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Posts Tagged ‘Foursquare’

Quips: The Slide Some Vendors Won’t Let Me Show On Social Media Tools

Published on January 16, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Social Media Explained In 140 Characters (More or Less)

Some time back a tweet went out describing what all the tools were (Figure 1). I modified this a bit and now use it in alot of presentations to audiences around the world. More than 80% of the conference organizers usually are fine with this slide. Take a look and tell me what you think.

Figure 1. Social Media Overview

Your POV

So here’s the deal, some conference organizers won’t let me use this slide because they are worried about being politically correct or appropriate. I’m curious to see what you think as I crowd source an answer for a current client? Is this appropriate or not?

Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

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Assessing social business/social CRM readiness
Developing your social business/ social CRM strategy
Vendor selection
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Sharing best practices
Designing a next gen apps strategy
Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
Demystifying software licensing

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Monday’s Musings: Lessons Learned From Amazon’s Cloud Outage

Published on April 25, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Amazon’s Cloud Outage Catches Most Clients Offguard

The recent Amazon cloud outage at its Northern Virgina data center from 5 am Thursday, April 21, 2011 to roughly 5 am Friday, April 22 has shaken the confidence of some executives on public cloud computing. Most notably, FourSquare, HootSuite, Reddit, and Quora publicly suffered visible performance issues. The industry’s reassurances in the past on up time performance and massive redundancy capabilities combined with the massive corporate adoption had everyone believing that public clouds were bullet proof. As calmer heads prevail, most CIOs, business leaders, and analysts realize that:

Cloud outages are rare but can happen. While most organizations can not deliver 99.5% up time let alone 90% performance, disruptions can and will happen. The massive impact to so many organizations last week highlights potential vulnerabilities of betting 100% of capacity in the cloud. More importantly, it showed that broad adoption does not equate with bullet-proof reliability. Most organizations lacked a contingency plan.
Cost benefit ratios still favor cloud deployments. For most organizations, the cost of deploying in the cloud remains a factor of 10 cheaper than moving back to the traditional data center or even a private cloud. Capital costs for equipment, labor for managing the data center, excess software capacity, and the deployment time required to stand up a server create significant cost advantages for cloud deployments.
Current service level agreements lack teeth and should be improved. Most organizations lack teeth in the cloud/saas contracts to address service level agreement failure. Despite all backups and contingency plans, clients should consider scenarios where core business systems go down. What remedies are appropriate? What contingencies for system back up are in place. Who is responsible for disaster recovery? Will the vendor provide liability and for what?

More…

Monday’s Musings: Why I’m Unplugging From Location Based Services Until The Privacy Issue Is Resolved

Published on January 17, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Convergence Of Smart Phone Affordability And Broad Network Access Drives Growth In Location Based Services

I’ve been a big fan of location based services (LBS). In fact, many of you have followed my whereabouts on Yelp, Tripit, and other integrated Twitter services. As many of you know, location based services take your geographical position from your mobile device and deliver relevant information services based on your relationship to people, objects, places, etc. In the 2010 Pew Research Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, surveys showed, 4% of Americans utilized Location Based Services (LBS) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Layar’s Augmented Reality location based service (LBS).

Constellation Research, Inc. estimates these services to grow and generate up to $10.7B in revenue by 2013. Among the early adopter set, LBS is on fire. Among the general population, growth will most likely trend with smartphone adoption, which market research firm IDC estimates a 55% growth from 2009 to 2010 (~270 million units). You do the math!

As one of those early adopters, I and many others have enjoyed LBS from a consumer tech point of view to:

Navigate around places. Use turn by turn navigation and traffic maps through services such as Google Navigation and Yahoo! Maps.
Identify events to attend. See where my friends are by date and location to make time to catch up using Loopt, Rummble, and Tripit.
Locate friends near me. Catch up with people near me using Foursquare and Gowalla as a matter of convenience. In some cases, track people by mobile device location.
Reduce traffic fines. Warn and be warned where speed traps, sobriety check points, and cameras through crowdsourcing apps such as Trapster and Phantom Alert
Find places to eat. Follow foodie friends to see where they check in on Yelp.
Receive offers from merchants. Get rewarded for checking in to locations with discounts from merchants. Take advantage of M-commerce (mobile).