Gary Edwards - Bookmarks

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Diigo Blog

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Fighting Government Waste One Google App At a Time - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

Vivek Kundra, CTO of the District of Columbia, says he found two compelling reasons to switch the D.C. government over to Gmail and Google Apps: first, its cheap cost would save the taxpayer money by avoiding bloated software contracts. Second, he believes Google technology will help ensure business continuity and the safety of data in the event of a disaster or disruption. ......... Now we know why Google needs Chrome: they have the killer apps but are in need of a high end Web-App browser to run them in. Otherwise they can't begin to solve the problems of security and business continuity.

Tags: google-apps, MSOffice, Web-Apps on 2008-10-02 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (3) -About

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American Thinker: Wrecks, Lies and Barney Frank

But then a caller challenged Frank's continued insistence that the meltdown was brought on by Republican deregulation, citing the 1999 NY Times article concerning Clinton Administration efforts to force Fannie to ease mortgage standards in order to provide more minority and lower-income lending. The caller reminded Barney of his own words as ranking member from a 2003 Times piece reporting Bush's initiative to reign in Fannie and Freddie by creating new oversight under the Treasury Department:

Tags: politics, bailout, barney-frank, fannie-freddie on 2008-10-01 -All Annotations (5) -About

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But then a caller challenged Frank's continued insistence that the meltdown was brought on by Republican deregulation, citing the 1999 NY Times article concerning Clinton Administration efforts to force Fannie to ease mortgage standards in order to provide more minority and lower-income lending. The caller reminded Barney of his own words as ranking member from a 2003 Times piece reporting Bush's initiative to reign in Fannie and Freddie by creating new oversight under the Treasury Department:
"The recklessness of government is a primary culprit here. For years, Congress has been pushing banks to make risky, subprime loans. Using the authority of the Community Reinvestment Act, the big push for subprime mortgages began in earnest during the Clinton years. Banks that didn't play ball were subject to serious fines and lawsuits, and regulatory obstacles were placed in their way. While expanding access to the American Dream is a worthy goal, by blindly pursuing that goal and allowing the end to justify any means, we put millions of Americans at financial risk."
In truth, the Bill that would have likely averted the Fannie/Freddy failure -- the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 (S. 190) -- was Republican legislation introduced by Sen. Charles Hagel [R-NE] in January of 2005.
What's more, the "regulation" Frank now takes credit for was not his (H.R.1427 passed the House last year but never escaped Senate committee) but rather Nancy Pelosi's (H.R. 3221 - The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008). And Pelosi's version, not surprisingly and unlike its Republican predecessors, was signed marked up with over 66 pages of Liberal wealth redistribution wish-fulfillment under the guise of assuring "affordable housing." While it did establish (and way too late, Barney) the Federal Housing Finance Agency, with regulatory authority over Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Banks, and the Office of Finance, it's bogged down with tons of pork-fat. This oinker even increased the national debt limit from $9.82 trillion to $10.62 trillion, and commissioned a boatload of programs for low income families to spend it on.
Frank did, however, introduce legislation of his own in October of last year. Would you believe that H.R. 3838 was actually an attempt to temporarily increase the caps on Fannie/Freddie portfolios and to mandate the "use of 85% of such increase for refinancing subprime mortgages at risk of foreclosure?

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American Thinker: Time for McCain to Name Names

There is but one issue in the 2008 election. The economy. Or more to the point, the economic meltdown. Whoever wins this debate will win the election. Or perhaps more accurately, whoever loses this debate will lose the election. Period.

Tags: cedmond-wright, american-thinker, bailout, politics on 2008-10-01 -All Annotations (4) -About

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Jeffrey Miron, Economist: Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer - CNN.com

This bailout was a terrible idea. Here's why.

The current mess would never have occurred in the absence of ill-conceived federal policies. The federal government chartered Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970; these two mortgage lending institutions are at the center of the crisis. The government implicitly promised these institutions that it would make good on their debts, so Fannie and Freddie took on huge amounts of excessive risk.

Tags: miron, bailout, politics on 2008-09-30 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (13) -About

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Congress pushed mortgage lenders and Fannie/Freddie to expand subprime lending.
subprime lending was more than a minor relaxation of existing credit guidelines. This lending was a wholesale abandonment of reasonable lending practices in which borrowers with poor credit characteristics got mortgages they were ill-equipped to handle.
Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.
In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This "moral hazard" generates enormous distortions in an economy's allocation of its financial resources.
If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.
The bailout has more problems. The final legislation will probably include numerous side conditions and special dealings that reward Washington lobbyists and their clients.
So what should the government do? Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess.

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Online Platform helps create any interface for any device., Salesforce.com

Online Platform helps create any interface for any device.

