Disqus - Latest Comments for Thorsten

Re: Twitter Being Used to Find Missing 14-Year-Old McKenzie “Kenzie” Church

Thorsten — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:02:27 -0000

Word came over just now from @Bridget_NewGirl that McKenzie was found (RT via @Armano). Anyone has more news?

Re: On Definitions: IPTV And Not-So-IPTV

Thorsten — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:01:47 -0000

Hi Rani,

Could you elaborate a bit more about what exactly you are looking for? Are you talking about the connection between the (cell) tower and the mobile phone? Let me know how I can help.

Re: What are the key characteristics or competencies of a great innovator?

Thorsten — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:42:04 -0000

Update: McKinsey published an excellent video interview with Judy Estrin who talks about the three horizons of innovation: http://bit.ly/R9DV

Re: Text-To-Font Wordpress Plugin

Thorsten — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:48:53 -0000

Oh, my, I should have used Wordpress SHORTCODES, as described in: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/02/02/mast...

Re: Text-To-Font Wordpress Plugin

Thorsten — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:17:12 -0000

Hi Michael,

[I have to put spaces between the "<", ">", and the tags so they don't get interpreted or filtered ;))]

Can you give me an example where your TTF plugin renders text "centered"? In my experience, the width of the TTF images is exactly the length of the text. If you want text to be centered, you would have to enclose it in a < div > or < p > or < h1 > tag etc. and then center the enclosed TTF image via CSS. In case your image also has a background color, your enclosure tag needs to have that background color as well. So if you're using my plugin, this helped:

< h1 style="text-align:center">||Super Header||||< /h1 >

Also: for compatibility reasons with non-image browsers as well as for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reasons, you should never render important text (like headings) into images and then not set the ALT tag accordingly. An even better solution is something called "StateScoping" of CSS, shown here:

http://alt.skybound.ca/statescope/

In the upper right corner of the main text content there is a link to switch "scopes", and you can see the difference between the page rendered with images and without. The example is also somewhat SEO safe, even with images switched on, as the text will still be included in the page and just displaced by CSS.I say "somewhat", because my latest experience is that Google does interpret the CSS placement for otherwise higher ranking sites to avoid tweaking of sites with SEO code that would never be displayed - such as putting "Nokia, N95, Gizmodo, Samsung, LG, G1, iPhone" within an < div > container that is placed off the screen just so to improve the hit rate on these keywords without actually displaying them :).

Cheers,
Thorsten

Re: Business innovation is NOT dependent on creative people

Thorsten — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:41:27 -0000

Update: mcKinsey published an excellent video interview with Judy Estrin who talks about the three horizons of innovation: http://bit.ly/R9DV

Re: WiMax Femto and WiMax Mobile Opportunities

Thorsten — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:36:20 -0000

I was looking for external links and pings and re-read my article again - I can't believe I actually wrote to "wait for LTE, leapfrogging WiMAX" ...

Obviously both technologies / standards are "4G", and quite equal in terms of their goals and objectives.

After getting up to speed on both technologies (on a superficial level) I think that LTE will get the upper hand with Tier 1 Telecoms, but that's all stuff of another blog post... Just wanted to share my "mea culpa" with you ;)

Re: Eight Reasons Why Buying IT Now Is NOT Critical

Thorsten — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:20:35 -0000

<cite>Daniel W. Rasmus</cite>, a Futurist in Washington wrote a great and valued response to my post.

Please go ahead and read his posting, here is my response to him:

Hello Daniel,

I really like and appreciate your comments and fully underwrite them. You do make a couple of assumptions, though, and I would 100% follow you under these assumptions (as I said in my post, I intended to make some bold statements as a counter opinion). I especially like one of the recurring thoughts of- and I paraphrase - "If your business model relies on IT, you better make sure it works - effectively and efficient".

And sometimes people might not realize how much their business model relies - or could rely - on IT. I recently helped a large wholesale appliance installation company and a one-man-show cabinet-maker to generate and track sales leads through an IT-based system, including social networking advertisment campaigns, dedicated blog sponsorship, and local sponsorship. I guess they never thought that this part of their business model was flawed because they used old computer systems.

I am divided on your point of new talent attraction and "latest cutting edge IT stuff" as a must have - that is certainly true for some sectors (mine definitely!), not so much in other industries. I think this is a case-by-case decision, but you make a valid point here.

In terms of "IT for customer relationship management with customers from Delhi" I certainly agree, a good example. And, as you also point out, just a part of the equation. I quoted some great comments by Seth Godin and Tom Peters in http://www.playoutintelligence.com/2009/01/07/t... from a recent video interview they did with McKinsey, maybe you find that worth watching.

Anyways, I hope you get lots of responses, I myself am interested to see both sides discussed. And of course as an IT innovation geek I'd like to see more geeky stuff around me ;)

Re: Cloud Computing Is Not A Resource Problem – It’s A Design Problem

Thorsten — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:38:06 -0000

why *exactly*? When i'm struggling with server issues, I buy a load balancer - in general? Could you elaborate a little bit, please? or are you simply advertising that you have a load balancer at kemptechnologies? ;)

Please let me know, I'm genuinely interested where you see that connection, for what business need, and for what technology problem...

Re: Cloud Computing Is Not A Resource Problem – It’s A Design Problem

Thorsten — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:02:45 -0000

You make some good points here, Sachin. I guess the lesson learned is that a lot of people who have little previous experience with large deployments also have little experience with the right testing environments. In effect they forgo basic testing principles and procedures that are "old" and well known and instead think that more resources can solve their problem instead of the right design - which is exactly my point.

On the other hand, if she would have 100 local PCs in her network, a DHCP router would've assigned 100 IP addresses, which in return would've avoided triggering flooding policies. Bad virtual machine setup, on the other hand, could lead to a single IP address for 100s of machines, resulting in her aforementioned triggering of flooding policies.

And yes, I'm looking forward to the order entry due to "please rewrite my applications" requests :)

Re: Chris Anderson’s Zero-Cost Digital Distribution? Not For Me!

Thorsten — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:44:45 -0000

Hi Pete, Thanks for your comment, and I fully agree! And S3 is of course not really up to par in terms of latency, so no actual real-time data, please :)

One of the common slides that I present says that scale of (real-time and no-so real-time) information logistics is a design problem, no a resource problem.

Re: Why Mobile Advertisement Itself Doesn’t Make Sense For Carriers

Thorsten — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:18:42 -0000

Jennifer Van Grove published a nice article on Foursquare vs. Twitter Local Advertisement (thanks!). She validates the point about smaller players and the "goldmine" of (local) mobile advertisement:

As a San Diego resident and frequent Foursquare user, I believe that local businesses have an unbelievable opportunity to leverage the advertising program to connect with customers ready to buy. There’s a very dedicated core group of users ready and willing to make our check-ins count for something, and the best part is we’re also an active social bunch, so you could find your coffee shop, bar, hotel, or clothing store the talk of the town both on Foursquare and Twitter. Now that’s smart business.