Infotrade

After years of hype, the IT industry finally had a rude awakening this spring, reminding us that cloud computing infrastructures are vulnerable to the same genetic IT flaw that plagues traditional data center operations: Everything fails sooner or later. In March, an 8.9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused widespread disruptions to power supplies and network connectivity to data centers across Japan, causing Japanese companies to rethink their traditional disaster recovery strategies. Several weeks later, the EBS system in one of Amazon’s EC2 data centers in the Eastern U.S. failed due to a faulty router upgrade and a cascade of resulting events, sent hundreds of customers—including many Web 2.0 companies such as Foursquare and Reddit—scrambling in an effort to resume services. Ironically, these events also highlight how cloud infrastructures, when managed correctly, actually provide unprecedented capabilities to deliver high availability, resiliency and business continuity in IT...

How do entrepreneurs create highly successful companies? After interviewing 45 of America’s leading company founders, I learned that it doesn’t take luck to start and grow a company that sells for $100 million or more, or goes public for $300 million or more, as each of theirs did. But it does take resilience — the ability to see an obstacle as something to climb over and move beyond. Each of these entrepreneurs faced at least one major setback that should have stopped them in their tracks; instead, they rebounded stronger, smarter, leaner, and meaner than before. Here are 5 ways they did it: 1. If you can’t hit home runs, go for singles. In the pharmaceutical industry, your odds of getting a drug approved are 1 in 1,000. It takes 10 years and $800 million to get a “home run” drug approved — the kind of drug that becomes a household name. Jeff Aronin, founder of Ovation Pharmaceuticals, knew he couldn’t compete. But instead of giving up, he decided to focus on drugs for “smaller” dise...

Total U.S. Internet ad revenues hit $7.3 billion in Q1 2011 , a 23 percent increase from last year, seemingly providing more evidence that the tech sector is in a bubble. After all, what kind of industry could possibly sustain 23 percent growth over the long run? Hold that thought. Once you dissect the way the  Interactive Advertising Bureau  constructs that number, and look at who exactly is receiving that $7.3 billion, then this bubble — if it is one — may have a long way to go before it bursts. The first thing to note is how robust web advertising has been. The “Great Recession” barely existed in Internet-land: So 2009 was a down year, but it was still up from 2007, which was the peak year of the boom that preceded the credit crisis. The post Sept. 11/dot-com bust of 2001 was a lot more damaging to the business than the disappearance of Lehman Bros. Secondly, the IAB told me that 54 percent of all U.S. internet advertising spend is collected by  Google  (GOOG): G...

Despite all our whining and complaining, email is a terrific tool. Stop laughing, it is. The problem with many teams and the way we manage them is that it’s the tool that gets used (and abused) the most.  People leave long email threads that make it a bear to search. We file the same email under different names. We’re working with different versions of the same document, resulting in wasted time, rework and frustration. Whether managing projects or your functional team, information just doesn’t flow the way email works. So what can you use to help people store information, access it as needed and help everyone find what they need when they need it? A collaboration tool that stores, accesses, organizes and creates a logical picture of the whole project is what we really need. Karl Goldfield  is the VP of Sales and M arketing for Teambox,  a tool that integrates email, file storage and social networking. He thinks that email is fine for what it does. “Most people are still...

It used to be that graduating from college was a sign that you had entered adulthood. But really, let’s get serious. It also used to be thought that a bar mitzvah ushered in adulthood, and we now all know the bar mitzvah thing is really just a sign that you are starting regular wet dreams. So let’s debunk the college grad thing: Today college graduation is just a stepping stone to the time of life when you will feel the most lost. Forget all that solemn advice about what to do after college; that was appropriate in another era, when people in their 20s were considered adults. Now that period of life is called “ emerging adulthood .”  A New York Times magazine piece  popularized the term to describe this new stage of life between adolescence and actual adulthood. The idea took off so quickly that the writer got a book deal offers just days after the piece ran. Which just confirms what we all know: college graduation does not mean the entrance into adulthood. It is more like pr...

What makes some companies able to crank out one groundbreaking innovation after another while others keep churning out the same old, same old? A new paper by  Michael L. Tushman  of Harvard Business School , Wendy K. Smith  of the Alfred Lerner School of Business  at the  University of Delaware , and  Andy Binns , of consulting firm  Change Logic , offers a diagnosis of many companies’ inability to innovate. The authors then outline three steps a leader can take to fix things. Why Innovations Die When a company is struggling, the authors write, innovations don’t seem like the road to the future. Instead, new projects usually get noticed mainly for the fact that they’re draining scarce resources, often while threatening the company’s core business to boot. At most companies, no single high-level person is in charge of innovation, which means it’s up to business unit heads-the very people who may be most threatened by a new way of doing things-to decide...

According to a study, the Chinese are shifting to a new way of consuming media, spending less time on the television and more on the Internet. CTR China ’s Media Audience Research & Report reveals that the television is still the top choice for media consumption with 72.8%, while computer and Internet is trailing close with 62.8%. What’s interesting is the huge shift that happened between 2009 and 2010, where time spent watching TV has decreased by 42.5% while the time spent using the Internet has increased by 44.8%. The research also shows that all respondents use at least two different channels to access information, with the combination of TV and Internet as the most common. The inevitable trend for media would be a convergence between the different channels to better adapt to the development of a multi-level, multi-dimensional socio-cultural consumer space. Although TV advertising is still predominant in China, analysts predict that money spent on online marketing can...

Social media companies have always been valued much higher and much quicker than most other industries. I believe this is because of the sheer number of users on these sites. Although there isn’t anything to sell these users, just their presence builds value. This infographic talks about a company called Color. Color raised over 40 million in funding without any revenue or users. This is something new in the social media realm. Before a website ever received real funding it would always need to build a user base. Now a good social media idea is all you need for 40 million bucks. I believe the strategy of these investment firms is to build up these companies value, and contribute to over-valuing them, until a big gun like Microsoft or Google buys it up for billions. Hey, it is a good strategy. Building users is easy when there is millions of dollars to make a free site better. Linked-in just went public and the market when crazy for it. Think about it if Facebook pulled that. Facebook ...

The Sinclair ZX81 was small, black with only 1K of memory, but 30 years ago it helped to spark a generation of programming wizards. Packing a heady 1KB of RAM, you would have needed many, many thousands of them to run Word or iTunes, but the ZX81 changed everything. It didn't do colour, it didn't do sound, it didn't sync with your trendy Swap Shop style telephone, it didn't even have an off switch. But it brought computers into the home, over a million of them, and created a generation of software developers. Before, computers had been giant expensive machines used by corporations and scientists - today, they are tiny machines made by giant corporations, with the power to make the miraculous routine. But in the gap between the two stood the ZX81. Continue reading the main story “ Start Quote If you had an extension pack you had to hold it in place with Blu-Tack, because if it wobbled a bit you'd lose everything” Richard Vanner It wasn't a lot of good at saving ...