latoga labs

Alliances & Partnership Advising

© 2006–2026 · Log in

Green Scene Hits Your Code

2 Comments

Since my mind is on efficiency this morning (see previous post about Facebook) I wanted to share an interesting blog posting I’ve had open in a browser for a few weeks now.  Steve Sounders, web performance guru from Google and previously Yahoo, posted some interesting thoughts on how green is your web page?

Steve did a quick mental experiment of calculating the CO2 emissions caused by bad code on a large website, he used wikipedia as his example.  I find this a bit interesting on the cyclical nature of the topic.  I might be showing my age a bit here, but back when I was a lad learning how to code up on the frozen tundra, we actually took into consideration efficiency and the cost of operations (maybe it was our proximity to Cray Research that drove this…).  I find it interesting that the green movement is causing this topic to be thought of again but in a different way.

I have been doing a little fun project like this myself at home.  A friend loaned my a device called Kill A Watz, which you plug into a power outlet and then plug other electrical devices into the Kill A Watz. The Kill A Watz then measurs how much electicity you are using on that one outlet.  It can track over time and give you the KW over a time period as well as real time watt usage.  I am using this on our home entertainment center to measure how much electricity is uses when it’s in standby mode.  Watch for a posting on that next week.  (I will give a teaser and let you know that a flat panel plasma TV uses twice the electricity when displaying a bright scene than when displaying a dark one…)

Is Facebook Really Efficient?

1 Comment

In my morning reading I came across the BusinessWeek article Facebook CEO Admits Missteps. I found one specific statement in this article a bit contradictory (in my mind):

“We are trying to help people communicate really efficiently, and we are going to allow developers to build some of them inside Facebook.”

I find thiscontradictory because the Facebook interface is the last thing I would think of as efficient. Maybe it’s just me, but since the first time I logged onto Facebook, I had a hard time trying to figure out how to use it. And when I started looking into developing a Facebook application I ran into the same issue. For a company that is trying to enable “efficient communication”, they should look at making their application interface more efficient and user friendly.

Am I along in this thinking? Does anyone else think that the interface to Facebook is hard to use. When I compare it next to LinkedIn, I find it very hard to use.

Maybe that’s part of the problem, what I use as my reference point. LinkedIn has a very clear purpose and (in comparison to Facebook) is very narrow in focus. When you’re trying to be everything for everyone, it’s hard to keep the usability.

Apple’s New Corporate Push

Leave a Comment

In my morning reading this morning, the headline Apple Goes Corporate from a BusinessWeek article caught my eye. I felt for a while that the pre-announced iPhone SDK was a lucrative opportunity for some enterprising developers to port or build a VPN client for the iPhone. This would be the missing link that would allow corporate users to move to the iPhone as they would at least be able to get their email on the device, even it if wasn’t in as seemless way as a BlackBerry provides. There would be a large number of new iPhone under just such a scenario.

But from this article, it looks like Apple is planning on doing a much more frontal approach to developing specifically for the Corporate market. What I don’t understand is…What Took So Long?

Did it take a 35% stock price drop to budge the stubbornness out of Apple with regards to the corporate customers? Or is now finally the right time after having enought Macs sneak their way in the back door of many companies over the self-serving concerns of the IT department? I made a switch almost 6 months ago back to the Mac and I would need to be hard pressed to move back to a PC again at this point. And every day I visit more companies where I am spotting the renegade Apple users.

Now, the interesting thing will be to see if this is just a marketing push to increase the stock price or if there will be a serious drive to move Apple into the corporate world. I wouldn’t expect a full frontal attack on all fronts, but using the iPhone as the wedge to open the crack in the corporate customer is a great strategy.

(Photo by Shapeshift)