrix for smart dumb terminals that were really cheap PC's built into flat screens with Citirix boot roms, no hard drives.

Now, I believe that Asus is coming out with keyboard / PC / 8" display all in one. Now, we have all the SAAS and cloud appls and connectivity to make this happen.

Re: New OnLive service could turn the video game world upside down

awilensky — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 09:58:55 -0000

The article jumbles up a bunch of technology, but that's Ok! High end vector graphics and Unix graphics workstations operate in a similar way; I'm surprised that it took the gaming industry so long to field a systems that centralized computation for the games and polygonal rendering output, and converted the output to a compressed stream of graphics primitives that are re-constructed on the client end. The tech is not new, it's just superb execution and marketing.

I can see how the game publishers would love this as an Itunes like or rather on demand way to get over that hump of increasingly complex and expensive game gear.

Re: Google Docs: Security Flubs and Eternal Beta

awilensky — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:12:33 -0000

Oy, vey. This orange box has me down. Ok, cloud services are somewhat beyond the control of the internal admins. However, misconfiguration and hidden bugs can lurk within premises based solutions. I have been witness to complex document management applications that had very similar 'surprises'.

Re: Hacking Education (continued)

awilensky — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 23:27:19 -0000

Oh, man, I don't even know where to begin. Geared to the Industrial worker? We should be so lucky to get back to that orientation towards true skills that foster the production of real, value added goods and services. We have eschewed a great swath of true industrial arts for the ephemeral and useless. We need more engineers and advanced trade education. The 4 year degree as a benchmark and cutting point for exclusion must be replaced with fine gained credentialing.

I could rant on this for hours. I have been a two way radio and mobile phone tech, audio tech, video, AV, interactive service manual publisher, analyst, programmer, writer, business consultant, what next. I know how to handle advanced test systems and design tools. I never went to university, but was accepted to several.

We have an antiquated system of expensive boutique schools. We need a general system of open admissions where any willing student can rise to the top once in, where they can pick up specific credentials for real skills.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/03/lovehate-relationship-with-my-bluetooth.html

awilensky — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:24:05 -0000

I guess I have been lucky with my Samsung 1st gen blackjack and less so with BT speakers for my MAc desktop setup. The phone pairs and remembers flawlessly with Motorola earpieces, and stays paired through power off of either device. All I have to do is turn them on and they find each other - and stay that way, even going in and out of range.

On the desktop with Bluetooth headsets for using Skype and recording, ech! My mac mini is happy until you turn off the headset, then you must re-pair. Except for one device which works better than others.

It's probably the headset part of the equation.

Re: Returning to the bank

awilensky — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:37:34 -0000

Mrs. Wilson....Mrs. Wilson! It is harder to get a small business loan than it is to get a multi-billion bailout. The SBA loan (or municipal equivalents) require a virtual homeland security check, while TARP and other major bailouts are oftentimes offered to institutions preemptively.

http://abmw.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/tarp-vs-sa...

Re: Social Media Lessons Learned - What To Do

awilensky — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:38:37 -0000

The orange has to go, John, please!

There is power for the small business (especially skilled trades and technical specialties) in using Social networks. The specialist business can showcase work and dynamically keep interested parties abreast of their most important work.

But there is a dwindling return for small business application specialists in the billing of customizations and such. However, these smaller, less tech savvy or moderately technical artisans could use the help, but at what price.

For my part, moving from Fortune 1000 product strategy analyst under contracts that ran 6-18 months, to being a local small biz helper....well, social media services have been a challenge.