Pervasive's Integration World Europe 2012

I was at Integration World Europe 2012 today, organised by Pervasive at the Cumberland hotel in London.
A nice environment and a party of a hundred plus, today's topics were Big Data, Data Integration, Cloud and Strategic Business Solutions.
Clear divisions were made on Cloud: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and public, private, community and hybrid

Shawn Rogers from Enterprise Management Associates showed an extensive amount of tips and tricks on how to make sure you get the Cloud solution you need, being honest about the small print. The 50-page report he squeezed into one presentation showed many insights, and I'll certainly study it

Wanted dead or alive: any Facebook user, $ 125 reward

With the upcoming IPO of Facebook this week, I got a little worried. I told a few people "Mark my words, this IPO is going to blow the Social Media bubble once and for all" and even "Wouldn't be surprised if FB's IPO is going to start the final leg of this crisis and finish everything off".
A bit gloomy, I admit. But I really need to get something off my chest here: you could put a value on people, but not in this context, and certainly not at a price like this

Amounts have been predicted as low (yes, "low") as $ 10 billion, and as high as $ 100 billion for Facebook's IPO. At their claimed amount of 800 million users, who miraculously seem to be logging on every second day at the least, that would mean at least $ 12.5 per user, at maximum $ 125.
A maximum amount of one hundred and twenty five dollars per Facebook user, dead or alive - would you offer such a ridiculous amount of money if it were your own? Of course not

How Klout could make Twitter a better place

I've written my fair share of posts on Klout. 1.5 years ago I started off with a mild post called "Why I have doubt about @Klout"

At the beginning of that I stated

First of all, I highly appreciate the service

- and I ended with

11 extra Klout points in 12 days on the one hand comforts me, and on the other makes me think about the stability and value of it all...

Since then, I've become increasingly weary of the product, especially because of the consistently incosnsistent quality of the product, its lack of service, and its continuous drumming on the marketing machine nonetheless - no wonder 2.5 million people instantly killed their Klout profile as soon as they finally got the chance to do so

Today, I present a way for Klout to actually create some goodwill on Twitter

tibbr 3.5 turns the world into interactive post-its

Tibbr released version 3.5 to the public today in Palo Alto California, 9 AM Pacific time. I got a solo preview yesterday and I was impressed by it - as usual I'd say.
"In twelve months since launch, tibbr has been deployed to hundreds of thousands of employees across global enterprises, who can now use tibbr to unify people, data and businesses processes to get work done"

A clear message: ...to get work done. In my opinion, tibbr dramatically reduces unnecessary human intervention in the workplace, thereby making work less unpleasant while freeing up resources for the really interesting work.
Not the greatest nor shortest sales pitch - but then I'm not selling anything here

Apple margin per device - expressed in Chinese

[Image by Sven Teschke]

An article in the New York Times published 2 days ago suddenly gained a lot of traction and got discussed, reposted and reblogged today: Apple making money off of the United States, while directly employing "only" twice as many employees in the US than overseas - but indirectly more than ten times those combined, none of which in the US

I've published on Apple's revenue and profit a few times now, last of which was two months ago. A historical year for Apple: it surpassed Google on profit per employee - operating profit so before taxes, by the way

Airline ticket pricing: ticket prices compared

After yesterday's post, some wanted to know "the best" flights / airline, regardless of surcharge(s). Fair enough, that probably means the cheapest ones, so I dove in again and came up with the following data (I calculated my own surcharge based on the experience I now have, so prices will differ from what you can find yourself)

(Like yesterday, I took a round-trip from New York to Amsterdam and back, leaving 21st of March and returning 4th of April. I compared both Economy as Business)

Airline ticket pricing: surcharges compared

Lots of regulations and restrictions have been enforced in Europe, and some other parts of the world, to "keep airplane tickets transparent".
You must know from your own situation or someone else's how that too-good-to-be-true 200 dollar one-week trip to the sun turned out to be 550 after all extra charges (that applied to your particular situation of course!) got slapped on, only to find out that airport bagage rules and local customs had to get their share of the pie too. Oh well, so it cost 700 dollars in stead, but it sure was fun, wasn't it?

Damn right it was - for them

The evangalyst: preaching to the converted

There are definite signs of evolution in social media. Where I saw some issues around mainstream adoption over a year ago, I can now rest assured.
Dozens of "priests and monks" have arisen all over the world to further aid the conversion towards social; Social Business now is the way to go and according to most InfoGraphics over 3/4 of all businesses all over the globe have either implemented social media or are very happy with it, or both

Do uneducated vote conservative - in the USA?

My last post of the year was about the correlation between conservatism and education. I took the results per state of the US 2008 election, showing the margin percentage for Obama, and related that to total education spend per state

The outcome was astonishing: all but 3 states fit perfectly into the newly found rule. The odd ones out were Sarah Palin's state, Dick Cheney's state, and Louisiana. However, Pat McGuinness slapped me on the wrist 4 times in a row, assuming his ass off, calling me ignorant and prejudiced, and spreading dumb and unsupported rumours. So here's my answer.
The data in the table above is based on data from the National Center of Education Statistics and shows actual education level in 2006-8