Audioslave – The Curse

Analyzing the external environment for e-business

I haven’t been around for long but this is a result of working over – over time! During that time, we (me and Andrew Bitros) also presented the following presentation. Let me know what you think (comment, disagree, love, hate etc.)

Analyzing the External Environment for e-Business http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/8140236

View more presentations from Andrew Bitros

Watch out TechCrunch – posts may backfire

Techcrunch is, together with Mashable (social media), Kotaku (games) and Gamasutra (games again!), my main source of information for  the Web 2.0 world. I decided not to abandon it after AOL bought it, because I believe it’s still on the cutting edge on its sector. But, I don’t like people who judge others from a superior point of view. And that’s why I think that, what happened yesterday to Robin Wauters and his harsh criticism over bad PR, was really intuitive for Techcrunch (short TC).

Data Source Handbook

There’s a simple word describing this book: toolbox. The Data Source Handbook is a great source of free APIs for a great number of different applications – with only one drawback: size.

The book starts by offering a simple categorization, that helps the reader find his way through the 57 different sources. Some of these can prove extremely useful (such as Flickr and Delicious), while the author is honest in mentioning specific drawbacks that some of the sources have. The links in the book are also a welcome addition (although I don’t really know if it could work well in any other way).

However, this book is definitely not for people with no programming skills. In my case (I have limited programming skills) it was a bit hard to get used to the book. Adding to this, the main drawback of this book is that it’s short, but this is normal, as it is not meant to include full descriptions.

Overall, this is a great toolbox for developers wishing to enhance their services. I enjoyed experimenting while reading the book (and learning as well, in order to improve my programming skills) and I’ll definitely keep on searching for related titles.

Disclaimer: I received a free ebook for review purposes.

My 2 cents on Quora

I’m proud for a single fact: I started using Quora before the last days’ buzz about it. I even had a related post about Fluther and Twitter some time ago, and I still believe that social Q&A websites are one of the most sophisticated applications in the Web 2.0 universe. But I haven’t shared my experience with Quora so far, and that’s what I’ll do today.