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Focusing on investment opportunities in the information technology sector

John Gannon

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Top Stories by John Gannon

Much of the focus in the technology press on Enterprise 2.0 platforms has been on the similarity of these tools to public social networking systems like Twitter, Facebook, etc. One consequence of this similarity, and one that’s being missed by the tech press and venture investors, is that these platforms make it possible for an employee at any organization to build an internal personal brand. I believe over time (3-5 years) that employees will view their internal brand as critical to their success within the company, and the forward thinking ones will put significant effort into building that brand. Those employees that are on the bleeding edge will want tools to help them leverage these Enterprise 2.0 platforms in a more effective way. Contact management and Inbox management tools (e.g. Mingly and Xobni) provide some functionality that can be additive to one’s perso... (more)

IDEs Belong in the Cloud

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 readi... (more)

Elevator Etiquette

Kind of obvious, but surprised at how many people don’t heed this advice… When meeting with clients or potential business partners off-site, don’t discuss your impressions of the meeting with your colleagues until the elevator has reached the bottom floor and you’re walking out of the building. That’s true even if you’re the only ones in the elevator. Call it superstitious or call it polite—but either way, don’t risk damaging your reputation by rehashing the conversation as soon as you walk away. via Business Etiquette: 5 Rules That Matter Now | Inc.com. Filed under: Uncategorize... (more)

War Games for Sysadmins

The beginning of a calendar year is a great time to make wild predictions, so here’s one…within the next 10 years we’ll see a new class of system administration tools that allow freelance sysadmins to virtually team with an organization’s existing IT staff to help debug operational problems within that organization’s applications and/or infrastructure. Key features I’d expect to see in these tools: Ability to take a snapshot of an organization’s live environment, or a portion of it, and run that snapshot in the cloud. The environment would have all PII and other identifying info ... (more)

Social Networking Tip For Programmers – and Everyone Else

Set aside one hour daily for active marketing: Software developers love to spend days and nights coding great stuff. Focusing on marketing, sales and customer activities is not quite as exciting. Put some discipline in place. A good starting point is to devote one hour per day of your time to work exclusively on marketing. And I don’t mean read the Web to learn about SEO. Spend one full, active hour contributing to forums, pitching to people, e-mailing journalists and other key influencers that may be interested in what you do. Does your web site have a success story from a real ... (more)