A challenge

Clay Christensen recently posted an article on Fast Company promoting his book, “How will you measure your Life?”  In the article, they separate Hygiene factors and motivators that cause us to think differently about our jobs.   The hygiene factors simply control job dissatisfaction versus motivators which cause you to love your job.  It seems too many of us fall into a trap of appeasing the hygiene side and not giving enough weight to the motivating side which can lead to regret and a feeling of being trapped.  How has your journey been?  What did you choose after formal education ended and where are you now?  I’d love to hear.

Big Data and Google

Recently Google went live with a cloud based big data crunching solution called BigQuery.  It goes head to head with Hadoop and other cloud based deployments of Hadoop like Cloudera.   Google is using a columnar data structure and claims far superior performance to on site Hadoop deployments when it comes to queries.  Although, without replicating their cloud scale compute power, it would be hard to compare.   Hadoop and others still have a place in big data even with BigQuery around as there are still scrubs  and processing of the data to be done.  Right now BigQuery is all about the query.  The pricing isn’t bad though if you have a project to try it out on.   I’d be interested to hear what you think if you give it a try.

LexisNexis makes the move to their own big data platform

They have been cooking up this solution for a while now, but have just announced the move of the first line to the new big data platform. The C.L.U.E. Auto line is the first to come over and take advantage of their new project.  The HPCC team has been out and about recently at several big data venues promoting the open source platform.  HPCC is billed as a superior alternative to Hadoop.  Visit their site and read up, this platform will become a significant player on the big data scene in the near future.

Social cooker.

There are a lot of good and hot things happening to the social companies right now.  Of course Facebook is making big news right now with their IPO.   LinkedIn’s first quarter revenues were up 101% with Net Income up 140%.   They also snapped up SlideShare, which is a great presentation sharing solution if you haven’t tried it out.  In addition to these revenue signs, Klout also announced today they are serving 1 billion API calls per day.   Hootsuite is also stirring up another $50M and being courted by some of the big names.  These are just a few recent examples but it got my attention.  This kind of innovation on the edge of the social sphere is turning into top dollar in a relative short time.  How will these continued successes influence the next round of players?  How does it influence the more established players?  Does it motivate you to innovate?

Are developer farms really enjoyable?

EBay just bought 35,000 square feet of space in NYC to house developers to build out its new recommendation system.  While this makes them the second largest development space in NYC next to Google, it begs the question.  Do developers want to work in a massive hive?  What does that do to productivity and innovation?  I’m sure, if it is anything like Google’s there will be plenty of perks, so perhaps you wouldn’t mind? 

Getting it right, eventually.

Did you know that Flickr started out as an MMO game? Twitter was a podcasting business. Pandora was nothing more than a B2B recommendation service. PayPal originally was a service to beam payments to and from Palm Pilots. Time and time again there are great signs of companies that evolve to success. It is too easy for us to sit at a point and time and think about, “if I could only pull a magic rabbit out of a hat” approaches, but that isn’t reality. These companies took a chance, put heart and brains into an idea, and then stayed smart to evolve to meet demands. There is no reason you can’t do that. Read more on The Pivot.

Facebook seeks up to $11.8B in their upcoming IPO.

The current  plan is to turn loose 337.4 million shares at $28 to $35 each according to their recent filing.  Those in the know said that Facebook was going for a $100B valuation.  This would have placed their market cap at half of Google’s!  They only have 10th of the sales revenue.   It does seem inevitable that this IPO will wash back to fair value in time, the question is how long will the initial frenzy last and how many will enjoy the ride.