HQ2 Winners and Losers
HQ2 applications are due October 19. Cities are falling over themselves to woo Amazon, but everyone will win this contest. Amazon is giving North America a crash course on the making of a digital enterprise and it couldn’t come soon enough. In mid-August, before HQ2 was announced, I was in St. Louis where employment, any […]
Angry Mob Drops Pitchforks, Hugs Uber
There’s a lot of cloud hate speech going around. Job destroyer. Monopolist. Election meddler. Before we burn the data centers to the ground, let’s praise the cloud for what it is. Cloud computing is the underpinning of the free economy. Does anyone remember Hotmail? It was the first free email service offered independently of an […]
Amazon Wants an Open Marriage
Amazon delivered a surprise punch to Seattle last week. It was as if an attractive, wealthy spouse asked for an open marriage. A shocker. Kind of like when Boeing moved its HQ to Chicago in 2001. Some say the company is responding to civic leaders who pile Seattle’s woes on Amazon (traffic, housing costs, homelessness). […]
DevOps Sprawl
Is DevOps suffering from over-automation? The promise of DevOps is faster application deployment, such as multiple updates per day. The development methodology is central to the success of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and other tech heavyweights. According to Gartner the DevOps tools market is $3 billion in 2017, up 21.1 percent from 2016. Mainstream enterprises, such […]
How Content Marketing Works
Content marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services. Instead of pitching products or services, content marketing provides relevant and useful content […]
10 Uses for Great Content
Writing is free if you have hours of free time. For everyone else there are writing budgets. As the cornerstone of social media and content marketing, writing costs might eat the lion’s share of the marketing budget. So here’s a way to get the most of your great writing. Bylined article: Your first stop with […]
Is Seattle in a Paradigm Shift?
Cloud computing and software development are transforming Seattle. The changes are shocking, but are they unprecedented? A colleague who worked many years in New York finance before returning to Seattle thinks this is a paradigm shift. What separates this from Seattle’s gold rush booms in the 1890s? The population growth is identical, with each era […]
The Rise of Developer Tools
Software developer tools are becoming a major industry. Last year the venture capital community plowed $640 million into software development tool startups. Recent exits in the space from Rally Software and Crashlytics for valuations of $315M and $100M respectively, and venture capital funding to the industry growing 77% annually, something new is happening. You can’t […]
A Beginner’s Guide to Martech
You can be forgiven for not understanding martech. Seven years ago there were 150 martech vendors. Today there are nearly 5,000. The industry is predicted to grow to $32 billion by 2018. And to think that marketers once used phone book sized directories called Standard Rates and Data to manage advertising. Martech is comprised of […]
The Rise of the Byline
The bylined article is in high demand. Once the province of trade journals, bylined articles are accepted at Forbes, Fortune, Huffington Post and other outlets. We have seen a 10x increase in bylined placements in the past 10 years as publishers go after long tail content at scale. A bylined article is often ghost written […]