Tag · secondary filter
Venture Building
Startups, venture diligence, fundraising, and turning technical capability into an enterprise.
44 pieces, grouped by format
September 14, 2007
Management 2.0
Are CIOs seen as obstacles to innovation? In a nice interview with Gary Hamel, Allan Alter at CIO Insight writes:
April 22, 2005
Modeling knowledge
These days I’ve been acting as a consulting architect for several federal government and commercial organizations where the problem of *knowledge modeling* has come up over and over again. It seems that the underlying issue at…
November 3, 2004
What is a Service?
Recently I’ve been conducting architecture assessments for a couple of clients (mostly in .NET shops but this topic is equally applicable in J2EE enivronments). I was asked to conduct reviews of newer architectures in which…
May 7, 2004
Get on the Enterprise Service Bus
Over the past couple of years the *Service Oriented Architecture* (SOA) model of system architecture has become a popular way of getting management consultants and technology evangelists like me into enterprise application…
April 25, 2004
Online social and professional networking
For the past few months I’ve been experimenting with the new social networking tools that are available online. The one I’ve found most useful (relatively speaking) is LinkedIn. Internetworking websites and software are…
September 30, 2023
Role of a Part-Time Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in Regulated Industries
Explore how a Fractional CTO can navigate the complex technological landscape in heavily regulated industries, making compliant and informed decisions.
October 8, 2005
Improving the product definition phase with prototyping and simulation tools
We’ve all heard how a substantial number of software projects fail or are cancelled routinely. For years developers have said “if only the requirements were right, the software would have worked right.” Intuitively we all…
August 14, 2006
It’s easier to get in than to get out
We’ve all seen it: we spend weeks or months in the “sales and demo cycle” for our applications. If we’re lucky we consider all workflows, if we’re even luckier we test drive the UI and make sure training goes smoothly, if…
April 29, 2004
Resume Driven Development (RDD)
Last week I had lunch with a non-technical manager customer of mine who is using our Netspective Enterprise Frameworks Suite for develoment of some heavy-duty mission-critical web applications. After choosing our NEFS, the…
July 27, 2009
Balsamiq Mockups is a good tool for requirement elicitation
We’ve all heard how a substantial number of software projects fail or are cancelled routinely. For years developers have said if only the requirements were right, the software would have worked right. Intuitively we all…
September 5, 2008
How To Demo Your Startup
This is an article I wish I wrote. It’s about how to demonstrate your startup or business idea to a stranger on the phone or in an audience. Since people pitch me their products (which I enjoy, of course), I see lots of demos…
September 4, 2008
The Evolution of Virtualization: Qumranet joins Red Hat
I saw this press release that caught my eye (thanks, Rich):
August 27, 2008
XTS’s Citrix reporting tools just keep on getting better
It has been some time since I last wrote about XTS, a rapidly growing virtualization management vendor focused on the Citrix market. In my recent interview with Eric Spiegel, CEO, I found out that XTS has had many important…
September 9, 2006
The Benefits of Working With Tech Startups
My friend Eric Spiegel’s just finished a nice article on working with startups. It’s a great explanation to customers on why they should do it and what some of the challenges are.
September 8, 2006
NIST Releases Recommendations for Securing Web Services
NIST Special Publication 800-95 addresses security needs for networks in which automated Web services are being deployed in service-oriented architectures. It’s only in draft but it covers the basics fairly well. If you’re…
August 4, 2006
Can’t We All Get Along?
I read a nice article on QA groups: Can’t We All Get Along?.
July 29, 2006
Open Source Versus .Net Stacks
eWeek did a decent review of open source (including Java) versus .NET “stacks” a few weeks ago. While the review wasn’t as thorough as I would have liked, the conclusions will let each side to walk away. And, it demonstrates…
April 23, 2006
Vitamin, Nourishment to help the web grow
Vitamin, a resource for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs just went live in version 2.0. It’s a pretty nice site discussing AJAX, the business of Web 2.0, CSS, Ruby, and other topics important to creators of SaaS and…
April 15, 2006
Open Source Business Intelligence and Reporting with BIRT
JDJ ran an interesting article on BIRT, one of a now growing number of open source Biz Intelligence platforms that compete with the likes of Actuate and BusinessObjects. I haven’t used it yet, but if any of you have and would…
April 14, 2006
Prejudging Talent Can Cost You
My friend Eric Spiegel has just published his most recent article *Prejudging Talent Can Cost You* at Datamation.
March 16, 2006
Conference on Intellectual Property in the Global Marketplace
I’m a patent holder and I train patent examiners on technology topics so I often see and sometimes work with the folks at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). If all you know about the USPTO is what you read in the…
March 9, 2006
Business Value of Enterprise Architecture
I’ve been doing lots of Enterprise Architecture work these days and I’m inevitably asked: “what’s the point? Aside from it being required by many business cases being prepared for new IT system, there really is utility in…
February 23, 2006
SaaS (Software as a Service) single instance, multi-tenancy architecture
The Microsoft MVP Architect’s mailing list today had a pleasant surprise: Fred Chong’s WebBlog : SaaS is a journey, walk with us.
