I’ve been using or should I say playing around on Foursquare for about five months. My initial reaction is that Foursquare is plain silly.  However, I keep “checking-in” and I keep accepting friend requests. Next thing I know, I want to be part of the 4SQ action. These guys are on to something.

For businesses Foursquare is rather simple, you have an easily accessible demographic profile that costs you nothing. You’ve got customers that have tried your products that you could potentially market to and/or incentives a return visit. You’ve basically got a low budget loyalty program. Because the information is real and the price is right why shouldn’t businesses get into the 4SQ action? They should. If you own a storefront get in now!

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I was one of three people that camped outside of my suburban Best Buy last year to guarantee I walked out with a Palm device that was buzzing the interwebs. Despite syncing my life, the Palm buzz has sizzled out. Android powered devices, the continued success of iPhone, and the fact that many companies are handing out Blackberries to their employees has made it very difficult for Palm to get noticed.

Today may be a low point.  Palm released financial numbers that are mediocre at best, and Palm stock took a beating in after hours trading.  But I’m not worried about Palm.

I skimmed their financial numbers and didn’t see a breakdown in their revenue, but Palm finally has close to 2000 apps in their App Catalog.  This growing catalog provides a constant revenue stream for Palm Inc.  Their App Catalog alone should help stabilize their cash flow. [...]

Hundreds of link shortening services are available today, but I believe some research and consideration is a must before embracing two of the more popular services. Let me explain. Bit.ly and ow.ly are two link shrinking services that are trending toward greater acceptance. A NY Times article from this summer estimated that bit.ly accounted for 46 percent of all links shortened.

Bit.ly’s recent success is a derivative of Twitter’s integration with bit.ly as their default link shortening service. Unlike the hundreds of other services, bit.ly has focused on reliability and basic analytics. Tinyurl, the original link shrinker, never embraced value-added services and had some issues with reliability, which most likely explains why Twitter shifted from Tinyurl to bit.ly. Also, bit.ly has attracted several well-recognized investors to solidify their dominance in the link shrinking space. [...]

Large organizations are spending millions to monitor their plethora of discombobulated systems.  This spend seemed logical pre-Twitter when we didn’t really understand the power of combining a simple 140 character message with an open API. However, now is a great time for IT companies to rethink their enterprise and closed approached to monitoring.

With the advent of social media both on the Internet and internal to many organizations, we are becoming more accustom to sharing information. Twitter is leading the way with “system” like updates for people.  Ever so often a person will send a notification to their followers or stakeholders about their life.  The status is usually as insignificant as, “I’m at Starbucks.”  However, it could be as critical as the need of the person.  While the individual can protect their status updates to approved followers, most Twitter users update in an unprotected state.  However, only the people following them see their notification unless an active search is performed. [...]

Remember the pirate port-town called Tortuga in Pirates of the Caribbean? Tortuga was out of the jurisdictions of the Royal Navy and the East India Trading Company. The place really lacked order. In Tortuga, pirates got slapped and first-mates where found in less than desirable places. Many IT professionals may think of images similar to Tortuga when they hear the phrase, “open source.” However, the results reveal that open source is not a disorderly software collaboration, so the images of Tortuga don’t apply.

Now think back again with me to Port Royal. Port Royal was the heavily-guarded British Caribbean stronghold. Most of the time, order was maintained, and only a few major problems occurred such as when Lady Elizabeth was abducted by pirates. How could the Governor’s daughter be kidnapped in such a secure place? However, Port Royal maintained the very important image of being under British control regardless of real threats and problems. Now this depiction could accurately portray our more commercial-ware solutions. [...]

Before (or Pre) this year’s Computer Electronic Show, I was not thinking about Palm. My current Palm Centro is slow, too small, and all of the apps are really old. I had decided on waiting for a Google Android phone for the Sprint network.

Then CES happened… The new Pre looks like a character from Wall-e. Applications can be developed using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS (well that’s a great tool box – seriously – think gmail). The keyboard appears to be more accommodating and the foundation of this eggy looking device is Linux. Finally applications can be managed like a deck of cards and they maintain their state as you move from app to app. [...]