Personal Technology

What’s Blackberry Up To?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 30, 2011 / Leave a comment

Blackberry announced a new product yesterday, Mobile Fusion. It is basically an update to the Blackberry Enterprise Server that has long been a dominant player in enterprise IT, but with a new twist: compatibility. In addition to managing blackberries, the software will also be able to manage Android and iOS...
Not Too Late For Microsoft to Stay Relevant?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 25, 2011 / Leave a comment

The world is moving away from Windows as we know it. Cloud based technologies will make for thinner and thinner personal computers (in technical terms a “thin” computer is one that doesn’t have a lot of computer power or storage). Most of the technical community assumes that this means the...
Time to Clean Up the Amount of Cloud Washing

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 23, 2011 / Leave a comment

When I was with IBM, we used to have a term called, “Blue Washing”. The term referred to taking a software product from a new acquisition and slapping the IBM logo all over it to make it in to a new product. The product usually was mostly unchanged and not...
The Future of Media is Here, When’s The Past Going Away?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 27, 2011 / Leave a comment

Lately I’ve seen several articles that lump all the media industries together (Books, Newspapers, Magazines, Music, TV, Movies) and discuss their impending doom. The story goes that the era of commissioning, creating, publicizing, distribution, selling is coming to an end. In this post Mainstream Media world creation will be accomplished by...
Applying Innovation to the Past Before the Future

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 21, 2011 / Leave a comment

My colleague, Sheppard Narkier wrote a great post on my company’s blog today. The overall concept is that when new innovations come around they often enable us to automate or get rid of deeply engrained tasks that may not be obvious. Once we’ve done that, we’re free to use the...
iOS5 vs. Android Ice Cream Sandwich

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 20, 2011 / Leave a comment

We’ve got new releases of both the Android and Apple mobile operating systems so everyone is forced to ask… “Who’s ahead?” As always, it’s not a simple question to answer. The interesting part about the Android vs. Apple discussion will always (or at least the next few years) be that their design...
Visualizing Data

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 19, 2011 / Leave a comment

I have had a post in my “ideas that need to be noodled” hopper for about a month with the heading “Visualizing Data”. I woke up this morning and found that Seth Godin had just written half the post. I particularly like his point about data visualization being especially necessary...
User Friendly & Stranger Friendly

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 13, 2011 / Leave a comment

I was having a conversation yesterday with one of the design/UI guys at my company (the guy behind our awesome website) about one of the products we are creating and he raised what I thought was an interesting point. He asked whether we were trying to make the product “user...
Netflix Hitting Cntrl Z

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 10, 2011 / 1 Comment

I am having a hard time processing the news this morning that Netflix is undoing their move to spin off the DVD rental business as Qwikster, explaining that they were moving too quickly. While I agree that they may have moved too quickly to split Qwikster and Netflix, I think...
On Respecting Steve Jobs

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 6, 2011 / Leave a comment

Note: I wasn’t going to do a Steve Jobs post. I have another post prepared about the protesters on Wall Street that’s far more interesting and informative. At the same time, I feel like every technology focused blog owes him a post of some sort today, so here is mine....