This is a topic those working with data are going to have to get their heads around. It’s a big topic, so best get that thinking in early. Behavioural targeting is finding initial use in the marketing space, where the ability to observe a user’s activities and adapt the advertising they are presented with increases returns quite dramatically. However, there are other applications too, from identifying children at risk and applying early intervention, to spotting employees with work-affecting issues. [more...]

This post carries on from CloudCamp London, and picks up one of the themes of my special guest post on James Govenor’s RedMonk blog. During the second half of the event I shepherded the “standards and interoperability” open space, alongside Matthias Kohl of Zimory. The session started off on potential standards for system images. While that sort of portability is a valid concern, there are much bigger concerns around standards within cloud computing. [more...]

Expand Networks announced another customer win today (Wingspan Care Group)

“The pain of WAN communications continues to increase as organizations become more dispersed globally, and remote workers increase in number,” said Efi Gatmor, Chief Technical Officer of Expand. “At Expand, our goal is to solve that pain wherever it may be, with technology that has the capacity to be virtually everywhere.”

Recently I had a discussion with Michael Cucchi, Sr. Director of Product Marketing for Expand. Not only have they been adding customers, but they have also added an ROI Calculator to their site (ROI calculator here). It is a web-based version of a more complex tool they use to help customers calculate the savings reaped from making more efficient use of wide area network bandwidth. [more...]

Affordable CRM took another step forward today. Tactile CRM has released version 2.0 of their CRM tool for small businesses. The new release includes a number of additional features, and some refinements of existing functionality. Clients and leads are now grouped together, under the new class of ‘organisations’ (Jake Stride of Tactile CRM describes the reasoning in this post). Tagging capabilities have now been added (examples on the Tactile blog).

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Last Thursday night saw the second CloudCamp in London. The first one spawned: Nailing down the Cloud – A Definition for Cloud Computing? and this one was a sell-out gig, with the venue packed to capacity.

The fact that a few hundred people came out on a cold wet London night to discuss Cloud Computing is a testimony to the growing fascination with all things cloud-like. One way or another, it is a phenomenon that will disrupt the status quo in software and service provision.

The evening kicked off with a set of speedy presentations: 5 minutes per presenter, brutally speedy. Their velocity and compactness made them hard to summarize, but let me try: [more...]