In 1999 when senior vice president Marc Benioff left Oracle to create Salesforce.com, many thought he was headed for a cliff at full steam but 10 years down the line, software as a service (SaaS) is a matured business model. Online productivity applications have joined the fray and are maturing at a brisk pace (Say Google Docs, Zoho).
In our modern enterprise, the database is a corner of most of the software architecture and I ask myself, will the database move into the cloud too? Will I be able to implement applications and point it to a database somewhere unknown?
The benefits are obvious – zero hardware configurations, zero backups (hey, I could spend a million dollars for that!), titanium grade security protection, etc. But should things fail, I have loss of data staring me in the face. With that I could get a jail time or be bankrupt depending on what data is missing.
These are interesting times.
Just like every other person, almost all my phone contacts are on Facebook, with constantly changing profiles. However, keeping track of who has changed picture or who has a new number is hell. Obviously, the dudes at Developing Trends shared my pain. So they came up with Fonebook, a nifty application that synchronizes your Microsoft Outlook contacts with their Facebook profiles. One caveat though, it doesn’t synchronize numbers and emails as it is against Facebook security policy.
Nokia is definitely the largest maker of any type of phone in the world, from the penny pinching Nokia 1100 to the super sexy N900, the mainframe of smartphones. While market penetration is good with the cheaper phones, the more expensive smartphones offer more profit margins.
Look at it this way, in Nigeria the cheapest of Nokia phones go for about N3,900 ($26) retail price from which Nokia, the distributor and retailers must have eke out their profit. I can only imagine how much each can get out of that phone: It is probably a game of numbers. The bread and butter is from the more expensive phones. Analysts have opined that Nokia makes as much as 25% margin on the more expensive phones. Generally profit margins on smart phones that can play movies and send e-mails can be 10 percentage points higher than standard devices.
I have always known that one day I would end up fatherless but just never thought about it until it happened today. September 28, 2009 will be a day I will never forget, just like other important dates.
My father died.
Mustapha Adedapo Olowe was a dreamer. He could crank up ideas faster than you could digest them (I got that from him). He was hardworking and friendly (I got the hardworking part from him too). He was hardly ever sick. But then, like the way some economist said, on the long run we would all be dead.
So today was his own day. He's left behind kids who will never forget him. And also grand kids, who would probably never stop hearing stories about him.
May his soul rest him peace.
Agini Malaika
That has been the question running on my mind for so long. I use a HP desktop at work, currently running Windows XP SP2. But I know that, if I want, Linux could be made to run on it with minimal efforts (which involve scouting for drivers). At home, I run around with a Pavilion DV2000 that came with a Vista but I kicked that out and ran XP SP3 for about 5 months before laying my hands on Windows 7 Ultimate evaluation version(which is as sexy as it gets).
