ellementK: (ĕll'ǝ-mǝnt-kā)
noun - A fundamental, essential, or irreducible constituent of a composite entity. Middle English, from Old French, from Latin About Eleanor Kruszewski: I'm known variously as Eleanor or Elle. My last name is like that coach from Duke - kru-shef-ski. Based in Menlo Park, CA, I work for Yahoo! in their Developer Network. The easiest description of what I do is the MBA shin kicker, handling community, marketing, commercial programs and sundry backend stuff. Disclaimer: I've done big corps, midcorps, and startups, so I overstate and oversimplify as much as anyone else. These opinions are my own, not my employer's. |
View all entries in the 'Datapoints' CategoryA challenge to a practical mind - the Bay Area buy-vs-rent dilemmaThere was a fascinating discussion yesterday on a “chick list” I’m on, the SF Women of the Web, about housing prices in the bay area and bubble-or-not. Someone posted a link to this massively interesting rant on buy-vs-rent by Patrick Killelea. I’m right in Menlo, just over the ped bridge from PA, and I get to watch how quickly homes get sold — often only to be put back on the market within a year. Patrick is right on when it comes to renting, which Russ’ househunting this past week proved. Happily, Russ is moving to our hood. His househunting (as he called it) gave me cause to explain to someone that yes - of course, househunting means rental when it’s proclaimed so cheerfully. Otherwise it’s just trauma, right? When Russ IM’ed me his Craigslist of candidate houses this weekend, the low prices surprised me — I hadn’t looked at house prices in more than 3 years. I know the price for our appartment (very nice, hanging off the edge of the San Francisquito and a park) kept going down, but wasn’t inclinded to scope out an upgrade. What a strange world when renting keeps getting more cost effective (and ever more practical, with Mike working in SF and me with a to-be-determined commute as I scope for a new position). As I’m not a happy driver, it’d be terrible to be fully committed to living in Menlo if there was a juicy company in Pleasanton or Emeryville or San Rafael. That’s one cost that Patrick doesn’t even consider - the decreased flexibility that comes with owning a home or flat. People continue to wonder how people “afford” houses around here. The answer is you build a great company and manage to so that you can have a few such houses. Or you scrimp and save and hope to profit by selling your house to someone flush with market success. Rinse and repeat. But with time comes growth. I’m much more accepting of the market here now. Previously I expected to take the money and run to some island bunker. $700K takes you further just about anywhere, why not pick somewhere more convivial. I haven’t blogged about this (as I avoid political and newsish stuff), but the tsunami really made me reconsider the idea of tropical paradise. It’s an odd reflection to have, but since I’ve been mulling the life of an expat integrated into an adopted community, I’ve been troubled by new aspects of this experience that I could see in the aftermath of the tsunami. My somewhat glibly independent and adventurer instincts have been tamed by a sort of morbid practicality. Unspoiled is unspoiled and you can build your own infrastructure, but if something goes wrong, there’s little public infrastructure — the sort of safety net we take for granted here. In the event of some huge devastation like we saw this winter, it’s just impossible to recover. We’d rebuild together, if that was even feasible, but the timeline and cost are much different than recovering from a NorCal earthquake. Brewing up gourmet yuppie rum wouldn’t dig us out of that one (but the BVI’s aren’t so remote as Phuket). Participate: 0 Comments | TrackbackFurther indications things are back on trackI came home last night from the Steve Case/Walt Mossberg discussion at the Computer History Museum to find a final datapoint that things are getting better: Mike and I have to renew our lease and this is the first year that our rent has not actually gone down! It hasn’t gone up, and our two options (12 mos and 6 mos) are priced at parity, whereas before there was a slight discount to the 6 month lease. I always thought that reflected optimism on the part of our landlord that he could quickly ratchet it up once the good times came rolling. We’ve been here 3 full years now, and the spread between the two got wider, only to disappear completely this year. The second stream of indicators come from all the events and happenings. Last night there was the CHM thing, which was pretty good, but not quite the thing to hold my concentration after a day with my sick dad. Afterwards, a bunch of us went out for pizza - Mike, Niall, Brendan Wilson and his wife Ashley who works at PayPal, and Micah Alpern. It’s kind of like you can find or make a “party” where ever you go. Tonight, a chick group that I belong to is having a party - SFWOW is basically a mailing list with random discussion and tech stuff. It’s free or $3 depending on how full they are, at Cafe Metropole in SF. Afterwards, I get to get some art with the IronVJ battle at 1015 Folsom in SF, which should at least make me laugh. Hope to see some of you there. Participate: 1 Comment | TrackbackChanging usage patterns of the InternetThere may be hope for the internet yet, moralists may say. Or maybe it’s just that the marketers are taking over. Wired reporta that Sex Is Out, Consuming Is In with some new stats on Internet usage patterns: Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback McKinsey on consumer migration from wireline serviceThe McKinsey Quarterly brings perspective on the wireline vs. wireless telephony debate with the results from a survey of wireless subscribers:
