John Gannon

A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to play around with Ruby and naively thought that it would be easy to get started. I’d download Eclipse, and a few Ruby packages that weren’t shipped with MacOS, and then be off to the races. Fat chance. What I thought was going to a leisurely evening of writing sample Ruby apps turned out to be a marathon debugging session, wrestling with dependencies, error messages, and anything else that could have possible gone wrong — before I had the chance to write a lick of my own code. It reminded me of being a sysadmin, poring over log files and reading cryptic StackOverflow posts trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with my setup. It just should not be this hard for someone moderately technical to start coding up a simple app. Fortunately there are some companies building cloud hosted IDEs (definitely should have started there ... (more)

Mobile is the New Identity

I don’t think username/password can last much longer as the primary means of authentication on the web.  Rampant phishing has made it all to common for unsuspecting “normals” (and even those who are more tech savvy) to inadvertently open themselves up to malicious purchases, or massive promulgation of spam emails and social network comments from their account.  It’s only going to get worse as phishers get more and more sophisticated. One way to slash the number of successful phishing attempts would be for B2C sites to start adding mobile-based authentication as part of their login... (more)

Wrapp – Why LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman Is Investing In The Social Gifting Site

This is such a great idea. Really interested to see how this company evolves… Wrapp Mogul: Why LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman Is Investing In The Social Gifting Site FAST COMPANY | JANUARY 18, 2012 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/fastcompany/headlines/~3/vAXJBl45k4Y/linkedins-reid-hoffman-invests-in-social-gifting-site-wrapp Hoffman’s previously tossed cash at Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. Now the Greylock partner sees potential in the data you can … read more — http://pulse.me Filed under: Uncategorized ... (more)

HR tip – Promote fast

CEO’s and managers in high growth environments don’t have time to micro-manage.  They need staffers who can JFDI, without requiring a lot of care and feeding. If you have someone on your team who is consistently overdelivering, requires little supervision, and makes the team around them markedly better, promote them immediately and give them more responsibility along with that promotion. A promotion is a great way for a CEO or manager to recognize ‘A’ players, to position them as role models within the team or company, and to regain valuable management bandwidth. If you’re think... (more)

Congrats Sarah!

Very happy to see this tonight.  Sarah’s super sharp and it’s no surprise she’s working her way up at BVP. Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), a global venture capital firm, today announced the promotions of Abhijeet Muzumdar and Sarah Tavel to vice president. via Bessemer Venture Partners Announces Vice President Promotions | Business Wire. Filed under: Uncategorized ... (more)