Wait Before Buying a Kindle Fire: WiFi Problems
Got my Kindle Fire a few days ago, eagerly anticipating a morning of shiny new object joy followed by a nice Thanksgiving dinner. No joy. My Kindle Fire will not connect to WiFi and it can’t do much of anything without it. This is rapidly becoming a known problem. The Amazon support boards are filled [...]
Playing With Fire
I’ve had the Kindle Fire for a few days now and here are my impressions: The software layer that Amazon built on top of Android is smart and efficient. Not only does the interface hide the icon laden desktop that default Android features, but it serves the higher function goal of nicely integrating Amazon services [...]
Amazon’s Kindle Fire diverges the Tablet market
In his book The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called divergence the driving force that creates a new species. Last week Amazon enhanced their Kindle range of e-readers, but also applied some divergence to the tablet market by extending in to a new sub-category of mobile tablet devices with the Kindle Fire. I think it’s [...]
The Emerging Mobile+Cloud Stack and Its Natural Owners
Apple’s is set to launch iCloud in the next few days, and with it Steve Jobs plans to move the center of your digital life to the cloud. Amazon just announced the Kindle Fire, which Jeff Bezos calls a service, not a tablet. When you buy a new Android phone or tablet, the first thing [...]
Fool Me Once?
Shades of George W. Bush and Victoria’s Secret all in one. We got fooled again last week by our own ineptitude and inability to learn from history when Target stores website crashed under the weight of a highly successful marketing campaign. The last time anything remotely similar happened was when Victoria’s Secret decided to do [...]
Enterprise headlines and excerpts, 2011, July and August
July and August Enterprise Software and Solutions news. Headlines and excerpts follow below, but here are some of the highlights of the months of July and August: Apple became the world’s most valuable company, but Steve Jobs resigned due to health issues. Meanwhile, Google bought Motorola’s cell phone business. Salesforce.com promoted its message of Cloud, [...]
HTML5 – A Wonder Drug
I was reading up on some of the commentary surrounding Amazon’s release of an HTML5 reader, one of the best comes from Constellation’s Charles Brett: Amazon’s announcement of its Kindle Cloud Reader, based around HTML 5, is a wonder of irony. Apple has successfully been taking 30% of purchases made via anything bought through an [...]
The Two Most Desirable Features of a Platform as a Service
Big Data? Multitenancy? Uber DB scaling? Mad Hadoopishness? Faster app development? Universal Social Connectivity? Not so much. Some platform or other claims all of those things, but the two most desirable features of a PaaS appear to be revenue generation and commodity pricing, not necessarily in that order. Let me first say that I’ve come [...]
People Using Amazon Cloud: Get Some Cheap Insurance At Least
I’m reading through Twitter streams, Amazon Forums, and other news sources trying to get a sense of how users are responding and what their problems are. It’s pretty appalling out there. B2B companies admitting they have no recent backups and just have to wait for it to come back online. A company that claims patient’s [...]

