Just thirty years ago, innovation in almost any category was measured in years, but today it’s measured in weeks or months. If you were to focus on information technology specifically you could even argue that change can occur in days — and that cycle will continue to accelerate.

But adapting and innovating in IT requires that you have a platform strategy that allows for heterogeneous adoption of technology at each layer of infrastructure. You also need simplified, cost-effective, real-time access to a wide range of partners and solution providers, otherwise known as your technology ecosystem. This group of providers will be a veritable marketplace of vendors that are proprietary and open source, but whom together create a combination of technologies and services that allow the buyer to mix and match for any solution requirement.

The technology ecosystem has always been important. Even in the days when a minority of companies had a single mainframe, you still needed parts, skills, power, data centers, tools, and ideas, etc. But that ecosystem was smaller and moved more slowly. The technology ecosystems of the 60s through the 90s tended to change over months or years, and our systems from then were more likely to be from a small handful of vendors. This simplified provider environment reduced dependence on an ecosystem of otherwise unrelated partners and vendors, but guaranteed your dependence on the one.

That was then, this is now.

The difference today, and going forward, is that technology is rapidly moving to a much more agile adoption, development, operating and use model. Buyers today can identify and use cloud-based infrastructure or obtain a few licenses of a Software-as-a-Service delivered application in a matter of hours. Aside from cloud-based services, there are virtual platforms, appliances, internally developed applications and myriad customer devices that all need to interact, but can change almost overnight.

Some would argue that the sheer complexity of the ecosystem today screams for CIOs to try to create homogenous infrastructure environments. However, the very fact that we’re making IT solutions more portable and readily adaptable means that we must plan for the ability to support multi-vendor solutions at any layer of the technical infrastructure, from the CPU, through to platform as a service.

The rapid delivery of new solutions means that companies will no longer wait patiently for “their” provider to catch up to major innovation leaps. The only way to stay in front of your competition is to grease the technical infrastructure skids with strong management platforms and clear adoption, ownership, and orchestration strategies.

Many software, cloud, and hardware providers in today’s market would argue that they offer a strong ecosystem of partners, but I think the future ecosystem will be as open as possible and also offer the customer access to a wide variety of cloud, network and other services within the confines of a single data center. Think of your IT ecosystem as the local shops near your downtown flat, easy to access and well understood. However, if you’re downtown ecosystem was like the technology ecosystem you would have five coffee shops, three butchers, six shoe stores and so on from which to select goods and services. .

The open ecosystem

An open ecosystem allows for you to select the technology or service provider you like when the opportunity presents itself. It’s an environment where the customer has broad access to vendors and services related to any portion of the infrastructure stack, including wide area networking services and the data center capacity.

Under the old way of building IT, managers built it once, built it to last, and then got fired when it didn’t last. The new IT calls for managers to build it fast, possibly fail fast, and then build it again.

An open ecosystem means that in most cases you shouldn’t be spending years putting in a new technology architecture or solution. If it’s that complex or limited in its ability to adapt new technology you should be using a partner’s infrastructure such as an IaaS or PaaS provider solution.

There are also many options for building private cloud infrastructure, especially for larger businesses, but the focus should be on making it as open as possible. If you can’t taste test an application or new platform environment in a matter of days or weeks, you’re doing something wrong. Openness also helps if you need to move your work, because you want to have as many destinations to choose from as you can.

Many providers under one roof.

But even among open ecosystems there are important differences to be aware of. Ideally you will find an open ecosystem with a large number of different network, cloud, software and hardware providers under one umbrella. This allows the customer to make decisions around adoption of new technology quickly and efficiently. So instead of providing access to one or two bandwidth providers, the ideal ecosystem provides access to big and small players, and can play them against each other to get the best price and services for customers. In reality bringing together the combined customer and supplier community creates greater opportunities for both sides, in effect, a win-win.

It shouldn’t stop with bandwidth, either. An ecosystem should have not only the option of different hardware, and support services, but also different cloud service providers. If a customer wants to get cloud computing from a vendor, the ecosystem provider should invite that provider in. And if someone wants to build their own cloud, the ecosystem provider and data center provider should have an array of choices available for a customer to choose from.

The ideal delivery platform for this ecosystem is a data center provider who can create an environment that supports the needs of enterprise computing, while also lowering the costs and barriers to entry for ecosystem partners. This is an environment that removes all your risks associated with disaster avoidance, regulatory concerns, capacity and security. That location should have access to national freeways and airports as well as local government support that will help facilitate worker relocation and education, while also providing considerations for your hardware taxation risks.

