Monthly Archives: February 2018

6 Years on from Cutting the PayTV Cord

We’re in our 6th year of watching only on demand services such as Netflix and Amazon TV, after cutting the PayTV cord. We’re still able to access popular sporting events live like the Super Bowl without a PayTV subscription, which for some weird reason my wife likes to watch. When we were planning to cut […]

SMS API Pricing, I just don’t get it

The information shown below on SMS API pricing is easily accessible from the companies’ websites. I’ve used all their services. My clients use their services at a range of volumes. I’ve run hackathons where people are innovating on most of these companies, where we experience firsthand the ease of use and flexibility. I have a […]

From IM to the First Point of Contact with the Internet (FPOCI)

IM (Instant Messaging) / chat has been around for a long time. Before AIM (AOL Instant Messenger, 1997) and ICQ (Internet Chat Query, 1996), there was the command line function ‘chat’ on unix (early 1980s) which evolved into IRC (Internet Relay Chat,1988); and for the VMS (Virtual Memory System) crowd there was phone (sometime in […]

What’s Happened to Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts to form a judgment. If I were to sum up the one skill I think has helped me throughout my career, it would be hard to find a better one than critical thinking. Unfortunately, we live in a world where opinions and facts are treated with equal weight, […]

What’s the ROI of TADS?

A common question I’m asked about TADHack and TADSummit is, “What’s the ROI of TADS?” Return on Investment. In other words, how many relevant leads, which we can convert into sales, will TADS deliver. My response if always the same. There is no ROI for TADS, measured in those terms. I’ve had people close down the […]

What is it that you do?

I’m asked this question surprisingly often, “Alan, what is it that you do?” My stock answer is, “I wander the world helping people.” Which generally results in a wry smile from those who know me; else a questioning or annoyed look from someone who was expecting a straightforward answer to a straightforward question. When I […]

Hackathon Evolution

Hackathons are just one of many ways technologists get to the information / communities they need. In this weblog I’m not covering all the online resources and communities such as Github, StackOverflow, etc. GitHub reported last April having almost 20 million users and 57 million repositories, making it the largest host of source code in the […]

UCaaS is a subset of CPaaS

Its always before Enterprise Connect the confusion on CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) and UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) rises. Here are two simple definitions: UCaaS is a PBX in the cloud, its a telecom application (granted a complex one, but a telecom app nonetheless). CPaaS is a telecom application server in the […]

Linkedin’s broken Copyright Infringement Process, Treating its Customers Like Criminals

UPDATE: As of today (7th February) the Claim of Copyright Infringement has been revoked. My Slideshare account is reinstated. No apology, no explanation on how this came to pass, nor consideration of how this could be avoided in the future. As a paying Linkedin customer its an extremely poor experience. This weblog spans both personal […]