Monthly Archives: December 2010

December 30, 2010 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Those Aussie Getting All 1999 Again

By Ben Kepes

I’ve got a soft spot for Australia – sure they’re not so good at sports, and they spell culture with a capital “K”, but despite their failings I’ve grown to like them. Part of this came from spending a fair amount of time in Aussie this year running 10 or

Tagged , , , , |
December 29, 2010 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Holiday Post–On Enterprise Software

By Ben Kepes

2010 has seen a fair amount of criticism directed at enterprise software vendors – I’ve called a bunch of offerings marginal, lacklustre, me-too clones and worse. But I’d be the first to admit that sometimes buyers of enterprise software make life a little, ahem, hard for software vendors. As a

Tagged |
December 27, 2010 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Holiday Post–What is the Cloud?

By Ben Kepes

Holiday season is a good time to write some posts that are, depending on your location, easy to consume while sitting on a beach or sipping a mulled wine. First up is an old-faithful, that definitional post. I’ve long said that the term “cloud” is problematic, spanning as it does

December 23, 2010 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Folder Sharing with a Twist–Monetization. And a Bad PR Rant

By Ben Kepes

Warning – only part of this post is a product review, while the rest is a rant against bad PR. But for anyone out there with a fledgling product (or an established product for that matter) the second part of the post is worthwhile reading and thinking about… There’s a

Tagged , , , , , |
December 22, 2010 Posted in Business 2 Comments

FinancialForce–Educating the Market and Customer Stories

By Ben Kepes

As part of the recent DreamForce conference. FinancialForce decided to take a novel approach towards educating the marketplace and used the approach taken by Eliyahu Goldratt in his management book The Goal. FinancialForce commissioned a book called The Deal which, in the form of a novella, articulates the value of

Tagged , |
December 21, 2010 Posted in Business 2 Comments

Backup My Info–Differentiating with Service

By Ben Kepes

A recurring theme in briefings with vendors is a search for a point of differentiation – there are many application types where there are a huge number of vendors all battling for market share – in situations like this everyone is trying to find a nugget of difference to crate

Tagged , , , , , |
December 20, 2010 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Vendor Criticism and Turning the Other Cheek

By Ben Kepes

Recently a mini storm blew up when Kashflow CEO Duane Jackson posted explaining that he’d be asked by the organizers of the Global Entrepreneur Week not to attend a function as it was a private Sage event. While the situation has now been resolved, the back story seems to be

December 17, 2010 Posted in Business 2 Comments

The REAL Firehose, and Securing the Value of Telcos with Alcatel Lucent

By Ben Kepes

I posted the other day about the twitter firehose and specifically the announcement that Gnip would be selling access to a trimmed version of the feed. I intimated about the “other firehose” an aggregation of data that even makes the 1000 or so Tweets a second that the full Twitter

Tagged , |
December 17, 2010 Posted in Dan Pink, MIT, Motivation, People and Processes 2 Comments

On Motivation, and What Really Drives Us

By Ben Kepes

We’ve been told for years that incentivizing employees is the secret to better performance.

A great talk given at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) questions the assumption that if you reward something you get more of the behavior you want and, the corollary, that if you punish something, you get less of the behavior.

Dan Pink refers to a study at MIT which was funded by the Federal Reserve. In this study, a whole group of students were given a set of challenges – physical, cognitive, and spatial. Performance was incentivized via monetary reward in an approach typical of most workplaces. So what happened?

Tagged , , |
December 16, 2010 Posted in Business 1 Comment

CrowdFlower–and a Symbiosis of Human/Machine Input

By Ben Kepes

Sometimes in the race towards automation, we lose sight of the fact that there’s times when, by using people, we can avoid a lot of the errors computers make.  The question to ask then is how do we make human work accurate?  CrowdFlower, has developed one solution to this conundrum,

Tagged , , , |

The Author

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Schedule some time to talk to me here.

More about Ben here.

Want to find me across the social web? Click below

    

Subscribe to the Blog

 Subscribe - Posts for all authors

Enter your email address and we'll send our posts to you: