Thursday, August 2, 2012

Digital Provocateur: My Latest Forbes Posts

Here is a summary of my latest Forbes.com Posts. You an read my "Digital Provocateur" column here.

  • With news this morning that Box has raised an astounding $125 million in venture funding, it seems that there’s never been a better time to raise capital for a start-up.  Although for many aspiring entrepreneurs, the journey still remains a mystery. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Krish Ramakrishnan, the Co-Founder and Chief [...]
    • From an absolute percentage point of view, unsurprisingly Social Media is the clear winner with more than 1.5% of all job postings containing the term. More surprising is the second spot going again to jQuery with close to 1% of all searches. I also compared a few of the buzzwords du jour, “Big Data” and “” The winner is Big [...]
      • has announced that it has released its “Chaos Monkey“ infrastructure testing software under a free Open Source license. The software known as Chaos Monkey, is a service which runs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, it identifies groups of systems and randomly terminates one of the systems in an automated effort to discover failure points within a cloud infrastructure. [...]
        • Another morning and another announcement that yet another so called “Software defined Networking” (SDN) company will be acquired. This time it’s ’s turn, announcing the acquisition of Xsigo. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.  did note that the two companies will continue to operate independently and it is “business as usual.” , -based Xsigo will mark ’s sixth acquisition this year, [...]
          • I’ve just been on the train for the last half hour or so heading to my office in downtown Toronto. As I got on the train, the unthinkable happened, my twitter client stopped responding. In horror, I repeatedly hit the refresh icon with no success. Not even a fail whale for support.  I immediately felt a sense of [...]
            • Last week I had the opportunity to catch-up with Michael “Monty” Widenius, founder and original developer of MySQL. During our lengthy discussion, we covered a number of topics including the early history of MySQL and its ultimate sale to Sun in 2008 for $1 billion. Monty’s latest startup, MariaDB, aims to pick up where MySQL [...]
              • There is an increasingly common refrain I keep hearing from startups. These young companies, with their generally un-original software products, claim that its solution is just like  except open source. Don’t get me wrong. I like open source as much as the next guy but, from a value proposition standpoint, just being “open source” [...]
                • In the realm of bad ideas, there are bad ideas, then there are truly idiotic ones. A new twitter profile (@NeedADebitCard) keeps track of arguably one of the worst, reposting pictures of debit cards people have purposefully posted on twitter. Dean Putney over at BoingBoing shares his insights saying, “Some of them are lightly blurred– such as the one above which [...]
                  • Amazon’s Cloud service is having a bad a couple weeks. For the second time in as many weeks Amazon’s East Coast cloud crashed during a severe storm that left 1.3 million in the D.C. area without power. The outage brought down numerous high profile web sites hosted on Amazon including , Instagram, Pinterest, and Heroku. [...]
                    • has entered the busy ‘ as a service’ (IaaS) arena today with its new Google Compute Engine service. The cloud service, which describes as in a ‘Limited Preview Release,’ allows users to  run large-scale computing workloads on Linux virtual machines hosted on ‘s infrastructure. The IaaS service is very similar to Amazon’s EC2 service which it launched [...]
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