commbasics

Siliconvalley.com takes Google to task today  as hypocritical in demanding human rights in China as a requirement for getting business from the west.  They quote  co-founder  Sergey Brin   in an interview with The Guardian  today, who urges government and businesses to join in standing against state censorship, and point out that Google was in China for four years before pushing this idea. I'm going to give a big thumbs up to Google for getting religion now.  For almost two decades our business and government has been saying that once China sees how great it is to have free enterprise, they will learn the virtue of real freedom... and we can all get rich together.  But oppression of the masses has been part of Chinese society for millennia and thinking that making a few billion is going to change that is ridiculous. Google has learned a tough lesson.  Money doesn't fix everything.  If people want to join the party, they have to work with...

Ok, I know what a meme is in principal.  But every time I asked someone to tell me what it is, I got this gobbledygook of technobabble about genes and evolution and conversation.  And when I ask for an example, no one can remember one.  And because I could never get a solid example, the concept was alway murky for me.  But today, I fell into a meme.  Now I know what it is.  I'm going to share. A meme is a web-based conversation that generally has a life of its own.  Consider the email-based urban myth about Madelyn Murray O'Hare trying to get religious programs off TV.  That's a meme.  It's not a good thing, but that's an example.  Memes have basic characteristics in all their forms.  That's where the gene thing comes into being.  My son and I look different, but we share the same genes.  A meme can appear in many conversations that appear completely unrelated, but there are certain aspects of the conversation that link th...

Like any tech niche, social media is filled with buzz words, few of which are adequately defined.  Like "transparent."  All the consultants say you need to be transparent, which is supposed to be a synonym for truth.  But as Pilate asked, "What is truth?"   Then this week, was a flood of revelational posts.   Robert Scoble talked about the death of start-up launches in the context of the uselessness of start-up events, like Demo where they charge you $18K to participate and strictly control the flow of information... and how a good launch should be done.   Harry Gries  did a piece on how important it is for a start-up to focus on why they exist, not what they make.  And finally, the redoubtable David Scott Meerman  chimed in with a piece on solving a problem rather than discussing a product, essentially confirming Harry's two bits. In all of this information, I was having live conversations with technologists...

So I woke up this morning with a note from Cyril Spasevski at Magillem who said they are going to invest in a new website... in English.  He then directed me to portions of the site ... that are in English ... that identify the design products they offer.  Yes, they do sell design tools. I mention this because when someone shows a willingness to accept and act on constructive criticism, in demonstrates a high quality of character.  Well done, Cyril.

Having a bit of an exchange with Cyril Spasevski, chairman and CTO of Magillem Design Services in France, on Harry the ASIC Guy's site .  Cyril takes exception to my calling his company an design services company and not an EDA tool vendor.  Specifically, he says:  When you speak about a company ….”Magillem is…”…please could you refer to the official web site magillem.com, a minimum is to look at the company activity before announcing your “vision”…of what we are supposed to do!!! Gary is right on the activity, we are not a service organization, we provide eda tools and xml content assembly software, and are profitable and public.Twitter and blogs sometimes are not enough…to understand things, Lou, i hope that all your actions are not done in the same way. When you say”has systematized it’s offering to companies needing to outsource design.” : where did you get this ???? Please verify your sources as a journalist, with talent as usual. I don't need to get into the de...

Got a tweet from my buddy Robert Jones at OpDots today on an article in Mashable about Twitter  (And don't you just love how you get information nowadays).  the article was primarily a graphic on Twitter results since it's inception. You've probably all heard bits of this before and you use the information to determine whether you are going to get involved at all.  Why be on Twitter when most of the conversation is pointless crap and lots of people drop out.  Well, to paraphrase an old adage on government: People get the kind of media they deserve. If you want to have excellent media that you don't participate in, then you are going to have to pay for it.  If you don't want to pay for media and don't want to participate, be ready to accept a lot of crap.  But if you deliver valuable content and participate in the conversation, you get valuable media that you don't have to pay for. Twitter has some definite strategy problems, but they are not the creator o...

