FREE: The Future of Intense Irony
@audible_com please can you do more to convince your audio book publishers that you are an internet company, and by definition operating in a global marketplace.
Does Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) know that FREE is not FREE (contrary to his intent I believe), but it is completely UNAVAILABLE in the audio form for large parts of the world. What is this crap!
As @jason says "We LOVE audible", but the love get a little tougher when we get dissed and discriminated by @audible_com based on where we live.
Free offers to people following @audible_com? Great PR you would think...
.. but that turns into real bummer for a lot of us - actively poisonous PR. Couldn't you simply check to make sure that any freebie you want to offer is one that you can do globally?
Bah humbug!
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Trending Groceries #cider
You know when your local supermarkets and shops never stock one of your favourite things?
But you search the shelves on every visit anyway (just in case).
And when you do find it (even though you weren't really expecting to) you just have to buy it.
And you hope that somewhere back in the warehouse an alarm went off, and the clerks are leaping into action..
Smithers, we're spiking on sales of X. Hurry man, there's no time to waste: Reorder! Replenish! We must never go out of stock again.Rationally, your "consumer activism" is hardly a blip on the radar/grain of sand in the Sahara. But maybe it's more like tweeting to your grocery manager, and hoping you'll kick off a "trending groceries" list to get their attention.
Well, I thought I'd start a list of my own "trending groceries". Today: cider..
#1: #cider
So rare to find in Singapore. For the past few years I've been unconsciously checking on every visit to my local NTUC Fairprice.And then one fortuitous day I found a Pipsqueak 4-pack sitting on the shelf like a poor orphan. I had to adopt it of course, and have been back every week to save more of of it's brothers and sisters.
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Information, Knowledge, Wisdom ..
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best...
Frank Zappa (Lyrics to the song Packard Goose on the album Joe's Garage: Act III.)
Most consulting firms have a version of the "Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom" point of view, but I've never seen any of them credit Zappa;-)
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Launched: CloudJetty - a community guide to the latest "cloud" services and applications on the web
Time to drop the cloak of stealth from a new web application I've had in production for the past month or two..
CloudJetty is a site born from my own frustration in trying to find out what was really available in terms of business applications and services delivered "in the cloud". How do you find what is available, and how do you know what is trustworthy? That's what CloudJetty is for.
..a community-maintained buyers' guide to the latest "cloud" services and applications on the web, many for free or a nominal monthly subscription.
This is my open invitation for all to check out the site and help it grow..
- It is still early days, but the first step is just to take it for a test drive! Looking for an invoicing solution for your business? Take your pick. CRM? Of course. Personal backup solutions? Yep. Did you know you can even do BI in the Cloud? You bet.
- I'm looking for your help to grow the service listings. Got a favourite cloud/web app you are already using? If it's already in CloudJetty, add you rating and recommendation. If it's not there, then please feel free to go ahead and add it
- If you are a provider of cloud services and applications, I'm especially keen to get your products listed. Vendors are welcome to add their own listings, provided they go along with the community-wiki rules: no sales hype; and accept that your listings can be edited by others.
- I have no misconception that CloudJetty is perfect. I'd really like to hear about any problems, comments or suggestions you may have (there is a CloudJetty Google Group for feedback and discussion, or you can follow CloudJetty on twitter)
Do we really need another "Cloud" site?
Honestly, that was the first thing I thought when contemplating CloudJetty. There are lots of sites with news and opinion about Cloud. Twitter is full of cloud !spam! Most vendors worth their salt have got a "cloud" section on their sites. But seriously, I've failed to find much in the way of information for people who don't really want to talk about cloud, they just want to use what works, and avoid what doesn't.
The good news is that there's already an incredible range of services available - think of any personal productivity tool, business application, or infrastructure service, and chances are there's already a cloud service for it (but whether its any good is another question!)
And this is only the beginning. salesforce.com may have fired the first shots in the SaaS war and has forever shaken up the CRM space. And an array of "infrastructure" services (like Amazon EC2) have radically change the economics of a technology startup. But personally I expect in time we'll see these initial waves dwarfed by the mass migration of (especially) small business to cloud/web applications that is only now starting to gain momentum.
Just as this is only the beginning for cloud in general, it's also just the beginning for CloudJetty. Hopefully much more in store for this site .. but let's not run before we can walk, eh?
Technically..
It wouldn't be my tardate blog if I didn't geek out a little and share some of the behind the scenes details. CloudJetty is written in Ruby on Rails (2.3.4) and of course uses a good handful of gems (like vestal_versions, will_paginate, and my own Authlogic_RPX).
Best of all, I can get nice and self-referential. CloudJetty, being a application about the cloud, was built using cloud services, and to find out what cloud services it uses, you can look them up on ... CloudJetty;-)
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