It’s tough to find one place where all the above are available to the customer, but they are out there. Having these resources readily available is like having a Home Depot and a Lowes move in next to your house the day before you start a big home project. No matter what tool or resource you need, it’s all right there, immediately available, with competition, quantity and variety.

In this environment building a business that requires IT – or rethinking your existing IT doesn’t seem so daunting: With all these resources available, you virtually eliminate the risk of being forced into a “pragmatic” (read: bad but necessary) decision. You are free to experiment once, twice, three times, and then put it into production, without most of the historical baggage like “high network costs”, “no skilled staff” or a data center that is “out of capacity,” which have traditionally driven IT decisions.

So the increasing complexity and speed at which IT is moving doesn’t have to be something to worry about, instead look at it as an opportunity to roll with the technological changes without becoming too invested in a closed ecosystem.

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. .He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

Image courtesy of Flickr user john-norris.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight

Go to Source

Recently, I was invited by Google to participate in “Mobilizing Mobile” in Mobile, Alabama. As part of Google’s Go Mobile initiative, the event demonstrated what happens when a city’s infrastructure and community goes mobile.

Below you’ll find four key take-aways from teaming up with Google. I believe they can be applied by any startup, in any industry.

Lesson 1: Set the agenda

Consumer adoption of the mobile web is outpacing the rate at which mobile web experiences are being built. In less than three years, more people will access the web via a mobile device than by any other way. Google recognized this trend, and now its showing others where the world is headed.

By painting the bigger picture for everyone else, Google is also framing what the future will look like. Setting the agenda may sound like a lofty goal for a startup, but that’s what you should be focused on.

Startup companies are all about painting the big picture before anyone else can see it. Without a big picture idea, who will join you as a co-founder on your high-risk, potentially hallucinogenic quest? Who will fund you? Who will buy your product, rent you office space, listen to your pitch, or support your ideas? It’s this kind of foresight that creates new opportunities in the marketplace.

Lesson 2: Make your innovation tangible

Now that you’ve created your framework, you need to show it to your audience.

Google goes to great lengths to make its products approachable for users and developers. And they work hard to get users to test out new products as soon as possible.

For the GoMobile initiative, they built the GoMo Meter — a mobile preview tool that “shows you how your current site looks on a smartphone, and provides a report on what’s working and what you can do better.”

The GoMo Meter embodies several aspects of Google’s philosophy when it comes to new products. It has a low barrier to start, requires no commitment to use it, and offers easy access with a simple and obvious interface, all tied to a topic that interests each of us endlessly — ourselves (or, in this case, our websites).

How do you make your startup’s innovation tangible?

Start by figuring out what makes your innovation meaningful to your customers. What do they see and feel in their initial product encounter? When they ask themselves, “What is this?” and “Is it for me?” guide them to the right answer.

Look too for the human behaviors that your product is working on. It’s humans who will make decisions and judgments about your products, and you can tap into some enduring human traits in well-known ways. For example, after successfully raising a VC round, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman mentioned that well-known VC Roelof Botha only invests in consumer companies that let consumers indulge in one of the seven deadly sins.

Lastly, give users something obvious and easy to do. This could be watching a video or slideshow, clicking a button to initiate an action, entering a few data points, showing some before and after screenshots — anything that leads to a tangible and specific interaction.

As a startup, if you get people interacting with your product, you start to influence their behaviors. Their behaviors then influence their beliefs, which again influence their behaviors in a virtuous cycle.

You could try to influence beliefs. Untold millions are spent everyday attempting to influence beliefs – that’s much of the advertising you see. But it’s very hard both to influence beliefs and to measure changes in beliefs to learn if you’re effective. So focus on behaviors and let them lead to beliefs.

A simple way to prove that you want to influence behaviors over beliefs is to consider fast food. People eat it (a behavior) but they don’t believe it’s good for them. And how many of the seven deadly sins does it appeal to? Sloth, to start, and greed and gluttony for good measure.

Ask the hard question: what are the behaviors you want to have happen because of interaction with you product? Are those behaviors plausible and part of human nature?

Lesson 3: Focus, focus and focus

Focus on the parts of your business that are fundamental to how customers use your core product.

