One of us just joined SAP. That’s the first thing I thought of this morning when I heard the news that Sameer Patel has joined SAP as Global Vice President for the Social Software Business group. Sameer is  consultant. But just as important, he is a blogger. That means Sameer has the knowledge of a practitioner ...

Earlier I posted about SXSW and the change over the past six years. Yesterday, I asked  several people what big themes they see coming out of this year’s conference. The ambient apps came the closest to anything in terms of buzz. But they did not overwhelm SXSW like Twitter did in years past. Why is ...

The discussions at SXSW are more about data this year than in years past. Social is a topic of discussion but the influencers are now putting more attention on the data layers built on top of applications and the new ways to identify and manage the flow of “social objects” from apps and social networks. ...

Over the next few days I will do a “Question of the Day,” here at SXSW. Today: What Apps Are You Using at SXSW?” The responses today may surprise you. Services Angle What company does not have an app these days? Every startup, with few exceptions at SXSW, is a services company. And any modern ...

Dropbox has made its Web site simpler to use with easier sorting capabilities, an improved presentation layer for photos and a similar drag and drop experience as it provides on the desktop. Action Bar Dropbox designers used the Web update to provide easier access to files and folders. An action bar at the top of the ...

This past week, United  and Continental Airlines made a last transition to becoming one airline. For its reservation system, the combined companies dropped the United Web-based interface for a command line interface that runs on Microsoft DOS. And the outcome is what you might expect. Aggravation, anger and a very public indictment of using legacy, ...

In a report now available, IDC sees the big data and services market growing to $16.9 billion by 2o15. That’s up from $3.2 billion in 2010, a 39% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). IDC does not provide its reports to journalists for review so what it actually covers is fairly sketchy. IDC did post its ...

Intel released the latest in its Xeon family of processors today that boasts increased performance of up to 80%, new vector extensions for compute intensive applications and the first integrated I/O actually baked into the processor itself. This is Intel’s new micro architecture on the Sandy Bridge CPUs. The news has far reaching implications as ...

Some observations from conference organizers Alistair Croll and Ed Brill on theCube last week at the Strata Conference: Once users start using Hadoop, it is often the unexpected things that create value and it’s why the word “scientist,” is important. Using today’s big data tools requires you to explore. It’s true with Hadoop as an analytics ...

The data visualization blog Beautiful Data has some great stuff this week from the Strata Conference. The most recent post by Benedikt Koehler features a network map of the tweets from the first day at Strata with the hashtag #strataconf. You can see on the map how the keynotes play into the Twitter stream. The most tweets ...