Earlier in my career, choosing a technology stack came down what you wanted to build and: what are universities teaching? If developers were learning it, you probably could hire them. Simple. Even myself, I ‘grew up’ building on Perl, PHP and the classic LAMP stack. It was practical, scrappy and wildly productive for its time. […]
When ALL resumes are perfect!
I stumbled across a couple of Tiktoks talking about this new research paper on the impact of LLMs or hiring. And after digging into it the paper (Making Talk Cheap: Generative AI and Labor Market Signaling) its clear that it just dropped a bomb on traditional hiring… and explains many of the conversations I’ve had […]
Can We Really Trust the Bots to Buy for Us?
t starts with something simple, I need new shoes. Its fall and my Hoka’s are failing fast I ask chat; Order the same running Hoka shoes I bought last spring — but get me the newer Clifton model and find the best price. Thirty minutes later, the order is done. Your AI has scanned the […]
Blocking Bots to Trusting Agents: The Next Big Shift in Commerce
For years, the internet’s ecommerce rule was simple: if it looks like a bot, block it. Every payment page, every login, every sales form was built to keep automation out. That made sense, bots tested stolen cards, scraped data, and caused chaos. So we fought back with CAPTCHAs, fraud filters, and endless security layers. But […]
The AI Use Case No One Is Talking About
Most AI conversations today are about content creation… writing, coding, or generating images. But the many one of the most trans-formative AI use case isn’t about making more content. It’s about unlocking the content we already have. That use case is AI-driven knowledge management or what I call agentic knowledge management that doesn’t just find […]
Welding 101
Over the weekend I did a welding introduction class at The Fortress. I had touched welding since high school and we did mainly torch welding then. At the time the teachers thought that torch welding was the easiest to learn and eventually we did a bit of stick welding. 20 years latter and MIG Welding […]
Voice sales, not so simple for Alexa…
A leaked Amazon report are shows that only 2% of users have used Alexa to make a purchase. In our home we’ve had Alexa for a couple of years and we disabled voice purchased almostimmediately after our son ( one of the primary users ) quickly figured out how to order a transformer. I luckily […]
The Best E-mail Testing Tool
HTML e-mail has come along way but different e-mail clients still load and display HTML emails different. The best way to reduce risk of someone seeing a poorly formatted e-mail is to test them in a tool that can show you how your e-mail will render multiple e-mail clients.
Retail Video Games
I hate discs and especially video game discs. They scratch easily and I loose them. All of the consoles only have a single disc slot so switching games always involved ejecting and swapping discs. Even worst if you have a problem with your console and the disc doesn’t eject properly…
iWatch about being a wallet, not a wearable
There are a lot of rumours about the Apple September 9th event and a possible Apple iWatch launch. I believe most Smart watches today are largely useless. I was surprised at how quickly people abandoned their Pebble, we’re never far from our phones and continuous connection drains your phone quickly. Even the relatively small battery […]
Joining Hill+Knowlton Strategies
I wanted to formally share some exciting news from my professional life. Effective yesterday, Ascentum Inc has been acquired and will be joining the Hill+Knowlton Strategies family. I’ve been with Ascentum for 3 years and as you probably know Ascentum specializes in helping businesses, government and not-for-profit organizations facilitate and create dialogue with stakeholders via online, […]
“Forget the Wi-Fi, 6 GB is enough for all your needs”
Rogers Wireless has a launched a new “Super 6G Plan” that is sort of based on the now in-famous 6GB plan that was available when the iPhone launched. The plan lists the following benefits:
BlackBerry… Its all about the Browser.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on my first mobile project in a while. I use an iPhone regularly and have access to an older Android device. I haven’t used a BlackBerry device in close to 3 years. In fact, to get one we asked the last person in our office that got […]
Fixing Draw Something…
There’s been a lot of discussion around Draw Something and Zynga’s purchase of the game. Forbes recently reported that the game saw a 5M drop in Daily Active Users. This is a problem but Forbes seem to focus mainly on the belief that users are tired of the game. Gigaom has a more complete […]
How to Travel to the US, with your iPhone…
I travel to the US 2-3 times a year and I want to use my iPhone while traveling. The first task is to understand is your usage. My typical usage is: Voice Calls – I receive 2-3 calls daily with a total daily talk time of 20 mins, generally I know 2 of the 3 […]