Jeff Nolan's take on innovation, entrepreneurship, tech and stuff that interests me
I was reading this article on the wave of executive departures at HTC on the heals of a successful product, the HTC One, and a clearly unsuccessful launch of the HTC First. The reporting is actually good and highlights the phenomena of the death spiral that many in Silicon Valley are familiar with, as influential [...]
I recently wrapped up my transition period out of Get Satisfaction and immediately swung into a new role at Ping Identity. This was no easy decision for me as I continue to support the mission of Get Satisfaction and have invested much of myself in it over the last 3 years. Life in the Valley [...]
The Verge is reporting that the iconic Start Menu will be returning in Windows 8.1. For those of you that don’t follow such things, Microsoft removed the start menu is Win8 in when they replaced the desktop as the primary UX canvas in favor of the new tile interface, called Modern (originally called Metro). Removing [...]
I have been using a Lenovo Yoga laptop for a month and like it enough to report back on my impressions. This laptop replaces an Asus Zenbook Touch that I had been using and generally liked but in order to maximize the touch aspects of Windows 8 I found that having a touch screen simply [...]
I have been watching with curiosity the battle of words between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the NYTimes. On balance I think Musk miscalculated and has come out on the losing side of the bigger issue he is confronting… complexity. As I drive around I see a surprising number of the Tesla Model S sedans [...]
Like a lot of people I depend on Office to do my job. I have tried a range of personal productivity applications and nothing comes close to Office in terms of depth of features and overall completeness of the product. It is nothing short of a stunning achievement that changed the way we work. When [...]
I was talking with team members on our sales team yesterday, considerably younger than I am but at that point in life where they are increasingly self-aware and conscious of the world around them. We were talking about Instagram and the tendency for people to share even the most mundane moments in their life, to [...]
A few months ago I read the Civil War novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. A non-fiction work, this is a historical account of the battle of Gettysburg that is written in the style of a novel where characters develop and intimacy, flaws, and achievement are revealed as the novel progresses. After having read [...]
There are two seminal moments in m personal history that explain why I ended up in the technology industry. The first was when I first encountered a BASIC compiler in the 8th grade and discovered that I could write a program, store it on a cassette tape (that I later upgraded to an 8″ floppy [...]
Like for many in the tech industry, and beyond, the case of Aaron Swartz touched a nerve with me. We live in an era where government has few boundaries and the threat of legal action carries as much consequence as successful prosecution. Tyranny is a strong word but it comes in many sanctioned forms, government [...]