Sinu - Your IT Department

Inspiring Speech on The Bronx and Environmental Injustices

This morning while composing an email which highlighted some of our great subscribers, I was reminded of this great speech by Majora Carter, founder of 'Sustainable South Bronx', a subscriber of Sinu's IT Service.

I would encourage everyone to view this inspirational speech she gave a while ago at TED:

Posted on Sunday, July 20, 2008 at 02:07PM by

Larry Velez in Friends in our Sandbox |

Can scalability go in cycles?

I just finished reading 'Guns, Germs and Steel', it is one of these rare books that changes the way you look at the world. I would put it ahead with 'The World is Flat' and 'The Big Switch' in regards to its importance in my understanding of the world.

In GGS, Jared Diamond mentions a few isolated cases when a society rejected technology and what I see as 'scalability' in favor of tradition or because of an overly centralized and powerful government with bad ideas. In the book I am reading now, 'The Black Swan', Nassim Taleb touches on a similar point when he discusses what can be seen as scalable and not scalable professions. He mentions doctors, restaurants and bakers as having a well defined limitation on the number of customers/revenue opportunities they can service. On the scalable side, he mentions authors and modern musicians. He goes on to elaborate on some of the winner-takes-all problems with scalable professions where there ends up being very few giants and most of the rest are left out of the rewards.

This reminds me of previously mentioned societies and how they rejected scalability. In one example Japan, after having much experience with gun powder, eliminated guns completely from their society only to be on the losing side of a conflict with armed European powers a few decades later.

In getting into 'Black Swan' thinking of unlikely exceptions to what seem to be rules - I wonder if there is ever a case in business where designing for non-scalability, where rejecting all the things we expect should be a part of "a winning business" (web 2.0, automation, computers, etc) would produce better results. I guess the problem with this is that no one would notice - because the sheer total dollar amounts would not be on top of a list of "large companies" only the profitability, team satisfaction and quality of life measurements could be off the charts - but it would be hard to beat a company like GE or Microsoft in a revenue comparison without designing and executing on the assumption that scale should be attained as its own self-fulfilling goal.

Posted on Monday, July 7, 2008 at 08:25AM by

Larry Velez in Business Technology |

Semantic Lust

Yesterday I read about Twine at Read/Write/Web and was giddy with excitement. For so long I have been waiting for a semantic based wiki solution that we can use to organize, mash and store all the data/knowledge we gather from our subscribers, into a beautiful set of regular reports and real-time dashboards that would help our subscriber companies explore their own companies from an IT perspective - as deeply as they would like.

We are currently accomplishing this using Jotspot. We were a very early adopter of Jotspot and saw great potential - but with limited semantic like tools within JotSpot, we ended up with little ability to report from the data we were putting in. We have been regularly making our sacrifices for the JotSpot/Google gods and have not lost faith - but our eye has started to wander.

When I first saw Freebase, I thought it was the answer to our data organizing needs. How easy to use, how elegant it was... But the more I learned about Freebase, the more it seemed that they were out to start a war with Wikipedia for the source of all knowledge. Wikipedia's fanatical community has kept it difficult to use and this may give Freebase a chance, time will tell. But one thing seems clear - Metaweb has no time to build business tools while chasing this lofty goal. So I was left to continue with my sacrifices and prayers to GoogleJot to relaunch JotSpot as the ultimate semantic tool.

I read about Twine and read the Wired article about them and once again my hopes are lifted. Whether this is the answer to our prayers is yet to be seen. While there are hints that they want to build a business friendly tool (privacy, AD integration, etc) - we'll see how they unravel.

All this metathinking has me wondering what the UI options for our mythical knowledge tool might be.

I wonder if we start with an object and set the type as 'Sinu Subscriber Business Solution' and then add 'hosted in-house' as an additional type/tag - will the UI automatically add a new column option when displaying this object that would summarize the backup health for the object based on data we are collecting from the backup solution in place. This would be a beautiful thing.

In the meantime, I am very happy the wiki is evolving. If you want to understand what it is that is getting all of is Semantic Web groupies excited - watch Tim Berners-Lee explain it.

Posted on Sunday, October 21, 2007 at 08:05AM by

Larry Velez in Friends in our Sandbox |