Integration is the new Operation - this decade and next

I gave a presentation the other day that is a very short version of my Integration book. As usual, that forced me to compact thoughts and ideas, and craft a new visual - see above.
I've used that already in a post the other day, but that didn't pay proper attention to it

I'm a bit tired of all the use of the word integrated and integration over the last few weeks and months. I would like to say: "You keep using that word. I think it does not mean what you think it means"

Consumer and enterprise IT company analysis

In January this year I did an analysis of "classical" US IT companies: Google, Microsoft and Apple, which are targeting consumers, and Oracle, SAP, IBM and HP, which are targeting companies.
Yes that's a fairly big generalisation but please allow me to do so...

This is the update which includes the next year, I need to find a good moment to do so because they have different book years and being US-based or European also means different publication dates for the same results.
Anyway, I took revenue and operating profit (also known as operating income, earnings from operations, income from operations, income before income taxes), and here are the absolute figures for "GMA":

Asphalt that controls traffic type and flow?

This weekend I attended the SAP Inside track NL event, held at Ciber HQ in Eindhoven. The event was great, and I really enjoyed it but would have loved to stay longer and gotten more involved.
What has followed are great conversations and discussions, new people to follow on Twitter and elsewhere, and lots of topics to talk about

One of the inputs for that is the presentation I gave at #sitNL

Flout.me is fun, but should be flogged and reported

I did what I guess most of you did when you saw the first entry of flout.me in your Twitter timeline: frown. Then I saw another one. And another one. And smiled. I clicked the URL, authorised the app, then laughed out loud

Looks familiar? Well, there's more to it than that: Flout is a Klout superstar!

An Occupy miscarriage conspiracy theory? Please, don't

Jennifer Fox is the name of the Seattle Occupy protester whose video and words have gone viral in the last 2 days, claiming police pepper spray and physical abuse led her to miscarry her 3 months old foetus

When I read about it, the images shocked me: a deeply hurt Fox seems to be fighting a dozen emotions at the same time: pepper spray, pain, worries about her baby, shock, you name it.
However, the dozen or so blog posts and news paper articles I read left me with questions. The major one of those was about how they possibly could lose verification out of sight in their hurry to be sucked along into the publish stream of yet another SEO hype. Bloggers, journalists: the majority of you should be very, very ashamed for spinelessly republishing a major news story without asking any questions or performing any checks

Once bitten, twice shy? Klout scores get clouted again

Almost 1.5 years ago I showed how very, very flawed Klout's actually is. I made some nice screenshots and illustrated how Klout's scoring is statistically impossible, and how they magically manage to present you with two scores at the same time.
Today, history repeats itself, proving that Klout is still just as immature a product as they were in June 2010. Apparently, some need to fail more than once in order to learn something

The initial KloutoCalypse: how big is it?

In my last post I showed how to remove your Klout profile from the public eye, without waiting for Klout to take 24-48 hours to do so. As I get impatient every now and then, I decided to take the first 500 tweets containing Klout and delete after I published it. I ignored all the tweets that said something like "Gee I wish I could delete my Klout profile" and only kept those that showed knowledge of being able to delete their Klout account with a few simple clicks.

Out of the 500 tweets, 337 remained. I filtered those for unique users, and stuck to 293 (sorry, said 296 before) unique Twitter users who knew how to delete their Klout profile.
For every single one of those, I checked their Klout profile to see if it still existed.

Completely drop your Klout account in 30 seconds

Well, the day has finally come. Since today, Klout allows you to delete the profile they (or you) created on you.
In my case, that means I'll first have to sign up for klout, as they created my account all by themselves - but I'm happy to go through that little PITA

Here's how to delete your account:

My first anniversary

Today, it's been exactly one year since I became self-employed.
I've loved almost every second of it - while the start was hard, the middle and end were absolutely great

The market is still going up and down so I've had quite a few days without paid work, but used those to work on my business, network, future clients and assignments, and the apps and websites I'm working on

After one year, I've made a few times what I used to earn so the future looks bright. I treated our family to our most expensive vacation ever as successes have got to be celebrated, and conveniently that concluded my first year

Why I'm using fake identities to sign up

That is, from now on I will. It is not only getting harder to sign up, it is also getting harder to sign in, and out. Let me explain please as this story has a few sides to it.
But first, let me make my point: I'm going to use fake identities to sign up for new services. If I like the new service, I'll abandon the fake identity and sign up with a real one

Will that mean I'll be lying when accepting most ToS?