Since a growing number of customers are accessing Google’s core search products through mobile devices, the company has purposefully allocated time, people, and money to development in this sector. It may sound simple for a multi-armed beast like Google to redistribute some of its wealth, but having a lot of resources means the company can easily get derailed and scattered. It’s just as hard for a large company to focus as it is for a startup.

While a startup tends to have a scarcity of resources, it also has the freedom to focus wherever it chooses and to change that focus whenever it wants. The popular term here is “pivoting.” Startups, like all businesses, find success in momentum, and momentum is all about velocity. A startup that changes direction all the time ends up going in circles.

Lesson 4: Track the micro, decide on the macro

Google has built a superb business by understanding the value of data and gathering that information so that others can make meaning from it.

Google tracked the traffic it generated from the Go Mobile event to see if the initiative had been persuasive. Let’s call those micro-metrics.

Micro-metrics — visits, conversions, leads — were used for tracking and tuning, and the macro-metrics — years of mobile adoption, traffic, revenues — drove the strategy and focus.

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, has a great blog post with much more detail on startup metrics (and tracking the micro while making decisions on the macro) called “Learning is Better than Optimization.

The hard part is balancing the micro and the macro. Every day in a startup involves a ton of detailed work in the micro details of execution, while each decision in the micro details of execution influences the macro strategy.

The answer to balance out the two? Habits and self-reflection.

For Google’s GoMo we connected monthly on a few measurements we’d established to track our success – traffic numbers, leads and conversions.

Internally at my company Mobify, we have a weekly process where each team lead announces their key numbers. Then on a regular basis we review the key numbers. In that review we talk about both the key numbers – their sources, influences and meaning – as well as whether these key numbers are the right numbers to be tracking.

A great framework for figuring out your key performance indicators (KPIs) is to think about your segment ABCs: Acquisitions, Behaviors, Conversions. This ABCs framework is from Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist and author of two great books on web analytics. His blog post Web Analytics Segmentation is a terrific guide to getting started and improving your abilities to balance the micro and the macro.

Combine the ABCs framework with good habits and self-reflection and you will find meaning in measurement.

Bringing it together

While it’s hard to imagine that your startup has much in common with a giant like Google, these four strategies should resonate with any sized-business. Think big and paint the picture before anyone else can see it. Have the resolve to focus where attention is needed. And most importantly, never lose sight of what makes you meaningful to your customers. Your company may never reach the size and scale of Google, but your startup can still make a sizable difference.

Igor Faletski is the CEO of Mobify, a web platform that optimizes ecommerce and publishing sites for mobile and powers more than 20,000 sites.

Image courtesy of Flickr user thinkpublic

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Go to Source

After spending a full week with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 I purchased from an importer, I’m thoroughly impressed with the small slate. U.S. consumers will see a version with LTE for Verizon’s LTE network in the near future, but my hope is that the Wi-Fi version I bought follows soon; it would be priced less than an full-cost LTE version and wouldn’t require a lengthy data contract.

The Galaxy Tab 7.7 is Samsung’s first tablet to use its Super AMOLED Plus technology, bringing vivid colors, deep blacks and super-wide viewing angles. It doesn’t hurt that the 7.7-inch screen has a higher resolution than most 720p HDTV sets either: the 1280 x 800 resolution is a treat for the eyes; especially when watching high-def videos.

Of course, the outside of a tablet is only as good as what’s inside. In this case, its Samsung’s Exynos dual-core processor running at 1.4 GHz. And this chip keeps the Galaxy Tab 7.7 humming along quickly.

I ran many benchmarks between this new tablet and several others, including the quad-core Transformer Prime, and found that the new Tab tests just as fast, if not faster.

The Prime is better for gaming, thanks to 12 graphics cores, but for most tasks the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is currently comparable. This may change in the future as more apps become optimized for quad-core chips, however.

A cheaper Android tablet option appeared this week as well. Sprint is selling the ZTE Optik for $99 with a 2-year 3G data contract or $349 without a commitment. This 7-inch slate runs Android 3.2, not Android 4.0, but has a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, two cameras, GPS radio and 1280 x 800 resolution display.

ZTE, a Chinese hardware maker, is starting to make a big push in the U.S. tablet and smartphone market; if it can build quality devices with these low price points, it should do well against the current competition.

Late in the week, some confusion arose around the Galaxy Nexus, Google’s flagship developer phone. Verizon currently sells the Galaxy Nexus LTE in the U.S. while an unlocked GSM version — the one I have — is sold overseas. On Google’s website for the Galaxy Nexus stock software, the Verizon version is now archived. It appeared at first glance that Verizon was taking over control of the Galaxy Nexus software for phones on its network.

