Open Source Blogging

This week I’ve touched base with Panorama Software, socialtext, and now with Jive Software. Jive continued the trend I discussed a couple of days ago about enterprise disruption.

You are meeting quite a few of the companies that are disrupting the older players and trying to, as Jive’s CMO xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, said, open up a new social space inside companies. Hope you’re enjoying this look at the players. We’ll bring you others after CES.

Anyway, here’s Sam Lawrence of Jive Software, who talks with me about the economy, how they are competing with Sharepoint, and that they are working on a … Continue Reading

Steve Jobs won’t be center stage this week. Chuq von Rospach, who used to work at Apple, wraps up what that means from an inside-the-Apple sphere.

But there’s another first coming up next week: it’ll be the first CES without Bill Gates on stage.

It is Steve Ballmer’s big moment. The lights will be all on him thanks to Steve Jobs’ decision to not show up on stage.

Now, look at the enterprise videos I’ve been doing this week (I just did another one with Jive Software’s CMO this morning). Do you sense it? This is Steve Ballmer’s big … Continue Reading

In addition to the interview I did yesterday with socialtext, which explores some of the disruption coming to enterprises, there’s another trend I’m tracking: the coming fight between the collaborative web and Microsoft.

Now some pundits in the industry think that the fight will be head on. Not me. I think it’ll be more parasitic. Like how mold takes over a strawberry. Slow, but in the end the strawberry dies.

Is that what we’re seeing now? Well, here’s something that is a small piece of the bigger trend. You could call it a few cells of mold on the strawberry, if … Continue Reading

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

This morning after our hill run my sister asked me about Twitter: “What’s Twitter all about? I don’t get it?”

Neither did I at first — I resisted using Twitter for more than a year because it seemed like just another distraction, just another way to waste time and have noisy chatter going on in front of you.

But I decided to see what the fuss was all about, and did my Great Twitter Experiment. To my surprise, Twitter was actually fun, interesting, and useful — if used correctly.

I’ve also found … Continue Reading

About two years ago, I wrote a very popular piece for The Simple Dollar called 30 useful Pieces Of Free (and Open) Software for Windows. In it, I talked about how I had a new Dell laptop and that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on additional software for it, so I went hunting. I sought out open source software so that I knew it would be not only free, but the code would be peer-reviewed and it wouldn’t have any bugs or malicious elements in it. And, eventually, I found thirty … Continue Reading

For years, books and articles and blogs on productivity have been showing us how to be more productive: crank out the tasks, multi-task, work faster, be organized.

In short, they’ve taught us to be a good part of a corporation that wants more out of us. But that’s old-school productivity, or Productivity 1.0.

Today let’s take a look at Productivity 2.0: a new set of rules have changed everything for the workers of the world. Don’t crank out tasks — learn to work with a deeper focus. Don’t plan and hold meetings and form committees — just launch the software or product … Continue Reading

Recently, I’ve been reading the excellent book The Price of Privilege by Dr. Madeline Levine, which discussed the prevalence of depression and social problems among affluent teens. For the most part, the book lays the blame for this problem squarely on the parents: in their race to affluence, they failed to give adequate time, attention, and focus to their children. She even goes so far as to talk about “soccer moms,” suggesting that they often fall prey to this - they give their children some of … Continue Reading

I’m convinced the coolest place to do an interview with an HP executive is the original HP Garage. Robin Purohit, HP’s General Manager of Information Management, invited me over to talk about information overload inside Enterprises and what HP Software is doing for Enterprises to help them manage their email.

… Continue Reading

I just put up a Photosynth of my family room. Unfortunately you need a Windows machine to view it. But, this is a combination of 50 images I made this afternoon with my Canon 5D.

It took only a few minutes to upload them all and complete the Photosynth. Very easy to do. Anyone can do it, you just need to plan out your Photosynth a bit. Sort of like a big stitched panorama, except that people can “walk” through the images and zoom into different ones.

Can you find the photo of our 11-month-old son, Milan?

… Continue Reading

Uttarakhand tour: I was unable to write something on my blog, I was unable to read newspaper regularly, I was …. yet I was very happy as I was on a tour of “Devbhoomi Uttarakhand” with my parents last week. Its name was uttarakhand initially, then changed to uttaranchal and again uttarakhand as it was the northern part of Uttar Pradesh. But I think they should have thought of some other local good name. Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya pradesh are very boring names. There are two parts in uttarakhand - Garhwal and Kumayun. Somebody suggested that we should merge Uttarakhand … Continue Reading