May 12, 2008 - Salesforce Summer '08 incorporates Visualforce User-Interface-as-a-Service, which gives complete control over Salesforce UI for creating any UI for any Force.com application and extending it to any device. Visualforce Components, also included, enables addition, removal, and reassembly of basic building blocks of Salesforce UI to add custom-built components. ISV-built components can also be brought in to accelerate building of business applications that offer Web 2.0 usability. Visualforce is a new technology for developing powerful user interfaces (UIs) that can be used to enhance the standard Salesforce SaaS applications or to create custom PaaS applications on Force.com. Visualforce includes all the resources developers need to build rich, interactive applications and user experiences for a variety of audiences, applications, and devices. Combined with the powerful logic and workflow intelligence provided by Apex Code, Visualforce offers the flexibility to meet the requirements of applications that feature many different types of users on a variety of devices. Visualforce uses the best of Internet technology, including HTML, AJAX and Adobe Flex, for business applications, making them as innovative and as effective as their consumer Web counterparts.

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ACORN, Obama and the Mortgage Mess: Guilty Party by Mona Charen on National Review Online

The financial markets were teetering on the edge of an abyss last week. The secretary of the Treasury was literally on his knees begging the speaker of the House not to sabotage the bailout bill. The crash of falling banks made the earth tremble. The Republican presidential candidate suspended his campaign to deal with the crisis. And amid all this, the Democrats in Congress managed to find time to slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy little slush fund for ACORN.

ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a busy hive of left-wing agitation and “direct action” that claims chapters in 50 cities and 100,000 dues-paying members. ACORN is where Sixties leftovers who couldn’t get tenure at universities wound up.

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Obama's Leftism - WSJ.com

Community Organizer = Saul Alinsky Professional Radical and Revolutionary: If we discount his absences, Mr. Obama voted to ADA's approval more than 98% of the time.

This touches directly on the question of what, beyond the platitudes of unity, hope and change, Mr. Obama himself believes in. His voting record is one indication. Another is his intellectual evolution.

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Alinsky's institutional base was the Industrial Areas Foundation, which he called a "school for professional radicals" and whose goal he announced to be "revolution, not revelation."
"The vision statement of Trinity United Church of Christ," in Wright's words, was "based upon the systematized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of Dr. James Cone's book, Black Power and Black Theology."
"We are an African people, and remain 'true to our native land,' the mother continent, the cradle of civilization." It defines Trinity as, among other things, "a congregation committed to the historical education of African people in diaspora, a congregation committed to liberation." When Mr. Obama joined the church in the 1980s, it did not yet have a Web site, but he tells of a brochure that, while condoning the pursuit of income, warned congregants against the "psychological entrapment of black 'middleclassness.'
The flow of culture now ran in reverse as well, the former gang-banger, the teenage mother, had their own forms of validation—claims of greater deprivation, and hence authenticity.
Bill Ayers, a former leader of the so-called Weather Underground. This leftist terrorist group, akin to the German Baader-Meinhof gang or the Italian Red Brigades, specialized in bombing government buildings. Ayers later wrote boastfully that he had personally carried out an attack on the Pentagon. Ayers's wife and closest collaborator was Bernardine Dohrn, whose views were so extreme that they seemed to cross a line from ultraleftism to Satanism. At a meeting of the Weather Underground, she hailed the murders then recently committed by Charles Manson's demented followers.
Thanks to the meticulous investigations of the left-leaning blogger Steven Diamond (globallabor.blogspot.com), the story of Mr. Obama and Ayers's collaboration has been seeping into the public record despite extraordinary efforts to seal it.
in 1994, when the philanthropist Walter Annenberg put up $500 million to help the nation's public schools, Ayers submitted a grant proposal that secured $50 million for an entity called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The word "challenge" signified that the recipients were required to find double the amount in matching funds; this they did, disposing altogether of some $160 million.
Ayers named himself to head the Collaborative; Barack Obama, apparently by Ayers's choice, became chairman of the Board.
The two also served together on the board of the leftist Woods Fund from 1998 until 2001.
As his wife, Michelle, put it: "Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He's a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change."
Alice Palmer, who had decided to make a run for the U.S. Congress. She introduced Mr. Obama in Democratic Party circles as her anointed successor.
Like others among his mentors or patrons, Ms. Palmer, too, was a radical, a member of the executive body of the U.S. Peace Council, the least disguised of Soviet front organizations.
In his campaign for the Illinois senate, Mr. Obama was endorsed by the New Party, a coalition of socialists, Communists and other leftists.
He called himself "progressive," a term of art favored by veterans of the hard New Left, like Tom Hayden, as well as by old-time Communists.
her view, expressed in her standard stump speech, that our country is a "downright mean" place, "guided by fear," where the "life . . . that most people are living has gotten progressively worse."
a radical worldview. In one notable remark, he said of voters in economic distress that in their desperation they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Chastised for his condescension, he responded: "I said something that everybody knows is true." This was elitism of a very specific kind—the mentality of the community organizer, according to which people in the grip of "false consciousness" need to be enlightened as to the true nature of their class interests, and to the nature of their true class enemies.
the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income . . . the arms merchants in our own country . . . feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.
In this litany of global perfidy, the issues of Saddam Hussein's murderous dictatorship, of American security, of the future of freedom, shrink to inconsequentiality next to the struggle of the oppressed against their American capitalist overlords.
we must accept multiculturalism at home and share our wealth abroad.

