FUD versus Innovation
Visa and Square’s partnership is a much better play than Verifone’s smear campaign in March 2011.
Category: Thoughts
The Road to Free Kindles
The Amazon Kindle seems destined to be free hardware that’s ad-supported. Do you think it’s still worth buying?
Apple’s iOS subscription plan: nothing to do with subscriptions
A post on how Apple’s iOS subscription plan isn’t primarily about subscription revenue, which is a smaller slice of the pie. Instead, it’s a strategic move to harness the value-add component of the larger slice of the pie, which is advertising revenue.
Google, go kill the URL bar!
Google considers eliminating the URL navigation bar from its Chrome browser.
Who would have guessed: Spending incentives drive spending!
In the spirit of the holiday season here in the US, this article from the Wall Street Journal seems particularly appropriate: In many cases, rewards enticed people whose cards were dormant to start spending…[and] even small rewards can prompt people to spend more. This useful study backs up the old management consulting adage of “you [...]
ProductCampNYC 2010
So following my earlier recommendation, I jumped out of bed on a crisp Saturday morning and headed over to the Microsoft offices in midtown Manhattan for the 2010 version of ProductCampNYC! There were great conversations, a ton of expertise, and an awesome raffle to close it out. To give you a sample of the topics, [...]
Selling Scrum to Skeptics: Budgets
Scrum and agile (note the lowercase!) development techniques have been around for a few years now, and prominent companies use it in some form or another. However, I’ve seen multiple instances where clients and management alike will derail the whole notion of Scrum! It pains me to see it, so here’s a Part 1 (of [...]
Why Fail Whales Can Make Great Teams
Twitter and Foursquare are two easy examples that come to mind for services that have failed very publicly. They get pretty bad press from people because of service outages. I myself have been on the receiving end too, but as someone who’s been in the application development side of the house, I know that these [...]
Yay for (full?) Google Docs on Android!
I’m frustrated at the gap between Apple and Google, and it’s not about the typical symptoms harped on around the web (i.e. hardware, client-side software, number of apps). Instead, it really comes down to Google’s product management and in this case, using user personas that stitch together functionality well!
A Scrum a day keeps the management away
I’m sure you know about apples and doctors and whatnot; I’ve also found that Scrums are just like that too. It’s a foundational tool for any team that’s becoming “agile”, and a great starting point to work Scrum principles into an organization for a lot of reasons.
