I was a guest speaker at the IDC Marketing Performance Measurement (MPM) conference yesterday in New York on the CMO panel for effective strategies for marketing performance measurement. I had the opportunity to discuss MPM with competitors, large and small tech companies as well as with the IDC CMO advisory folks. I thought I would share my own key takeaways on the state of MPM in the tech industry.

EBIC regular and digital photo expert Kathleen O'Connell from AstraZeneca sent me this photo from the Wednesday night Alacra dinner. Thanks, Kathleen!...

California was the first state to pass a law requiring companies that keep personal data to disclose when that data is lost or stolen. Since then, many states have followed suit. Now Congress is debating federal legislation that would do the same thing nationwide.

The BDFL just posted that Google is looking for students from undergrad through Ph.D levels to work on new open source code and mentors to, well, mentor these students. Obviously, since Guido is posting this, the particular students and mentors he's trying to draw are Pythonically inclined. This is a great opportunity to get involved in some Python related project. The Python Summer of Code Wiki is here and the Google Summer of Code page is here.

Remember NeXT? Steve Job's next big thing after he left Apple in the 80's? Weblog Mac on Intel reports they've gotten NeXT OpenStep up and running on a new Intel-based MacBook Pro. OpenStep was developed in the early '90s to let NeXT's NeXTStep OS run on Solaris SPARC workstations. NeXTStep, which dates back to the late 80's was a Mach-kernel based Unix with a GUI that later evolved into Rhapsody and eventually OS X. GNUStep continues a live, open-source and developing GNU release of OpenStep.

What's worse than discovering that your backup hard drive has mechanical difficulties that just killed a years worth of your pictures and videos? I'll give you the answer: Discovering that the file system on your primary data drive is corrupt and also just killed that same years worth of pictures and video.

Microsoft's David Weiss provides a A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab. Lots of interesting information and good photos from the home of Mactopia.com.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

My son and I woke up Sunday morning and drove a rented truck to New York City to move his worldly goods into an apartment there.

Good news for coders, the Visual Studio Express & Coding4Fun Team at Microsoft have posted an announcement on the ASP.NET Forums that the Express Editions of Visual Studio 2005 will be free till the end of time (as opposed to the first-year free deal previously announced). Get out and grab them today if you haven't already done so and join the 5 million or so others who have downloaded these cool tools.

Surj Patel has just published an intriguing column over on the VoIP-News site that discusses the new open source Freeswitch project. Surj is excited by the announcement last week that Freeswitch has the ability to broker calls between the PSTN and the VoIP-specific protocol Jingle (used by GoogleTalk), and sees this as a potential tipping point for a flood of new innovative applications:

Speaking of Security is the RSA Security Blog and Podcast. It features a group of experts in identity management, encryption, privacy, policy, and enterprise security standards.

I'm perplexed by Ellison's FT interview re: open source. I only half believe him when he says that Red Hat doesn't own anything. Ellison is trying to cast a shadow on the Red Hat deal from two weeks ago, and, to me, it speaks volumes that he's so prepared to answer questions about the JBoss deal. Here's an illuminating (and perplexing) quote:

SOA Expert Podcast Show 35...Great Debate, SOA vs. Traditional Enterprise Architecture Listen to the latest SOA Expert Podcast...

Oracle and Google

 

I heard Marissa Mayer talk at BayChi.

ongoing � The Cost of AJAX

So saying "AJAX is expensive" (or that it's cheap) is like saying "A mountain bike is slower than a battle tank" (or that it's faster). The truth depends on what you're doing with it. In the case of web sites, it depends on how many fetches you do and where you have to go to get the data to satisfy them.

I would start with the above, move on to "The Real AJAX Upside", and then call yourself a better, more informed hacker because of it. (Or a better, more informed Mort, if in fact such a term is more appropriate in your particular case (would you admit it if it was?))

Update: Worth noting,

In answer (posted on April 2nd, 2006) to the question

... when we can expect a 1.0 release?

Dino Viehland

Widgets, BitTorrent, content blocking: Introducing Opera 9 Beta

I know a fair amount about evangelism and a little bit about blogging, so I've combined the two in order to provide some insights into the evangelism of a blog. Granted, I've only been at blogging for 120 days...

CFDJ's Simon Horwith weighs in on ColdFusion, Flex, CF in the Adobe era, and more, stating that "this acquisition is the best thing that could have ever happened to ColdFusion".

Using sudo effectively.