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How Can Our Products Be Remarkable?

Seth Godin is fond of saying that we must make our products and our companies remarkable, but it's easier to say than to do (as Seth well knows). And I fear that some people just blow off Seth's advice, because they hear "remarkable" as just another fatuous superlative, such as "great" or "fantastic" that is bereft of its original, more specific meaning. Remarkable means something that would cause someone to remark about it. So, how do we become remarkable?

Too many people have given up on being remarkable because they believe that it's too hard. They think about a company such as Apple, with makes the quintessentially remarkable products and ask, "How could I ever do anything that remarkable?"

I'm here to tell you that you don't have to.

In fact, one way to be remarkable has nothing to do with your product, but rather your attitude. Take a direct competitor to Apple, Dell Computer. Dell has made itself remarkable in recent years, not by its products but by its behavior.

When Dell was called out by Jeff Jarvis and others for its poor customer service (the entire "Dell Hell" debacle), it responded remarkably, not by ignoring social media but by embracing it, by engaging, and by changing it s corporate culture to be much more open and responsive. That approach caused many a p/> [...]

Thu Jan 21, 2010 10:05 am

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Switzerland Drops Legal Hammer on Google Street View

What flies in some countries won't in others.

That's the lesson Google is learning from its latest struggle with Switzerland, which is suing the search engine over its Street View feature in Google Maps, which provides 360° horizontal and 290° vertical panoramic street-level views of 100-plus cities all over the world:

When people sit at their computer or log into their Google account from their smartphone, they tend to marvel at Street View when they use it to look at ground floor footage of a city.

But that includes the people who live there and some folks get upset when they see pictures of themselves, which are shot from cameras attached to Google-sanctioned cars, or even trikes.

This is what has upset Hanspeter Thuer, the Swiss Data Protection Authority commissioner. He wants Google to ensure that all faces and car plates are blurred and that Google erase images of walled gardens and private streets, among other demands. Thuer said in a statement:

Numerous faces and vehicle number plates are not made sufficiently unrecognizable from the point of view of data protection, especially where the persons concerned are shown in sensitive locations, e.g. outside hospitals, prisons or schools.

He said Google failed to comply with requests he made in August for the company to be more vigilant about protecting the privacy of Swiss people. Now, he is suing Google, a first for the search engine over Street View, which has ruffled feathers in Japan, Greece, Germmany and elsewhere.

In the meantime, Thuer wants Google to erase all pictures taken in Switzerland and to cease taking a/> [...]

Sat Nov 14, 2009 16:15 pm

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Terracotta: A Picture of the Changing Database Market

Terracotta and companies in the new world of distributed data environments have an increasingly important role in the cloud computing universe.

Simply due to the fact that they are forcing more change in the database market then we have seen in the past 20 years.

Terracotta is a case in point. Today, the company announced its new version of Ehcache, which can store a terabyte of data and 100 million objects in a single cache.

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Terracotta says the new capability is ready out of the box and does not require changes to the application code. It can be turned on with two lines of configuration.

Significant is the flexibility that the service provides. Java applications of any size can now be served in memory.

This offers enterprises an option. It means a database does not have to be over provisioned in order to manage large scale application deployments.

Terracotta's Ehcache 2.2 represents a trend that we are seeing as more companies seek to establish a foothold in the market by offering distributed database services. The company competes with the likes of Oracle.

Terracotta, started in 2003, specializes in scaling Java environments. The company acquired Ehcache last summer. Ehcache has traditionally held the spot as the most popular open source Java cache library.

Data scales in the cloud /> [...]

Tue Jul 20, 2010 18:10 pm

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Cartoon: Wi No Fi?

OSCON has wrapped in sunny Portland, and with it the most ambitious conference wireless networking I've ever seen. Yet even here I heard attendees complaining about sluggish Wi-Fi... and organizers asking them not to download large files.

Now, there's little question that OSCON is an edge case. Get a few thousand developers and software engineers together and you're going to strain the bandwidth.

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But every conference I've been to - every single one in the last four or five years - has had issues with Wi-Fi. And for that matter, nearly every hotel I've stayed at has also had issues with Wi-Fi. And I sometimes wonder if the issue is often less one of conference overload than one of facilities that invest as little as they need to to be able to say they offer Wi-Fi.

Then again, every conference and hotel I've been to has had at least one person who insists on downloading an OS upgrade or a movie to watch on the plane home. That would be, um, me.

The question is, when does conference Wi-Fi stop being about just checking email and maybe sharing some notes, and start being about allowing people to continue doing the heavy wireless lifting they do at home and at the office? Ever?

More Noise to Signal.

Discuss

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Sun Jul 25, 2010 13:10 pm

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