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Cisco Mashes Up Collaboration | InternetNews Realtime IT News

David Knight of Cisco WebEX:
"Lots of people understand that collaboration is the driver for the next wave of productivity improvements," Knight said. "The real opportunity now is to automate the unstructured interactions between knowledge workers. What we're seeing is varying degrees of success in people recognizing the efficiency gains, and thus, varying degrees of adoption. The ones that are successful are the ones that are tying collaboration to the business process. "

Tags: webkit, wikiWORD, Chrome, knight, cisco, webex, collaboration on 2008-09-24 -All Annotations (1) -About

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iFundVC » Blog Archive » Launching the iFund Blog….

Insights Into the iPhone, iFund, and iFund Companies

Tags: webkit, iphone, ria, vc, silicon-valley, ifundVC on 2008-09-24 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Why Google Isn't Enough - Forbes.com

One key refrain that expresses this trend is heard in companies around the world: "Why can't we have a Google inside the four walls of our company?" While at first this seems like a good idea, the problem of using search inside a company is much more complicated than just indexing documents, throwing up a search box and asking people if they feel lucky.

This week, JargonSpy explores just what "enterprise search" means and why it is a complicated challenge that is becoming increasingly urgent for most companies to solve.

Tags: search, google, webkit, wikiword, rdf, metadata on 2008-09-23 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Will Collaboration Pit Cisco Against Microsoft, Google? - GigaOM

the growing popularity of cloud computing means corporate data centers will increasingly start to look like Internet data centers. Cisco has already recognized that as the “network” continues to become the focal point around which our digital personal and work lives revolve, the opportunity to make money will be immense. That’s why Chambers never misses an opportunity to talk about “collaboration.”

For instance, in the press release announcing the company’s latest numbers, he said: “We believe we are entering the next phase of the Internet as growth and productivity will center on collaboration enabled by networked Web 2.0 technologies.” But Cisco isn’t the only one with this vision — Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) are thinking along these lines as well, and are much further ahead in the game.

Tags: webkit, chrome, cisco, webex, sharepoint, microsoft, google on 2008-09-17 -All Annotations (2) -About

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20 Great Ideas For You To Steal -- Great Ideas -- InformationWeek

The technologiess used by 20 innovative companies surveyed by InformationWeek are profiled here. Ltos of good stuff. Ideas involving green technology, voice over IP, security, and more are profiled. Heavy use of portaland wki knowledge sharing systems. Data and business process services converge at the portal level to provide some interesting breakthroughs.

Tags: research on 2008-09-16 -All Annotations (1) -About

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IT Vendors Are Cautious On Web 2.0, Embrace SaaS -- Information Technology -- InformationWeek

IT companies love software as a service. The sector is one of the most enthusiastic users of Web-only applications such as Salesforce (NYSE: CRM).com, according to the 2008 InformationWeek 500 survey. Seventy-one percent of IT vendors use online business apps, making IT one of the top three out of 21 industries in that category.

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InformationWeek 500 Trends: Web 2.0, Globalization, Virtualization, And More -- InformationWeek 500

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I wonder if document collaboration will follow the wireless eMail trend? If wireless eMail drives the deployment of WiFi routers and computer devices (iPhone, BlackBerry, desktops) what will follow eMail through the WiFi pipeline? RiA Web Applications will deliver both data, documents and streaming media. Would it be safe to say that RiA was held back by the build out of the WiFi pipeline? That the transition from legacy "client/server" systems to RiA-WebStack-Cloud systems was stalled by the lack of a thick WiFi pipeline? Worth considering.
post by garyedwards on 2008-09-16

