Monday, March 17, 2014

Recent Forbes Posts (November 2013 - March 2014)

  • The Future Of The Web Is Audible

    Like it or not the web has mostly been designed for those who can see it. The very nature of HTML and CSS is focused on how a web page looks, mostly disregarding our other senses. With the increasing popularity of wearable technology combined with advancements in machine learning, a newfound emphasis is being placed on not only how a website read »
  • How Facebook Is Spending Billions Buying Your Attention

    Much has been blogged, tweeted and written about Facebook’s massive $19 billion dollar acquisition of WhatsApp. It’s a fascinating story that hits at the heart of the new American dream. A dream that imagines anyone with a simple idea cannot only find success, but success on gargantuan scale. Yet as a story of rags to riches aside, a core read »

  • What's Driving Google's Obsession With Artificial Intelligence And Robots?

    Google is without question one of the most innovative companies on the planet.  It’s a company that is known mostly for its amazingly successful search and advertising businesses, and will probably be known for this for the foreseeable future. But lately it’s also quickly becoming known for its rather unorthodox array of read »
  • The Rise Of The Biobot: Mixing Biology And Technology

    In a recent article posted on the The Guardian website, author and new-age guru Deepak Chopra made an interesting observation.
    “A cyborg future is coming. Man’s relationship with machine is merging and machines are an extension of our own intelligence. I’m so into it. I wear all kinds of bio-sensors to tell me what’s going on read »
  • New Open Source Platform Allows Anyone To Hack Brain Waves

    For most people how the human brain works remains a mystery, let alone how to hack it.  A new Kickstarter campaign created by engineers Joel Murphy and Conor Russomanno aims to change this by putting an affordable, open-source brain-computer interface kit in the hands & minds of anyone.
    Brain-computer interfacing (BCI), read »
    • The Age of Surprise: Predicting The Future Of Technology

      Cover of Back to the Future
      It’s that time of the year again. You know, that time of year when technologists, pundits and bloggers get into the festive spirit and share technology predictions for the coming year. Being partially curious and possibly not wanting to be left out of the fun, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring with my read »
    • Bitcoin Mania: How To Create Your Very Own Crypto-Currency, For Free

      With Bitcoin now worth potentially more than an ounce of gold, I’m capping off my series of Bitcoin posts with an attempt to answer a recurring question. How to go about creating your very own crypto-currency.
      When looking at the various crypto-currencies that have emerged over the last few months, most, if not all of them have read »
  • The Top 30 Crypto-Currency Market Capitalizations In One Place

    (Update: Cryto-Currency Bubble Continues: Litecoin Surpasses Billion Dollar Market Capitalization)
    With Bitcoin passing $1000 this morning (it has since dropped), the halo effect of the rising the cypto-currency bubble has had a dramatic effect on many of the other virtual currencies. One of the biggest read »

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Joining Citrix as Chief Cloud Advocate

I'm happy to announce that effective immediately I've joined Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) as the company's first Chief Cloud Advocate.

In this role I will lead Citrix's cloud advocacy efforts with a particular focus on increasing the volume, reach and influence of Citrix's extensive portfolio of cloud solutions used by more then 260,000 customers and 100 million end users across the globe.

Among the many challenges I will be facing is the chance to increase the adoption of the various Open Source initiatives at Citrix as well the chance to work with others in the cloud computing space.

I am very excited and honoured to have the chance to join this innovative fast growing company. If you'd like to discuss anything or have an opportunity you'd like to collaborate on, please feel to reach out to me.

For those interested, here are some of Citrix's open source projects;

Apache CloudStack, an open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

OpenDaylight, a community-led, open, industry-supported framework, for accelerating adoption, fostering new innovation, reducing risk and creating a more transparent approach to Software-Defined Networking.

The Xen Project, the home for various virtualization technologies powering the world's largest clouds in production and is the foundation of many commercial products.

XenServer, an open source project and community managed by Citrix. The project develops open source software for securely running multiple operating systems and applications on a single device, enabling hardware consolidation and automation to reduce costs and simplify IT management of servers and applications.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Recent Forbes Posts



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 [...]
                    • Thursday, May 31, 2012

                      Tune into “The SMB recipe for success in the cloud” Google+ Hangout and be entered to win a Dell Vostro 3550 laptop!


                      A quick note to let everyone know I'll be hosting a Google+ Hangout with Dell on June 7th from noon to 1:00PM CDT.

                      The focus of the event will be on businesses moving into “the cloud.” But what does that really mean? As the cloud has become more ubiquitous, its meaning and value to small and medium businesses often seems more unclear. 

                      Join me, Dell and Trend Micro to clarify this topic of “the cloud” in a live Google+ Hnagout titled “The SMB Recipe for Success in the Cloud”. I'll be joined by fellow cloud experts Matthew Mikell and Bob Leck of Dell and TJ Alldridge of Trend Micro.
                      During this one-hour Google+ Hangout, these panelists will be sharing their wisdom and recommendations, helping small and medium businesses determine:

                      ·       What the cloud is and its value to a business
                      ·       The various cloud solutions and approaches available, and how to make the right choice
                      ·       Common concerns about the cloud and how to overcome them
                      ·       What to consider when choosing the right cloud partner.

                      Our panelists will answer viewer questions LIVE during the broadcast. Pose your questions to them in any of the following ways: a) post a comment on the +Dell page, b) tweet using the #DellHangout hashtag, or c) post a comment on the Dell YouTube page live comment sidebar. We encourage you to join us! All hangout registrants will automatically be entered to win a Dell™ Vostro™ 3550 laptop. Please see Official Rules below for details.

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