I joined a beta program recently for a product called Pop.to from Crowd Factory . I found it, in all places, on a Facebook -- and and I NEVER click on Facebook ads, but this piqued my interest. Measurement and Engagement are two of the big must-do's of social media.  The problems are, one, engagement and measurement are generally two separate efforts and, two, everyone has a different goal in measurement.  To do the job right, you have to figure out what you want to measure first and hope it is the right thing to measure.  Once you begin the engagement though, what your audience is interested in may completely change what you want to measure -- and hamper engagement in the process. I've always thought that there could be a way to engage and listen to your audience, so you could adjust accordingly, but have it tied directly into the measurement, all in one effort.  When I checked out Pop.to, I said, "Eureka!" Here's what I under...

options="{'widgetName':'SOTM','widgetStyle':'thumbsUp' } "> This week I started noticing something related to entertainment programming.  First, there is a new series called " Who do you think you are? " produced by Lisa Kudrow and underwritten primarily by Ancestry.com.  Second, there is predominant product placement and advertising on Dirty Jobs.  Third, Bertolli is advertising a web program featuring Marisa Tomei traveling around the culinary world of Ital y. These are just few examples of a definite trend of corporations creating concepts for media content.  This is nothing new, of course, but it's at a level not seen in decades, going back to radio programs (Remember Ovaltine and Little Orphan Annie?  Of course you don't.  Neither do I).  It's akin to the concept Brian Fuller calls Vendor as Publisher . There are those that are going to freak out about this, saying the corporate takeover of media is the death of j...

A few weeks ago I posted a cryptic statement on my Facebook page. "You'll never guess who wants to know what I know." Lots of people guessed, mostly in snarky comments, but I couldn't really elaborate until I had a confirmation.  A few minutes ago, I got the confirmation.  It may not mean much to most of you but I'm pretty blown away by it. I will be speaking about demystifying social media to clergy and laypeople attending the Assemblies of God Northern California/Nevada District Council, an annual conference held in Sacramento for the largest district in the world's fastest growing Protestant denomination.  There are many reason to be excited about this, but I will give you the one that gets to me.   For more than 100 years, evangelical churches have been at the forefront of blocking access to new communication technologies, but eventually adopt them when they see the value in reaching new audiences.  For the first time, a leadin...

Anyone looking for a verification engineer? Got an introduction from a young friend whose opinion I respect for a guy in the UK looking for work in the US. He's got experience in Constrained Random Verification, C++ verification testbench design, SCV, SV Verification tool design, Functional Coverage, Code Coverage, Silicon Characterisation, Cadence Design Tools, LEC, Matlab, Python, C; used to work for Broadcom and Icera; and has an MSEE. Since he contacted me through social technology, I thought I'd give a shout-out to the EDA homies. If there are any takers, drop me a line or a comment.

The customer/client is no more. He is now your partner and you are his. Your mutual success is intertwined. Spent a few days away... thinking.  Lots of stuff needs to be sorted out and I'm getting there.  Much of it has been inspired by Seth Godin's book Tribes , which has been incredibly encouraging personally and I highly recommend it.  But another large chunk came out of a story that Craig Ferguson  told about buying a rug in Turkey. He said he found this rug in a shop, liked it and asked how much it was.  The shop owner quoted a price and Craig reached for his wallet.  The shop owner said, "Let's have a cup of tea first."  They sat, drank tea, chatted, and then dickered on the price of the rug.  An agreeable price was set and Ferguson walked out with the rug at a price less then was originally quoted.  It's the way things are done there. What was not talked about was the reason it was done. ...

News popped on CNN today that Facebook has been awarded a patent on streaming news feeds on social media.  Since that's all Twitter is, look for lawsuits to pop up. Within Twitter itself, there are rumors of an updated interface that will kill off third-party tweet feeds,  that might be good for them, but Twitter claims the reason their traffic has fallen off is because of those apps.  If they are wrong and the fall off continues, they have no one to blame,