Google later provided an explanation that suggests it will still provide the updates for the Verizon Galaxy Nexus, saying certain software signatures on CDMA phones aren’t compatible with the Android Open Source Platform builds of Android. The situation is odd because the Sprint Nexus S, available since December of 2010, is a CDMA Nexus phone and this issue never cropped up. I suspect there’s more to this story, so I’ll be researching and watching for further developments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE

Go to Source

What a week! Most of the world was obsessing over the mother of all IPOs — Facebook. So no surprise, I had to include some good writing on the subject. Of course, I have already started looking beyond the social internet and got some good pointers for that.

• NowStreet Journal asks, what would have Facebook S-1 (and IPO) looked like had it come out in the days when tech stocks were given the small stock treatment? Also: Why Facebook is failing, Why Facebook’s growth is slowing so much and Evaluating a big network, which isn’t the same as a big product.
• It is time to move on from the social internet and instead dream of what Gideon Rosenbaltt calls place-based networks.
• Brilliant Kevin Kelly comes out with a list of things/trends that are going to be part of modern society in coming years. It is a delightful little post. I am fixated on Mirror Worlds and GlobeNet he talks about.
• Talking of Kelly and Wired magazine people, John Battelle, the founding managing editor of Wired, writes about Google and its recent moves and puts them in context of Facebook. I am not sure I have read a better post on Google than this one.
• I have never been a fan of Davos and Bruce Nussbaum does a good job of articulating why.  The Death of Davos Man–The Death of Davos is heck of a read. Plus 10 things you are not allowed to say at Davos.
• Information doesn’t want to be free, argues Andy Weissman. Instead, information just wants to be distributed friction-free. I totally agree, and I said so in my piece from last year, Old media is being unbundled, just like telecom was.
• Happiness takes a little magic, says Brian Lam. +1 to that.

Go to Source

What’s New This Week?

Facebook Seeks to Raise $5 Billion in IPO: “Social networking titan Facebook filed to go public, seeking to raise $5 billion in the largest flotation ever by an Internet company on Wall Street.” Facebook shares are not expected to begin trading for several months.  Experts expect this initial public offering to be much larger than Google was when it went public.  Do you plan on investing in Facebook? Leave your comments below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEXhNVDN-OI

Facebook IPO Reveals New Usage Numbers: Facebook’s nearly 200 page IPO documents revealed that Facebook now has 845 million active users, with 483 million people logging in daily.  Facebook also sees Google+ as a big competitive threat.

More Options for Google+ Badges: Google+ page owners now have a choice of badges to put on their website.  You can configure badges with a width that fits your design and choose one to complement your website.

Put a Google+ badge on your website to get more followers on your Google+ page.

Here are a few social media tools worth noting:

Salesforce Launches Desk.com and Desk.com Mobile: Salesforce‘s new services Desk.com and Desk.com Mobile are a “social help desk specifically targeted for small and mid-sized businesses (SMB).  Desk enables businesses to deliver personal customer service using a help desk that is social, mobile, and easy to use and deploy: key attributes for any SMB today looking to leverage social enterprise technologies.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UClF_DhDO_I&feature=player_embedded

Ifbyphone: Hubspot adds the Ifbyphone’s LeadResponder app to their marketplace. LeadResponder enables HubSpot customers to quickly connect with and convert qualified inbound marketing leads through the use of voice-based marketing automation.

"Ifbyphone’s integration with HubSpot solves the problem that occurs when a prospect completes a web form, then waits hours to receive a follow-up response."

So.cl: The social search experiment from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs.

Share your search. Rediscover search through your friends and community on the all-new social search…

And here’s an interesting infographic:

Is Pinterest the Next Social Commerce Game Changer?:

Have you had a look at Pinterest?

What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below.

Go to Source

Weekend Favs February Four

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or from my own travels.

First run of the day Telluride

Good stuff I found this week:

Quipol – Easily create and embed social polls that are very easy to use and very good looking

Transcribe – free online tool that makes it much easier to transcribe an audio – type and listen in the same place and keyboard shortcuts let you slow the audio down and skip around.

SocialBro – Great piece of software that allows you analyze and manage your Twitter following, including the best times to Tweet when your following are on Twitter.

Go to Source

Do you have poor information consumption habits?

