"More than 50 percent of Walmart customers have smartphones, and mobile is driving more than 40 percent of Walmart.com seasonal traffic."
—@Walmart Labs’ Tim Kimmet talks what’s in store for mobile shoppers
"More than 50 percent of Walmart customers have smartphones, and mobile is driving more than 40 percent of Walmart.com seasonal traffic."
—@Walmart Labs’ Tim Kimmet talks what’s in store for mobile shoppers
I can’t really concentrate on reading unless I have a pen in my hand. I love marginalia. I love used books and getting a glimpse of some stranger’s relationship to a book that is now in my life. I underline, star, box, vent, exclaim. I like rereading my books and seeing coffee stains or chocolaty fingerprints I left behind the last time I read them.
Size and internal vs. external coordination costs matter a lot. North of 100 people in a company, employees don’t all know each other. Politics become important. Incentives change. Signaling that work is being done may become more important than actually doing work. These costs are almost always underestimated. Yet they are so prevalent that professional investors should and do seriously reconsider before investing in companies that have more than one office. Severe coordination problems may stem from something as seemingly trivial or innocuous as a company having a multi-floor office. Hiring consultants and trying to outsource key development projects are, for similar reasons, serious red flags. While there’s surely been some lessening of these coordination costs in the last 40 years—and that explains the shift to somewhat smaller companies—the tendency is still to underestimate them. Since they remain fairly high, they’re worth thinking hard about.
If there was a common thread among everyone The Verge spoke with for this story, it was Samsung’s brutal dominance: the Korean giant’s own-sourced display and processor combined with an enormous marketing war chest make competing in Android extraordinarily difficult.
EMC believes that the third era will be one of mobile devices, cloud computing and big data…. "We don’t want you to build an app in Amazon’s cloud and have to pay Amazon a tax for the rest of its lifecycle."
—EMC World: Pivotal boss Paul Maritz talks up plans for new firm
“We will do cloud-based ERP on a massive scale,” said Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP’s executive board and one of the people who oversaw the project. Of SAP’s regular product, he said, “At some point in the future, complex implementations should go away. All of our products are moving to HANA.”
Was the Renaissance something that you put on and took off like a diadem, or was it something you did even while you slept?
At Stanford, Systrom opted to go abroad to Florence, Italy, for the winter term of his junior year, where he focused on photography. A teacher there persuaded him to switch from his Nikon to a plastic Holga that took square photos, a choice that would be echoed later at Instagram.
Through it all, we don’t have to become hermits. But we must not allow ourselves to continue being junkies.
Most of these dynamics predate the internet, but digital technologies are magnifying their salience. People keep returning to the mantra of “work-life balance” as a model for thinking about their lives, even as it’s hard to distinguish between what constitutes work and what constitutes life, which is presumably non-work. But this binary makes little sense for many people. And it raises a serious question: what does labor mean in a digital ecosystem where sociality is monetized and personal and professional identities are blurred?
As IBM now cleverly says Mobile isn’t a Device, Its Data… We’re heading into a beautiful, bright, future where Data is Eating The World and solving tough problems…
Amazon Web Services (AWS), by way of comparison, is estimated to have brought in $1.8 billion last year.
—Microsoft adds Azure to its billion dollar a year club | Ars Technica
menswear techniques that sounds really important and next level, but, when you think about it, is really just a basic move you used to do all the time as a kid.
Buying IBM’s x86 server business is the quickest way for Lenovo to rocket up the rankings and become the number four server maker in the world, behind IBM and far behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell. The deal would make Lenovo the number three x86 server maker instantly.
I suspect the prevalent “slow follower” mentality within the public IaaS companies that are chasing AWS will continue. So too will the confusion about their inability to catch up with AWS, let alone pass them by. At the end of the day, this is about inventing new ways to provide better and more resilient computing infrastructure to the Global 2000. Trying to beat AWS won’t get you there; you need to take the path of innovation and creativity
The history of computing over the last 30 years is one of lurches forward every time individuals got the power to do what only big enterprises could do previously — and to do a much better job of it.
In other words, as with open source, these developers can’t be bothered with corporate bureaucracy. In an earlier Forrester survey, developers said the primary benefit of the cloud is that it’s the "Fastest way for me to get my project done and deployed." This calls to mind Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady’s assertion that "Convenience trumps just about everything" when it comes to cloud adoption.
—Forrester: Middle-Aged Developers Driving Cloud Computing – ReadWrite
The technologies are maturing faster than the customer base which means we should expect to see an acceleration in developer use of cloud in the next five years.
{{{Better get a bucket}}} In-N-Out Burger has reportedly applied for a permit to build what would be its first Austin location near I-35 and Airport Boulevard. The west coast burger chain had already announced plans to open a store in Round Rock.
For many punters, the economic benefits of a pay-as-you-go rented virtual machine start to disappear at around $10,000 of predictable monthly spend, and at this point it really does make sense for them to investigate other support options or even start owning their own hardware.