These cross-effects - where consumers (and businesses) find themselves confronting multiple layers of choice - will drive consolidation in the industry as players seek to establish a consistent brand, and capture landline defections in their own mobile offerings. If the core business will inevitably be cannibalized, it is best to do it yourself. Participate: 0 Comments | TrackbackPersonal media keeps coming upTo frame the discussion, here are some datapoints: SDForum held an Emerging Technology SIG on Music and Meta Data last week. Creative Common’s novel licensing is attracting most interest around the areas of personal media, mostly audio and video. The ‘podcasting’ phenomenon is gaining almost mainstream status, as users take to the airwaves (even though their broadcasts are canned files posted for later consumption). Check out the article “The Long Tail” from for an idea of the pervasiveness of this concept - the message is clear - with the limitless storage potential of the web, efficient search means the fringe is accessible to all, and with that exploration enabled - personalization is becoming revenue driver. These are real markets - just look at the incredible sales (and usage!) of cameraphones and the staggering fact that the ringtone market was $3.5B in 2003. Sales of add-on, momentarily-cool novelties to kids has become a viable business overnight
Consumer applications often drive technology — we see this constantly with games and pR0n. At this point in time we seem to be seeing a great deal of innovation around personal media. So, it’s in light of these developments that I’m inclined to read this piece on emergent music technologies with less skepticism. I’ve never heard that story about Motorola’s genesis…. Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback Sifry’s Alerts: Oct 2004 State of the Blogosphere: 4.6 posts per secondSifry’s Alerts: Oct 2004 State of the Blogosphere: 4.6 posts per second Participate: 0 Comments | TrackbackIDC on Global IT SpendingAlso this week I tuned in to IDC’s teleconference on “State of the Market: Global IT Spending 2004-2005” which gave their predictions for growth areas in the next year. You can find the presentation here. The summary is that spending on infrastructure upgrades is finally starting to slow – with the focus on pc upgrades shifting to network and peripherals. Hot areas of software investment are areas such as anti-virus, security and communications. Participate: 0 Comments | TrackbackSMB market has higher rate of IT spendingInformationWeek had a piece, Oracle Puts Pressure On Microsoft, which captures an interesting datapoint:
Implications: Still, from the perspective of the larger players now entering this market, that 6.3% of revenue was flowing to others, and thus represents a revenue growth opportunity - even if the market itself shrinks. Participate: 0 Comments | TrackbackMeta on IBM’s Lotus WorkplaceDavid Yockelson of the Meta Group with Matt Cain in a MetaView audio briefing. More information, the audio stream, and the slides can be found here.
David: Matt, how are you doing today?
David: Well I’m glad to hear it. For this Meta View, we’re going to talk about Lotus Workplace and I could succinctly put this as, this is the summary… well, I guess this is two things, it’s a summary and it’s a look forward at what IBM is doing post Notes, and along with Domino. But it’s also a way for IBM to better work WebSphere into the picture and have it intermingle, if not co-exist with Domino.
David: OK, so we’ll look at that in a second, and I’ll take a position that that is not necessarily a bad thing, but first, it’s a good thing I said Notes, and not Ray Ozzie or Iris, because then we’d go way back. But let’s go on to the next slide, and you’re going to talk a little bit about what we call Knowledge Worker Infrastructure (KWI) frameworks. Now, to the point you made a second ago, where IBM is essentially placing its bets and world focus, now one could argue that focusing in and around the portal, given it’s ability to drive context, and aggregate and manage and perhaps to ultimately lead the end users and lead IBM through an ability to create wonderful composite applications, and so on, would be the right bet to make. But why don’t you walk us through what goes into this particular KWI framework and what does that mean.