Here’s how you can tell — if you’re constantly looking for the next thing or shiny object, you’re addicted to the fast growth and short term life of weeds. Some of them are pretty. All the action is up top, yet they don’t grow strong. Small roots.

On the other end of the spectrum are trees.

All the action is underground, so you don’t really see it while it’s happening — and at least for a while. Yet, once they grow, trees could be there for decades, stretching upward and providing a welcome respite for generations.

Weeds and trees

Is a metaphor for ideas I borrowed from my friend Peter.

This special edition of links is all about theory — it’s not the size of the library that counts it’s the way it’s organized. We’re all way too docile to the “do” culture, until what you thought about doesn’t work.

Then we revert to theory. As Peter Tunjic said:

We’ve spent the last 100 years bemoaning theory as somehow esoteric -– real “men” are practical. It’s hard to tell someone that in fact that practical knowledge becomes  impractical without theory.

Theory is just another word for learning –- without it knowledge is impractical no matter what it says on the label.

I agree.

Which is why a pitch I received from a West Coast agency late last night became a one hour conversation about life, people, and meaning with a young brand manager.

Get the theory right, learn from experience, and you get the execution right.

Saturday three

The three stories that caught my eye this week are:

+++

A frank conversation between Dan Ariely and Malcolm Gladwell on social science. Journalist Resource reports:

What do people do with the things they read in books such as this? And my working assumption is that what they do is they talk about it. The reason people read a book like, books like ours — as opposed to novels — is that books like ours are fodder for continued thought and conversation.

[...] People are information-rich and theory-poor. If you can give them a way of organizing their experience, then their minds are wide open. Which I would not have not have necessarily thought. And if you can frame questions appropriately you can overcome all kinds of ideological — what you would have thought of — as ideological constraints.

Giving people a way of organizing their experience or a framework to think about what they do is central.

+++

Technology makes it too easy to keep clicking through for hours at a time. Happiness takes a little magic, writes Brian Lam, it’s the most important metric in personal tech:

The first thing I did was to take back my time. I quit all the online content that was id-provoking and knee jerk. I stopped reading the stupid hyped up news stories that are press releases or rants about things that will get fixed in a week. I stopped reading the junk and about the junk that was new, but not good. I stopped reading blogs that write stories like “top 17 photos of awesome clouds by iPhone” and “EXCLUSIVE ANGRY BIRDS COMING TO FACEBOOK ON VALENTINES DAY.” And corporate news that only affects the 1%. Most days, I feel like most internet writers and editors are engaging in the kind of vapid conversation you find at parties that is neither enlightening or entertaining, and where everyone is shouting and no one is saying anything. I don’t have time for this.

Do you? As Lam says, Get on, make the most meaningful information and connections, and then get offline. Then, live purposefully towards happiness.

+++

Gina Trapani tackles the flip side of having a big audience:

Having a big audience means you’re a commodity, and you get to constantly field pitches from strangers, acquaintances, former co-workers, and distant family members who you never hear from otherwise asking you to mention their new app, book, Kickstarter project, or MySpace page. People decide how important you are by your Klout score and treat you accordingly. Ad agencies look up how much your tweets are worth and recruit you to tweet on behalf of their clients for money. It’s a bizarre and sometimes awkward crash course in saying “sorry, no” to the requests that just don’t feel right (and most of them don’t).

Trapani works with a freelancer mindset. Do you think about those professionals who are actual freelancers and consultants when you work on your programs?

+++

Weedy ideas are in fashion. They grow so fast, compete with solid ideas, to then die in the sun and be replaced by the next weed of an idea.

Trees are another conversation altogether. There, all the action is underground, until they are no match for the weeds.

Is your program, book, talk, practice full of weeds or are you cultivating trees?

Follow the discussion over on Conversation Agent Google+ Page.

Have a great weekend everyone.

If this post from Conversation Agent was useful, subscribe, share and like it. Sign up for my Premium Newsletter for more in depth discussions.

Go to Source

Last week I talked about how marketers should leverage culture to promote brands. Today I would like to talk about why we also can (and should) change culture.

As I watched the video above I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Is marketing changing culture? Or is culture changing marketing?” Or in other words, are these ads changing our perception of beauty or is our perception of beauty changing the ads? I still don’t have the answer, but maybe it;s a little bit of both.

In the end it doesn’t really matter, the bottom line is that the concept of “ideal beauty” has been around for a very long time. However, that doesn’t mean that it has to continue, and as marketers we have a unique ability to make a difference. Because as marketers we, in part, define culture.

