- Latest News
- Comment & Metrics
- Magazine Articles
- Jason Stamper's Blog
- Open Source Blog
- Newsletter Sign-Up
Jason Stamper's Blog: March 2006 Archives
Even Channel 4's Jon Snow agrees I'm overworked
March 31, 2006
Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow says us journalists who also have blogs are overworked - or words to that effect.
"There's no question of the added value of the material that you get involved in - blogging, podding and so on are an extension of the day job," he said, according to journalism.co.uk. "But it is very easy to stack up an enormous amount of activity that then begins to erode what you can actually do. You then stop being a journalist and start simply being a transmitter."
I couldn't agree more - as I wrote here, it's easy to spend increasing amounts of time blogging, at the risk of taking your eye off journalism, which in my case is my primary role as editor of Computer Business Review (CBR) magazine, and a writer of sister publication ComputerWire's daily news.
"People in the media who have got to know about a particular area and who blog are encouraged by their employers to do as much as possible," said Snow. Tell me about it. No, literally - tell me about your life as a blogger and how much time you spend blogging (possibly to the detriment of other activities?) by hitting the 'Comment' button below. Love to hear from you.
Then again, isn't it also true that the line between being a blogger and a journalist is becoming less and less clear?
Why public tech firms are going private
March 30, 2006
Anyone following the technology industry of late will have started to notice a new trend, and for once I'm not talking about yet another three-letter acronym to join the likes of SOA, BPM and ROI. We're increasingly seeing publicly traded technology companies spurn the markets and return to private ownership.
But what's driving the trend, and what does it mean for technology buyers? I decided to jot down some thoughts, spurred on by a meeting with the CEO of Serena Software, which went private in a $1.2bn deal led by Silver Lake Partners on November 13 last year.
In fact you would be forgiven for thinking that the latest trend for mature technology companies to buyout their shareholders and return to private ownership could be explained by those three words: Silver Lake Partners, or SLP. Whoops - seems I am talking about a three-letter acronym after all.
Silver Lake Partners is the private equity firm that has blazed a trail in returning companies to private ownership, a service perhaps best exemplified by their $11.6bn deal to take data-management software and services vendor SunGard Data Systems private. Not only was that the largest leveraged technology vendor buyout yet; it was also the third largest leveraged buyout in any sector.
What's up with the Web Services stack?
March 24, 2006
Something odd seems to be going on in the upper layers of the Web Services stack, in that band of specifications that are either immature standards, or not yet at the standards stage. I'm talking about WS-* specifications, that include WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Security and more.
While there was relatively rapid consensus on the value of tried-and-tested standards at the lower end of the web services stack, where the likes of XML, SOAP and WSDL can get people on the road to a web services development approach, at the more abstracted WS-* level there still seems to be a lot of wrangling going on.
85% of IT Project Failures "Actually Rather Good": New Research
March 17, 2006
March 16: London, England -- New research just out has found that in a study of 73 failed IT projects, only 11 of them, or 15%, actually failed. The remaining 62 projects were described by respondents in the study as "actually rather good" (65%), "not as bad as it could have been" (23%), and "a darn site better than the last project we attempted" (12%).
Writely or wrongly, Google buys Upstartle
March 10, 2006
Finally putting meat on the bones of those long-held rumours that Google would come out with some sort of web-based office applications suite, Google quietly revealed that it has bought Upstartle, a beta-stage Silicon Valley firm that was on course to release a word processing software service that can be used via the web.
So at least one Goomour - the new term for a rumour about Google - looks set to come to fruition. I and others mulled over the idea of a Google office suite in September last year, and a lot of people said it was a crazy notion. Not so crazy, it seems.
Upstartle was six months into a public beta test of Writely.com, which billed itself as “The Web Word Processor”, offering users the ability to upload or create documents and edit them with a familiar WYSIWYG interface. The most obvious place to start speculating is where this places Google competitively against Microsoft. Could a move to web-based word processing eat into sales of Office, one of Microsoft’s biggest cash cows, for example?
Read CBR's full take on the news here.
If babies were like software…
March 08, 2006
PRESS RELEASE...PRESS RELEASE...PRESS RELEASE...PRESS RELEASE
**Release under embargo for first three months of pregnancy**
LONDON, March 8, 2006 -- Mr. and Mrs. Smith Ltd, a UK-based start-up in the human life-form market, today announced the release of Tommy Smith Junior Version 1.0, with a wide range of usability and integration enhancements as well as the ability to act as the central platform for a Baby Oriented Architecture (BOA) rollout.
back to top