My Internet Notebook

a journal on software, mobile, marketing

Archive for May, 2006

Windows XP Advanced Tricks

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Uninstall Programs

Sometimes a program was not in the Add/Remove program list but you want to remove it, you can find the ‘UninstallString’ key for the program in the windows registry HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall The you just run the command.

Written by Y.

May 22nd, 2006 at 3:19 pm

Posted in Testing

Mobile CRM the Growth Story

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There was a press release today that announced a special promotion on a product that I worked on long and hard – Sales Anywhere for Salesforce.com

“Sales Anywhere provides anywhere, anytime access to Salesforce.com accounts on Windows Mobile, Palm OS and BlackBerry devices — with or without a wireless connection. Whether at a customer site or on an airplane, industry-leading ease-of-use and robust synchronization ensure that sales professionals always have quick and reliable access to their Salesforce.com accounts to maximize field productivity and effectiveness.”

What’s interesting to note is that Sybase (SY) stock price rose 2.36% in a broadly negative market today, which translates to about $45 million in market cap value. I would like to think that investors are still very much optimistic about Mobile CRM’s growth prospect, a strong area of iAnywhere Solutions. Being a part of this whole effort definitely feels good.

(This post is not a piece of investor advice, implicit or explicit.)

Written by Y.

May 17th, 2006 at 12:44 am

Posted in Business,Mobility

Open Source Business Intelligence

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Some open source BI companies in the news:

Pentaho, a company that has created open-source business intelligence software, has landed $5 million in series A funding, the company said Thursday. Investors are New Enterprise Associates (NEA), which led the round, and Index Ventures. NEA partner Vladimir Jacimovic will join Pentaho’s board.

Business intelligence tools are for querying corporate databases, analyzing results and generating reports. Pentaho’s revenue model is to have a free low-end product and to charge for more functional versions of the product. The company also charges for support services. The free version is designed to serve between 300-500 people, according to a company spokesperson.

Vendors, such as SAS, Business Objects and Cognos, have been in the market for many years, but a handful of open-source companies are trying to break in. These include Jaspersoft and Greenplum, which have developed open-source business intelligence products. The Eclipse open-source foundation also launched a business intelligence project, started by Actuate.

Written by Y.

May 5th, 2006 at 2:17 pm

Posted in Testing

WSJ.com Pundits Discuss the Internets Future

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WSJ.com Pundits Discuss the Internets Future

Ms. Esther Dyson: The big challenges in the future will be limiting distribution of that information (security, privacy, confidentiality, etc.) on the one hand and filtering it out on the other (not search, but data-mining, exception-reporting, spam filtering, friend recommendations, behavioral targeting and the like). The big questions are who controls the filtering: individuals, organizations or governments? Will it be done transparently?

Mr. Vint Cerf: The Internet reaches only about a billion users so there are another 5.5 billion to go. It is beginning to include a good deal of information in many languages, but the domain name system needs to be outfitted with a similar capability. Access speeds are increasing but in a very non-uniform fashion. Business models for supporting various parts of the Internet are also in flux with new models being tested almost daily. Mobility is a component of the Internet that is plainly of increasing importance and will drive a variety of new applications. Entertainment media will be augmented with Internet counterparts with results that may not be entirely predictable but which will almost certainly have an interactive component missing from the traditional media. A plethora of “things” will become Internet connected and managed. There will be inventions for the use of the Internet that will come from academic and user settings to surprise us all when they appear, as they have in the past, in unexpected ways — propagating through viral advertising. There’s an Internet in your future, resistance is futile.

Written by Y.

May 4th, 2006 at 11:08 pm

Posted in Internet

Researching a Competitor

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Your first source is obviously the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

You should also consider accessing business directories online, such as Hoovers, Dun & Bradstreet, Leadership Library, Reference USA, Corptech, Datamonitor, Mergent, and Plunkett Research. These are good resources to understand a company’s ranking in its industry, its financial strength, its executives and their backgrounds, industry trends, competitors, and customer base.

Written by Y.

May 1st, 2006 at 5:35 pm

Posted in Testing