How To Change Culture With Marketing

Develop Icons – Cultures love a good icon. For example take a look at Donald Duck in Germany, they love him. A strong icon can be a powerful force with in a culture. And who creates icons? Marketers do, that’s who! If we want to change our culture’s obsession with ideal body types we need to work to develop more icons that embody realistic and diverse forms of beauty.

Change The Narrative – Maybe with the help of some of our new icons we can start telling some new stories. How about a story about a fully figured woman that men fight over. Or perhaps a movie about a funny young guy in a wheelchair that hordes of women lust after (wink). Stories shape our collective conscience and define the way we view the world. They also help define our own personal narrative, which gives us courage to be different and try new things.

Make A Profit – Remember that marketing is still all about generating wealth. With out wealth we can’t elevate icons or tell new stories. So we need to use the power of marketing to create consumer demands that redefine cultural norms. We need to start building brands that target individuals that deviate from the prevailing cultural narrative. We need fashion brands that market directly to consumers with wrinkles and body weight. We need to grow these brand’s revenue streams and make wrinkles profitable.

Quit Being Lazy – As I watched the video above I couldn’t help but think how unimaginative and uncreative the ads pictured were. Smart marketing is never easy. To redefine culture we have to be creative and try many different things and be willing to fail. Sometimes, it’s hard selling failure to our clients, which is why we need to demand and expect more courage from the companies and brands we work with. Most of you that work with large brands know that they are run by good people that want to do the right thing, they just often times lack the needed courage to do what needs to be done.

In the 21st century marketers are one of the most influential elements on our culture. We have the power to redefine ideas and conscientiousness and it’s our job to wield that power responsibly. This does not mean simply abstaining from the types of ads in the video, it also means taking an active role in the development of new trends that shape our collective identity. If we can effectively do that, we can use marketing to make the world a better place while generating wealth. And, to me that sounds beautiful.

Go to Source

The recruiting feat is historic since Google has never hired such a senior person away from Apple. The hiring is also interesting because the Department of Justice is investigating Google and Apple for allegedly working out a “no poach” agreement where the companies — along with Pixar, Lucasfilm, Intel and Intuit — allegedly conspired to suppress employee compensation by not poaching each other’s employees.

Simon Prakash worked at Apple for more than eight years and was most recently the senior director of product integrity at Apple, according to his LinkedIn page. That means he was responsible for product quality across all of Apple’s products, from iPhones to Macs. Apple has the best reputation for product quality, according to consumer satisfaction surveys by J.D. Power.

Now he’ll be working for Google on a secret project, presumably run by Google co-founder Sergei Brin, who is in charge of a variety of secret research and development projects at Apple. Google recently acquired Motorola Mobility and it has a wide variety of hardware projects under way that Prakash might be working on.

Prakash started at Apple more than eight years ago as a senior reliability manager. Before that, he was director of engineering design validation at Cielo Communications. He was also a reliability and FA manager at 3Com. Prakash is scheduled to begin work on Monday. We’re checking with Google and Apple for comment.

If there really was a “no poaching” agreement between Apple and Google, it’s clear that it no longer exists. That’s probably a good thing, considering that the Justice Department is now paying attention.

Filed under: VentureBeat

Go to Source

Today’s businessman is highly educated and always connected. The technology we have been armed with allows us to take advantage of far more opportunities than those who came before us. Unfortunately, the recession has left many businessmen working harder, longer, and for less. The future is bright, however, the next generation is highly self-aware, motivated, and very conscious when it comes to their health and their environment. With these tools, and natural skills, the businessman of the future promises to be an entirely new breed of success.

Innovation has historically driven our economy. And there’s still hope yet. While unemployment is still a whopping 8.5%, there are changes coming. Obama’s state of the union address made mention of reforms to support the next Steve Jobs.

We live in interesting times. Technology is ushering a wellspring of information at speeds and bandwidth faster than ever before. It’s our very innovation that leads to a new divide between the haves and have-nots. Still, a combination of hope for the future, tenacity, and harnessing our past will enable the businessman to continue to march on and win.

Brian Wallace is the President of NowSourcing, a premier social media firm specializing in infographic design, development and content marketing promotion. The company is based in Louisville, Ky. and works with companies that range from small business to Fortune 500.

(Click the image to enlarge.)

Filed under: VentureBeat

Go to Source