
When sustainable fashion jumps out as a theme at ur tech conference
When I started looking for talks and examples of sustaining the craft for Monki Gras I didn’t have fashion in mind. But Mazz Mosley, lead backend engineer at Unmade proposed a talk, and now a few other examples have emerged. The Unmade story is cool. Not least because I was thinking just this morning how personalisation […]

The new Patreon economy
10 years ago I used the phrase New Patronage Economy to describe how open source and cloud were changing the relationship between people, the work they do, and how that work is valued and paid for. At the time I was hopeful that open source would somewhat change the contract to favour the creators […]

Voice recognition project completed at UTD
Every semester I try and work with some students at UTD by facilitating a ‘capstone’ project. It’s another dimension of my support for STEM education. Yesterday, they gave their presentation to their professor and class. This semester the project was creating an Android based speech recognition solution to facilitate a Voice-based Inspection and Evaluation Framework. […]

Effektif BPM Goes Open Source
On a call with Tom Baeyens last week, he told me about their decision to turn the engine and APIs of Effektif BPM into an open source project: not a huge surprise since he was a driver behind two major open source BPM projects prior to starting Effektif, but an interesting turn of events. When […]

Apple launches ResearchKit – secure, private, open source medical research
Apple announced a new initiative at its Spring Forward event yesterday – ResearchKit. What is ResearchKit? Apple’s SVP of Operations, Jeff Williams, described it as a framework for medical researchers to create and deploy mobile apps which collect and share medical data from phone users (with their permission), and share it with the researchers. Why […]

Transforming Data Into Action – Part Two
In part one of this series we looked at big data and transforming it into smart data, or data that is contextual, relevant and delivered to the right people / person at the right time. One of the other interesting and growing use cases in the business use of data is something called small data. […]

It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source: Thoughts on the Hortonworks S-1
It took me a week or so to get to it, but in this post, I’ll take a dive into the Hortonworks S-1 filing in support of a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of their stock. While Hadoop and big data are unarguably huge trends driving the industry and while the future of Hadoop looks very bright indeed, […]

Technology for Good – episode thirty four with Salesforce’s John Tascheck
Welcome to episode thirty four of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode our guest was SalesForce SVP of Strategy, John Taschek. John and I are both longtime members of the Enterprise Irregulars, but this was the first time John and I had had a conversation outside of email! Some of the more […]

Thoughts on MongoDB’s Humongous $150M Round
Two weeks ago MongoDB, formerly known as 10gen, announced a massive $150M funding round said to be the largest in the history of databases lead by Fidelity, Altimeter, and Salesforce.com with participation from existing investors Intel, NEA, Red Hat, and Sequoia. This brings the total capital raised by MongoDB to $231M, making it the best-funded database / big […]

Firefox MASSIVE FAIL – frequent, incompatible upgrades and instability
For years, I have been a dedicated Firefox user. Before Chrome, Firefox was a browser that really met my needs. Firefox was faster and more flexible than Internet Explorer. Firefox was innovative, supporting tabs, add-ons, standards, and multiple platforms. Over the years, I customized my Firefox environment to meet my needs, with add-ons that made […]