Tag: You’re IT — Meet David Berkowitz!

We tagged David Berkowitz this week!

1. David, when did you first discover your love for technology?
One of my earliest memories of really embracing technology was when I wrote my first book report in first grade on Stuart Little. My family had our first PC (my brother already had an Apple IIe), and I learned how to use the thesaurus on Wordperfect. I never turned back. Typing had a great impact on me too, allowing me to get thoughts on paper much faster than I could write them, so even in the early 80s I seemed to be itching to be a blogger.

2. How do you earn a living?
It isn’t by blogging. I’m Director of Emerging Media and Client Strategy at 360i, the digital marketing agency, where I help big brands with their social media and mobile strategies.

3. What keeps you up at night?
I sleep pretty well, thanks. What really keeps me up though is information overload.

4. What do you do when you’re not working?
I’m relatively recently married (still within the first year) and my wife and I love to travel. During the summer it’s fun exploring various parts of New York City, where I live. I like to catch movies, I read a good amount, and thanks to the DVR I manage to watch a lot of TV (my latest ‘discovery’: Californication - can’t wait for the next season).

5. You’ve looked in your crystal ball and have seen the future of enterprise IT. What does it look like?
It’s a big, white, puffly cloud. Not the cumulo nimbus kind. This is a very happy cloud, the cottony kind.

Bonus Question: If Stephen Spielberg was going to make a movie about your life, what would it be called?
Bloggers of the Lost Ark? No… Saving Private Berkowitz… no, that’s not it either. Here it is - I’d actually title the film by the screen name I used on the dating site when I met my wife: “Google This.”

Overheard: A good SOA architect is like an expensive wedding planner

Like a high-dollar wedding planner, an SOA architect can spare you mistakes and embarrassments while making the big event relatively painless, mostly by eliminating any unforeseen and unwanted surprises. Pam Baker, Best Reuse Plays in SOA

I laughed out loud when I read this analogy, picturing the CEO as Bridezilla and the rest of the executive board as the wedding party. Coincidently, Jason Bloomberg, over at SearchSOA.com, was just explaining that there’s a shortage of good SOA consultants right now.

Overheard: SOA - how do you measure success?

Combining both the Service-oriented Vitality Index and the SoROI provides a much clearer picture of a company’s SOA health. The Service-oriented Vitality Index, or SoVI, is the ratio of revenue generated from a service (or services) over the last 12 months as compared with all other existing SOA revenue… The SoROI is the cumulative before tax profits over “N” number of years from SOA-driven products divided by the cumulative product expenditures for that same period. Jerry Smith, 10 Measures for Successful SOA Implementations

Jerry Smith does a nice job breaking down some of the issues involved in making a business case for SOA. How do you measure success? And how do you get everyone to agree on the metrics? Jerry suggests there are ten ways you can measure success. All of them make sense to me except for SoVI. I need to go read more about SoVI and SoROI. Are they legitimate metrics or are they just biz-tech voodoo?

Overheard: Desktop Apps from the Web

Just when everyone was expecting that all our software and services would move completely into the browser and off the desktop, a movement begins to bring services out of the browser and back onto the desktop. Aseem Kishore, Web apps on your desktop

Pritesh Desai also does a really good job cutting through the clutter and explaining exactly what you’re getting with Mozilla Prism.

Prism lets you create an web app for any web page by downloading a small extension called Prism. Then to make a web app simply go to that web page and then select Tools>Make a web app. Prism is more or less like creating a shortcut pointing to a url on Internet.

My first thought was “Who would want to use Prism?” Then it occurred to me that Prism would be very useful for low-tech desktop management. It would be a fairly easy way for network admins in elementary education, for instance, to provide access to particular web sites without giving students access to the entire Internet.

Overheard: Gzip your website

Gzip is a method of compressing text that is sent from your server to the browser. In the same way that zipping a file reduces its download size, gzipping a webpage decreases the amount of data that has to be downloaded. A smaller download size means faster download speeds. corbyboy, Optimise Your Pages for Faster Load Time

Overheard: How do you spell spam? K-N-O-L

The end result is that it is not a matter of if Knol will be spammed, but when it will happen and what form it will it take. Will it be SEO spammers using it to kick competitors out of the rankings? Will human plagiarists use the Adsense system to submit lifted content for the promise of high search results and ad revenue? Or will it be something else altogether? Jonathan Bailey, Google Knol: The Future of Spam

Overheard: Cuil will soon be a verb that nobody knows how to pronounce

The search engine’s launch was such a spectacular flameout that it may well go down as a verb. “What happened to that Eddie Murphy movie that was supposed to win him an Oscar?” “It came and went — it got totally Cuiled.” David Berkowitz, Do We Need Another…

There was tons of buzz this week — both in the media and in the office — about Cuil. The new search engine promised to index more sites than Google and it had some big industry names behind it. Everyone got all excited, hoping that Google finally had a real competitor. So what went wrong after the big reveal?

The engine works — it’s just not Google. And remember, Google is the supreme ruler. We build out sites for Google. We live and die by changes in the Google algorithm. Competing with Google is serious business. Literally.

Here’s how I knew that Cuil had disappointed and was already being dismissed. It hasn’t even been a week and there are already Cuil jokes.

Think about it. Have you ever in your whole entire life heard a Google joke?

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P.S.

David Berkowitz’s quote made me laugh, but the thing I REALLY wondered when I heard about Cuil was this — what the heck were these brilliant people thinking when they named their engine Cuil?

NEW RULE: Never name your product something you need to tell people how to pronounce. For those of you new to the buzz-swarm, the word cuil is gaelic for knowledge and it’s pronounced “cool.”

Overheard: Justin Gehtland and continuous integration

All development teams (read: more than one programmer) have to deal with integration builds. This is where you pull together all the bits and pieces that the different team members were working on, and check to see if you have a fully functioning product or a Frankenstein’s monster. Justin Gehtland, Continuous Integration with CruiseControl.NET and Draco.NET

Justin Gehtland is great teacher. (That’s my highest compliment!)

Overheard: Jack Kelley designed the first mouse pad

Jack Kelley designed the world’s first mouse pad in 1969, when he worked at the Stanford Research Institute with Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the world’s first computer mouse. Kelley went on to work for Herman Miller Designs, where he and Robert Propst designed The Action Office System, the first flexible, modular office space.  We know Kelley and Propst’s design as the office cubicle.

Overheard: UMPC is ‘out’ - MID is ‘in’

Intel began to deemphasize the term UMPC in the Spring of 2008 and now prefers talking about “MID,” the Mobile Internet Device. Most of Intel-based MIDs currently under development are merely a better realization of the original UMPC concept. UMPC.com website

MIDs aren’t tied to a Microsoft OS, either.