Life with Me in the middle
Business
Is Comcast hiding behind a new name?
Feb 5th
On February 3rd Comcast posted an article announcing that they have officially launched a new brand for their technology platforms and products. In my experience when a well established company changes brands it is due to one of two factors. 1) They have been purchased and are merging entities or 2) They are hiding their past discrepancies with a new name.
Simply put, XFINITY is about offering our customers more — more HD, more speed, more choice and more control over their services. XFINITY is the culmination of years of work to transition Comcast’s network and products to a platform that will now offer 100+ HD channels, 50 to 70 foreign-language channels, approaching 20,000+ VOD choices, incredibly fast Internet speeds (50 Mbps growing to 100+ Mbps) and thousands of TV shows and movies online for our customers to watch whenever and wherever they want.
Reading the above statement does this not describe exactly what they are already doing? To me it seems Comcast is trying to take the easy way out and fool consumers into thinking there is a new king in town. The gates are open let me hear your thoughts.
via Comcast Launches XFINITY : Comcast Voices | The Official Comcast Blog.
Real-Time Collaboration is Great, Just Not At This Time
Oct 8th
via readwriteweb.com
A Forrester study is reporting that real-time collaboration is not catching on. As you can see from the figure above Email is clearly the winner with 87% of workers using it at least every hour. This of course is followed by word processors with 79% and Web browser (web apps) with 76%.
As much as we all want to be able to collaborate in real time honestly what does it buy us? Most of the time we are too consumed with the quantity of work that there is no time for real-time. This is why email is and will continue to be the #1 form of team collaboration. You can send and receive email at your leisure. Almost every gadget on the planet supports email in some form or fashion. If done properly it won’t overwhelm you into a state of numbness because you know you can check it when you get around to it and continue on your current task in real-time.
With my teams I use Basecamp which is a life saver for sure. It works great for any size team, 2 to 100 plus. Its not real time and that is exactly why I love it. Are you collaborating in real-time with your team? If so how is that working for you?
Google and Apple Breakup
Oct 1st
via venturebeat.com
If you haven’t read already Google and Apple are no longer “friends”. It appears that Apple will cut the last seam that holds the two together, Google Maps. According to VentureBeat, Apple purchased a small maps company named Placebase. One can only assume this will be replacing the integrated Google Maps on the iPhone in the near future.
Was this a good move by Apple? Possibly not, considering the extensive API already available for Google Maps. However if Apple has proven anything its that they know how to write a great API. One thing is for sure, Apple is ready to take on the competition in a big way. Who will be the supreme champion in the end? I think we all will. Competition just brings better hardware and better services to each and every one of us.
Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America
Jan 8th
Have you ever wanted to see just how fast and how many Walmart stores there are in America? The great folks over at Flowing Data have done just that. This was so well done I had to share.