77% of InformationWeek 500 companies have deployed server virtualization widely, up from just 46% a year ago. Virtualization's often a key tool for data center consolidation, and 50% of top 100 companies consolidated data centers this year, compared with 28% of the remaining 400 companies.
Add Sticky Note
- IMHO, server virtualization for the sake of data consolidation is hosted-cloud computing for the "behind the firewall" innerWeb. Most RiA-WebStack technologies will work inside and out. For many it's an ROI questions. For many others it's a data-document security/reliability question. The technologies though are simillar if not the same.
  posted by garyedwards on 2008-09-16
WAN optimization/application acceleration also shot up
The third obvious trend is wireless e-mail
Add Sticky Note
- whoops, left my comments in the page section rather than attached to this WiFi wireless eMail section.
  posted by garyedwards on 2008-09-16
encrypted customer records
Two technologies, RFID and grid computing, don't slot well into either of the two categories described here--they're neither on the cusp of a big year yet nor have they broken through to wide adoption
"make business processes more efficient,"
Add Sticky Note
- ... "Make business processes more efficient" : 51%
  ...... Lower costs : 39%
  ........... home grown IT products and services : 39%
  ................ Create new business model / revenue stream : 12%
  ................... Going green : 6%
  
  Interesting breakdown but it shouldn't come as a surprise. The focus is on making existing business processes more efficient as opposed to a "rip out and replace" re engineering. This is also why SharePoint is so successful! The Microsoft WebStack adds collaborative - web value to existing business systems instead of re inventing. It's the integration with MSOffice-Outlook-Access desktop productivity environment that rules 95% of business "client/server" systems that is the secret to SharePoint's success. Microsoft is deep inside existing enterprise systems and has a complete plan for adding web value as well as providing for the great transiton from "client/server" to client/ WebStack-Cloud-RiA /server models. Like SaaS, SOA and Web 2.0
  posted by garyedwards on 2008-09-16

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InformationWeek 500 Trends: Web 2.0, Globalization, Virtualization, And More -- InformationWeek 500

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InformationWeek 500 Trends: Web 2.0, Globalization, Virtualization, And More -- InformationWeek 500

What the InformationWeek 500 data tells us about the use of emerging technologies.

Tags: research, web20, ria, sharepoint, portal, document-management, cms on 2008-09-16 -All Annotations (11) -About

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Web 2.0 is one of the trendiest ideas in tech, for instance, but there are entire industries where not one company in our survey cites it as a top productivity improver. Meantime, adoption of some more tactical technologies, such as WAN optimization, has exploded in the last year.
critical trends, from Web 2.0 to globalization to virtualization
When it comes to using Web 2.0 collaboration tools
the momentum is behind wikis, blogs, and social networking, though primarily among co-workers.
Use of hosted collaboration applications--from calendars to document sharing--hit a reasonably high 60%.
Asked what technologies have improved productivity the most, only 14% overall cite "encouraging the use of Web 2.0 technologies.
One possible bright spot in our survey is that implementing new collaboration tools, such as Microsoft SharePoint, is cited more often than any other--48%--as a technology leveraged to improve productivity.
at satisfied companies, business units rather than IT departments are much more likely to drive the selection of Web 2.0 technologies. At companies dissatisfied with Web 2.0, IT is more likely to take the lead.
Add Sticky Note
- Note that wikiWORD hits directly the top three technologies: collaboration, integrated search and hosted docuemnt management!
  posted by garyedwards on 2008-09-16
There's more to Web 2.0 than collaboration tools like wikis and other employee-facing tools, and there's interesting progress on the critical back-end layer that enables Web 2.0. One is mashups; 38% of InformationWeek 500 companies are combining Web and enterprise content in new ways. The other is in Web 2.0 development tools.

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How to Fund a Startup

Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the next gear. .... Y Combination founder Paul Graham explains the many issues and considerations involved with funding a startup.

Few startups get it quite right. Many are underfunded. A few are overfunded, which is like trying to start driving in third gear.

I think it would help founders to understand funding better—not just the mechanics of it, but what investors are thinking.

Tags: yc, vc, entrepeneur, entrepreneurship, investment, startup, angels on 2008-09-15 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (36) -About

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two reasons: they understand your situation, and they're a
source of contacts and advice.
The contacts and advice can be more important than the money.
the concept of exit strategy
Another concept we need to introduce now is valuation.
Some angel investors join together in syndicates.
One of the dangers of taking investment from individual angels,
rather than through an angel group or investment firm, is that they
have less reputation to protect.
What
kind of anti-dilution protection do they want?
Fair or not, investors do it if you let them. Even VCs do it. And
funding delays are a big distraction for founders, who ought to be
working on their company, not worrying about investors. What's a
startup to do?
The key to closing deals is never to stop pursuing alternatives
Seed Funding Firms
Seed firms differ from angels and VCs in that they invest exclusively
in the earliest phases—often when the company is still just an
idea.
seed investors usually care less
about the idea than the people. This is true of all venture funding,
but especially so in the seed stage.

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