EnjoyTech

I had discussion with Jim Fowler, the CEO of JigSaw , a couple of weeks back where he walked me through their new offering, Data Fusion , that JigSaw announced today . Data Fusion is a data-as-a-service offering that allows Salesforce.com customers to buy a large list of prospects with detailed verified contact information provided by JigSaw. There are plenty of legal and ethical issues around how JigSaw acquires the business contact information. Michael Arrington does not like JigSaw and Rafe Needleman calls it one of the creepiest products that he has ever seen. I don't want to argue about these ethical and legal aspects. I would let the other people, users, and customers sort that out. I find the idea of acquiring such a list to pre-seed a CRM instance with the vetted data is an interesting one that utilizes data-as-a-service. A pre-seeded CRM instance speeds up the adoption of the tool inside an organization since suddenly sales people start seeing value in the tool and are

A recent paper by Mike Stonebraker and others compared relational and columnar database in a parallel configuration with MapReduce . The paper concludes that MapReduce is an easy to configure and easy to use option where as the other data stores, relational and columnar databases, pay the upfront price of organizing the data but outperform MapReduce in the runtime performance. This study does highlight the fact that a chosen option does not necessarily dictate or limit the scale as long as the other attributes such as an effective parallelism algorithm, B-tree indices, main-memory computation, compression etc. can help achieve the desired scale. The real issue, which is not being addressed, is that even if the chosen approach does not limit the scale it still significantly impacts the design-time decisions that developers and architects have to make. These upfront decisions limit the functionality of the applications built on these data store and reduces the overall design-agility of t

Amazon's design tweaks to its review system has resulted into $2.7 billion of new revenue argues Jared Spool. Other people have also picked up this story with their analysis . I am wary of absolute revenue numbers tied to a feature to derive lost opportunity cost since a variety of other things could have driven the sale. It is wrong to assume that people would not have bought the products had the feature not existed. However I do believe it is a great step in the direction of making the review system more useful and drive more clickthroughs and conversions. Simply the presence of the reviews, magic number 20 in this case , motivates consumers to drill down into the details of a product and its reviews. Amazon has made significant progress in collaborative filtering through their review system and it is an exemplary of a long tail business model. It has helped consumers to gain transparency and has also helped expose issues with the products. This is not enough. As an e-commerce m

I was at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco last week. It was not very different from the previous year except that I could see the impact of slow economy - shrinking attendance, less crowded booths, and "Hire Me" ribbons . Tim O'Reilly's keynote was interesting. He said that Web 2.0 was never about the version number (read, he does not like people calling Web 3.0 a successor of Web 2.0). He had the equation Web 2.0 + World = Web Squared. I changed it to Web 2.0 + Cloud = Web 2 . The cloud seems more appropriate and the superscript is much cooler. If this catches on, remember, you read it here first! The biggest shift that I have observed in Web 2.0 is the exponential growth of social media. This was evident at the Web 2.0 expo by looking at the number of participating social computing companies. Web 2.0 is certainly taking the direction of social computing. Tim mentioned in his keynote that the immense data gathered by the sensors and other means have hidden meanin