Hello Fringsters Goodbye Skype
What's The Buzz Darla Baker What's The Buzz Darla Baker

Hello Fringsters Goodbye Skype

I hope fring and skype work this out. It is not good for the users when companies such as Skype don't play well with others. Think "What Would Google Do?" Google wants users to come to their service through any means. Regardless of how we use Skype, Skype is still benefiting from the use.

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Agile Development Lessons from Zynga Farmville
Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker

Agile Development Lessons from Zynga Farmville

He and Amitt also talked about the ability of tying each experience to a point of monetization—at user account creation, users status page and status viewing; but also that the best way is to bring the promotion into the game. He talked specifically about a promotion they ran with FTD where in the game you could buy a virtual boquet; and integrating product placement into the story line yielded he said 3-5x conversion rates. He also was big on two tier currencies; which I understood as a base currency that users mostly earn through time and effort in the game; and a second more mega currency that maps to premium monetization of user actions; and links with more “subscriber” class buyers.

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Techcrunch:  Linus Torvalds:  Google's Nexus One First Mobile Phone I Don't Hate

Techcrunch: Linus Torvalds: Google's Nexus One First Mobile Phone I Don't Hate

I haven't seen the Google Nexus One yet, but I've listened to and read reviews.  From what I've heard, if I were to give up my iPhone, this would be the phone I would choose.  Jeff Jarvis on a recent This Week in Google, however, pointed out that the Google app for the iPhone provides a better user experience than does accessing Google on the Nexus One.

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Citrix vs WMWare:  Citrix Storagelink tips the scales

Citrix vs WMWare: Citrix Storagelink tips the scales

Those of you who regularly work with virtualization technologies know the many frustrations and concerns surrounding providing a proper storage infrastructure for virtualization. In particular, we often spend top dollar for high-end storage arrays from companies such as EMC in order to gain the support and high availability that these arrays offer. However, much of what makes these arrays high-end winds up being wasted in the implementation of these arrays for virtualization.

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Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker

Kevin Rose Presents at the FOWA London 2009 Event - Taking Your Site from One to One Million Users

This presentation by Kevin Rose of Digg.com provides us with fantastic and timely information for how to grow a site and cultivate the community of followers you gain. I have outlined the highlights of his presentation here for easy reference. For further discussion, visit the Tech Cast Talk Discussion Forum Post for this topic.

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Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker Featured, What's The Buzz Darla Baker

Should Pandora use a subscription based business model?

On TWist Episode 16 Jason talked about an idea to have fans of an artist pay a subscription fee to receive news and bonus mp3s from the artist. I am a big fan of Pandora.com. Jason's idea inspired me to start thinking about the possibilities for Pandora and a subscription model. On Pandora, a user creates a custom "radio station" that the user seeds with artists and songs and then trains by giving selections a thumbs up or a thumbs down. In addition, users are offered the ability to bookmark a song or even purchase a song.

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What's The Buzz Darla Baker What's The Buzz Darla Baker

What does it mean for Oracle to buy Sun and Virtual Iron? A play for the Cloud

Last summer I signed up for a developer account with 3Tera in their AppLogic Cloud environment to begin testing it as a a place to move our current managed hosting environment. During that same time, we met with Oracle to discuss licensing Oracle in the 3Tera AppLogic cloud. The guys we spoke with could only think in terms of physical cores for their licensing model. At the end of the conversation, after an hour of extreme frustration, I issued them a very strongly worded challenge to go back to Oracle and figure out a licensing model for virtualization and the cloud or Oracle is going to be left in the dust.

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