January 29, 2006
Math Will Rock Your World
Nice article on how math is making a resurgence in corporate America: Math Will Rock Your World.
January 11, 2006
Knowing When to Quit
As a serial entrepreneur, I found this *Knowing When to Quit* very useful. I advise new startups regularly and sometimes I give them this same speech that Jim wrote about:
January 4, 2006
IronPython (Python for .NET) 1.0 Beta 1 is out
You can now download IronPython 1.0 Beta 1. I think this is big news for .NET because dynamic languages like Perl, Ruby, and Python are at the forefront of modern language design. I’m still a C++, C#, and Java guy at heart…
December 29, 2005
Yapping in a podcast may be worse than on TV
There’s a lot of talk these days about video podcasts taking off in 2006. And, I certainly agree that hobbyists will take to it like they have with audio blogging/podcasting. Jakob Nielsen recently discussed how video…
December 23, 2005
VC firms spot enterprise trends
Most of my readers are in enterprise software development. As we all know, enterprise software has seen some tough times over the past few years. If you’re interested in what’s coming up in this space, *follow the money*: VC…
December 23, 2005
IBM Buys Web Services Pioneer Bowstreet
The recent purchase of Bowstreet, who tried to ride the wave of web services and later service oriented architecture, demonstrates how hard it really is to succeed in enterprise software in general but especially in software…
December 23, 2005
Fact or myth? Will 9 in 10 new businesses close in the first year?
Balanko-Dickson reports:
November 29, 2005
Eric Spiegel’s got the cure for Citrix reporting blues
I met with Eric today to talk about his company and what it does for its customers and came away thinking “why didn’t I think of that?” Eric Spiegel is CEO and co-founder of eXpert Technology Solutions, which provides turnkey,…
November 19, 2005
Does “Web 2.0” mean anything?
Paul’s a great writer and he’s just posted a grea piece on Web 2.0. Some of my favorite snippets:
November 10, 2005
AJAX driven ERD diagramming tool
Most of us who’ve lived in the enterprise database space for even a few years know that Embarcadero and Erwin are two powerful ERD diagramming tools. I just ran across this WWW SQL Designer tool that provides some of the same…
November 4, 2005
Peer to peer messaging middleware
As we all know, SOA (service oriented architecture) is not a technology, it is a way of architecting and designing complex distributed systems so that real business value is gained and maintained. As SOA begins to make sense…
October 13, 2005
A few early HHS awards for interoperable health information technology
A few important early contracts have been awarded by HHS to learn more about the EMR, EHR, and Healthcare IT market. If you’re in the healthcare world, take a look at this report and this one.
September 25, 2005
Finally, someone else takes care of physical mail
For those of us that are tired of spam in our snail mail and haven’t quite found the equivalent of a physical bayesian filter for their real postal mail, take a look at Remote Control Mail. I found their idea of a permanent…
September 24, 2005
How blogging is shaping the tech debate
Most small companies don’t think they can afford a PR firm but Alice Marshall of Presto Vivace is looking to change all that by giving top-notch PR advice to small and medium sized businesses. She recently interviewed me for…
June 15, 2005
Automate runtime classfile modification
I ran across this great article that demonstrates how to change Java classes on the fly (at load time). The article discusses how to automatically implement the useful but difficult to maintain toString() methods we’re all…
April 30, 2005
MD Logix might actually make MDA useful
There’s been a lot of talk recently about *Model Driven Architecture* (MDA) being perhaps a silver bullet or at least a potentially great solution for development of complex software. In my travels as a consulting architect to…
April 20, 2005
Free Tutorial and Presentation creation software
If you ever write software documentation such as tutorials or create demos of your software, you know you need “screen capture” software to take snapshots of screens. What you may find more useful is “screen motion capture”…
February 22, 2005
Easier to use Java Date/Time classes
For those of us who deal with business applications for a living, date/time functionality is crucial. The Joda Time package is an open source library that makes dealing with Calendar, Date, Time, and other related classes…
February 10, 2005
Time to give EJB 3.0 a serious look
Senior Java architects like myself have complained for years that the EJB standard and its associated programming model was overly complex and probably didn’t provide a good return on investment. While EJB 2.x was a big…
April 27, 2004
Microsoft OneNote actually works
As a person that spends equal time with business and technology issues I take lots of notes and have tried my share of “note taking” software. However, I never spent more than a few weeks on any particular note taker or…
April 24, 2004
UMD Netcentricity Conference was useful
I attended the Robert H. Smith School of Busines Fourth Annual Netcentricity Conference yesterday at the University of Maryland. I expected it to be a stuffy academic conference without much applicability to my life as a CEO…