Orrin Edenfield

There’s a large amount of untapped data sitting in CRM, ERP and other enterprise systems, ripe with possibilities. Big Data solutions like Hadoop will allow businesses and software vendors to put that data to use. Nucleus Research predicts we’ll soon see enterprise applications with embedded analytics, integration of role-based interfaces, and a push-model for information, which is already available with some collaborative applications such as Salesforce.com’s Chatter

The possibilities are endless. Many times today we see HDFS and other Hadoop-technologies used to store messages (think Facebook) or log/analytics files (think Google search) but ERP and accounting data can also be stored there and the business intelligence world is just starting to see the possibilities here. This is going to be fun!

What China does better than any place else in the world is to innovate by commercialization, as opposed to constant research and perfecting the theory, like the West. When the Chinese get an idea, they test it in the marketplace. They’re happy to do three to four rounds of commercialization to get an idea right, whereas in the West companies spend the same amount of time on research, testing, and validation before trying to take products to market. The electric vehicle is a good example. The Chinese view is that it’s not going to be perfect, and they’re not trying to make it perfect from day one. They’ve got a few more series of improvements to go, and they’ll work on them in parallel with finding out what the customer really likes and adapting to that. That’s an innovative way of doing innovation, something that the rest of the world is struggling to understand. In our business in China, if we don’t innovate through or with commercialization, we’re going to lag behind our competitors.

I try to take this approach when looking at a large project. If you don't focus on small wins and learning as you go, you end up getting lost in the big picture. Start with something is 60-70% to where you want to be and then go through an iterative process to get to 100%.

Instead of leading with new technology, the studios lead with litigation, legislation and lobbying. (Imagine if the $110 million/year spent on lobbying went to disruptive innovation.)

Great read on the history of the movie/music industry's fight with technology and how Congress has gotten pulled into the middle of it.

But there isn’t a clear path in increasing analytical capacity, and that’s what goes wanting.

This goes right along with something seen for years. IT for the sake of IT rather than IT investment for the sake of returning value to the business. There is little point in setting up a Hadoop cluster and storing 200 TB of data if there is no plan on using that 200 TB of data for a business use and you have the appropriate man-power (however little or much is required) to extract the value.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

Eric Baldeschwieler, Keynote speaker at Apache Lucene Eurocon 2011 in Barcelona last week, predicts that 50% of the world’s data will be stored on Hadoop within 5 years

Interesting article on the key role search (Lucene/Solr) plays in a Big Data architecture.

Why does social intelligence emerge as the make-or-break leadership skill set? For one, leadership is the art of accomplishing goals through other people.

Something I find hard at times but I think I am getting better with as I gain more experience and insight into how others approach problems.

This is what the rest of the world has been waiting for. I am looking forward to using this device.

A survey by Citigroup showed the primary inhibiter to tablet purchases among consumers was the price, and most struggling would-be iPad manufacturers, like Motorola and Research in Motion, cannot afford shrink margins to undercut the iPad.

While the cost to manufacture the Amazon tablet is not yet known, Amazon itself is one of the few companies that can even afford to sell a device at a loss to firmly plant its platform. It is expecting $10 billion in revenue in the current quarter.

Yes, I will spend $250 that gets me 90-95% of what an iPad does at $500. I think there are many of us out there looking forward to this Amazon.