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Showing posts from March, 2011

Amazon - Diapers, Soap and Cloud Computing

When you hear of Amazon what do you usually think of? Place to buy Books, vacuum cleaner, diapers or laptops that can be shipped directly to your home. Plain vanilla, boring e-commerce...... however nothing could be farther from the truth. Amazon over the years has built itself into an obvious e-commerce behemoth which sells shoes to clothes to computers. But not so obviously Amazon has built a mind boggling technology capability with the ability to execute across hardware, software and consumer electronics platforms. 3 years ago, it would have been difficult to believe that Amazon would produce the biggest selling e-reader in history. But with Kindle, Amazon created a top of the line e-reader - a network device with the ability to download content using an always on data connection. It was unprecedented and showed how a network device of the future would behave. Similarly on the enterprise side of things, Amazon was a pioneer in offering commercial cloud computing

Has real-time data killed reliable data?

My Facebook newsfeed never looks the same, it is constantly changing and I am not talking about new posts getting added, it just keeps showing different posts ordered based on some weird Facebook logic. So slowly but surely I have stopped depending on Facebook posts, or tweets as information. People are often posting something, deleting it, editing it and so on. On top of that Facebook/Twitter keeps messing with the ordering and visibility of the posts...sometimes I see all posts by my friends, sometimes I don't. Just a single refresh could change the order and visibility of the posts. It is just not Facebook newsfeed that has this inconsistency problem,  I am the admin of the Picksie Fan page on Facebook - every 2 minutes the number of fans keep changing for no apparent reason without anyone added or removed. Similarly in Twitter, the number of twitter followers, number of tweets or the number of people I am following keeps changing so randomly that I have stopped trying to