Here's a colorful story I stumbled into on Diplomatic Traffic bashing France's Jacques Chirac for the failure of Quaero, which I've written about previously and characterized as the Airbus of Search. Germany's recent bail-out from the Quaero project, detailed in an excellent
One of our field consultants, Matt Turner, has started a blog called Discovering XQuery. Since Matt is often in demand and spends lots of time working on customer engagements, he hasn't found the time to do many posts, but the ones he has done are quite good. So
I had dinner a few weeks back in Boston with the folks from Harvard Business School Publishing (HBSP). The restaurant, Mare, had the absolutely unique positioning of "organic, coastal Italian." (Try the spaghettoni and the bread pudding.) The wine list was super but they lacked cocktails, presumably a
I was on a sales call in the UK recently, where we had a telling interchange with a prospective customer (PC). It went something like this. PC: "So tell me what problems other publishers are solving with MarkLogic?" ML: We described how our customers repurpose content, build custom
Here's a cute little site I found a while back on John Battelle's Searchblog. It's called givemebackmygoogle.com and its slogan is "Google results without all the annoying affiliate links." It uses Google to achieve its results and simple transforms your search
I’m going to start applying a test to new prospective customers outside Mark Logic’s core publishing and government markets. In the middle of a conversation with a senior business person I’ll stop and say something like: "Well, you know that many leading publishers trust their content
It's a darn shame what's happened to stock options. When I first started in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, stock options were seen as a real innovation, a creative way to align employees with shareholders, a way to help employees particpate in the value they were
If you somehow haven't heard, Google today announced that it will acquire YouTube in a stock transaction worth $1.65B. The official press release is here. The New York Times has an excellent article on the transaction. I've pulled a few excerpts related to YouTube (and
I recently ran across a cool (sister, Sequoia-backed) company, called Port Authority Technologies, that sells information leak protection solutions. They sell an appliance that sits next to your firewall and looks, at a network level, for content that's getting sent outside that shouldn't be. What kind
Here's a post where O'Reilly's Dale Dougherty writes about a talk at EuroOSCON by Greg Stein, of Google Code, where Stein talks about building a bug-tracking system. Traditional applications have been built on a traditional database view. That view requires that everything be decomposed
I found this excellent post, entitled Top Ten Geek Business Myths, on Ron Garret (formerly, Erann Gat's) blog today. Garret worked early on at Google, wrote for Xooglers (which appears defunct), and has become a venture capitalist. Here are his ten myths: 1. A brilliant idea will make
Those over 40 probably recall the movie Animal House, the fictitious Faber College at which it is set, and the college's motivational slogan, Knowledge is Good, which I'll use as the theme for today's post. First off, let's address the semantic one-upmanship
