I am trying to cover several of my bases with this post, so I hope it makes sense. As you are probably aware we have been toying with and analysing Amazon web services (AWS). We are doing so for a number of reasons including building for what we consider to be a future platform. In the short term we have been looking at migrating existing web applications hosted in traditional environments (co-hosting etc..) towards the virtual servers/services provided by AWS.

Read more...

Doc says it all so simply

"The because effect is a kind of jujitsu. While other people look to make money with something, you're finding ways of making money because of something."

But it doesn't quite fit into a tweet..

Well it's been one heck of a busy week again, more on that later. On Wednesday I ended up at Jame's favorite watering hole (Bedales) for yet another meeting of minds. I don't know why it is but every time I meet up with James and the crew stuff just seems to happen.

James has gone well beyond his operator status and is now looking to apply that great network thinking in other pastures (in addition to his existing networks). It doesn't take a genius to work out what will happen next with green/ecological conversations with James at the helm. Just mix a born communicator with rising tide subject - and boom the Tsunami starts.

So right now I am in the latter stages of events kicked of from the meeting, and James is hitting Techmeme with his twitter currency post, along with a mug shot of me next to the story!

I now have a blogging deficit, my code is behind schedule, a project I am working on slipped a week already, add to this tens of new leads/channels and networks to follow up on and I'm already feeling that holiday weekend in front of me slipping away...

More coming soon, very soon

Ok here's an idea scrap the I.T. department and Marketing department and replace both of them with a new department called "Communications". Next hardwire your clients and suppliers into the new 'coms dept' by destroying  your call centers and accounting bouncers by replacing them with wikis, blogs and home brewed social software build on web/Saas APIs. Have the folks who used to work in marketing participate in and enable blogs (not just yours, the whole sphere). Fire the PR company, use the money to hire good bloggers and evangelists . Have the Folks formerly know as 'The I.T. dept' build and run wikis and the locally brewed social software, have them report to the bloggers. What about the legacy I.T. ? Skeleton staff it or outsource it, but slowly and surely move away from it as fast as possible. Next transform your business into a purple cow, which will surely happen as you actually learn what the market place actually needs and desires. No really! think about it, I'm deadly serious......

What do you think, will it work?

P.S. if you need any help just give us a shout..

Ok I am going to attempt to distill what I have learnt of Fortress primarily from these slides

Warning : My experience of Fortress so far could be compared to Reading the Haynes manual of a vehicle before driving it. This is not usually a good idea, as all one really needs to get from a to b is to know how to drive. Usually when I do this it I end up disliking a language, as I did by reading BJarne Stroustrup's C++ Programming language (ISBN-10: 0201327554), BJarne may be a programming genius but his book writing sucks. I am however excited by Fortress so here goes.

Read more...

I see Microsoft are now planning to exploit the humble shipping container, an idea borrowed from Sun. But they seem to want to take the idea further by making these containers disposable with no human access. Obviously this is all part of the new live platform infrastructure plan, but it looks kind of similar to a new generation of Mainframe, ironic really.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Platform, Sun