David: Ok, so now given that you gave us a little bit of a preview at, say, a 20,000 foot level, of Workplace. Next slide, walk us through a little bit more of the nuts and bolts of the Workplace client, and what goes on there.
David: OK - so from the client, let’s extend almost every place, go on to the next slide, and we’ll look at what is the IBM collaboration story four years from now.
David: OK, so there’s certainly opportunity for people to take a bet and in some cases, as you’re saying, it would make sense for people to move in one direction, or in only one direction. Now, moving to a different crystal ball, looking at Domino development, what do you think happens there?
David: Yeah, and I think a piece of that, just to move it up a level, but one of the popular and convincing things about Domino applications is that they always had, and you could argue good-bad, but it always had workflow built into it. In other words they were very tight into process. And there really isn’t much, there certainly isn’t anything in the native J2EE environment to do that, so the other thing that’s incumbent would be for IBM to bring that along. Whether it’s a sense of industry process, something at a slightly lower level in terms of specific business process, but something that will, in addition to the look and the feel and the underlying logic, something that can move things along and get work done. That was a hugely appealing piece of the Domino puzzle.
David: OK, so bottom line for us, what should clients do in the future?
David: Ok, so it sounds like there’s certainly a lot of promise but also potentially some pain, or at least work to do, whether it’s relative to migration or whether it’s relative to skill sets, trying to discern what sort of applications should live in which environments. So lots of decisions for our clients to make. David: Well, thanks very much, and for all those listening, thanks very much and that was today’s Meta View. Participate: 0 Comments | TrackbackIT ‘Shadow Spending’ Has Doubled - ComputerworldComputerworld has a piece, IT ‘Shadow Spending’ Has Doubled, discussing an undercurrent within IT spending that could have a large impact upon how sales are made. Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback Why your mass e-mail requests get ignored | CNET News.comInteresting research from Greg Barron, a research fellow at Harvard Business School, and research partner Eldad Yechiam, a postdoctoral research fellow at Indiana University’s Department of Psychology (primarily on email yielded this insight:
Interesting for what impact it has on corporate signalling, specifically what IBM is doing with Linux and On Demand, and HP with its Adaptive Enterprise. Gartner - CRM Services Market Size ForecastFrom notes I took at the DataQuest library on Process management services dominate other services offerings within CRM
The market was saturated during 2000-2001 with long term contracts - More on climate theorySupplemental to last week’s post on scenario planning and climate change, I ran into this more complete paper from Robert Gagosian, Pres & Dir of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which presented a couple of weeks ago at Davos. WHOI’s Climate and Change Institute has done a lot of the research to support this theory. Source: Ocean & Climate Change Institute - Abrupt Climate Change Participate: 0 Comments | TrackbackCA bans use of devices in carsYesterday’s buzz is about a new CA law that went into effect about banning use of pdas and computers in the front seats of cars. Check slashdot for the story and other comments. New wi-fi distance record, stretching across 82 milesThe new distance record for plain vanilla wifi is now 82 miles, as proven by students at Utah’s Weber State University. Participate: 4 Comments | TrackbackChanging face of office spaceSheila Muto brings us an update from one of the underpinnings of business growth - the world of leaseholds. Property developers are doing more to attract new tenants while facing some of the highest vacancy rates in the last decade. Not only are they thinking differently about what is needed to attract leasors, they’re thinking strategically about managing their businesses. They’re making the investment, at significant cost savings and to also achieve consistency across their properties.
from The Wall Street Journal Link to the article while you can. Participate: 4 Comments | TrackbackSummary of the Year in Ideas, 2003, from The New York Times MagazineExtract of the 67 keenest ideas The New York Times Magazine could find for 2o03. It’s interesting to me that I had run across about a third of them during the course of the year. Here’s how it works:
1) Proving You’re Human Source: The New York Times Magazine, December 14, 2003 Participate: 4 Comments | TrackbackSubmit to our presentationThis guarantees to be joked into oblivion, but it’s a good reminder, and no doubt, I’ll wonder where it came from later.
It’s a very good reminder to ensure that the purpose of a presentation is not art, or completed assignment, it is to communicate information, which takes tuning. Source: NYTimes.com Abstract. Full article is available for purchase from NYTimes. Participate: 6 Comments | Trackback |
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