Our services for technology vendors
Monash Research provides what we hope is great advice, to technology vendors, users, and investors alike. Working with organizations who want more insight and interaction than is available in our free blogs, we consult on a broad range of subjects – marketing and technology, strategy and tactics, large companies and small ones, all across a variety of industry sectors.
For the past several years, we’ve had an annual refresh of our vendor service offerings, always unveiled in the fall. This year has seen more change than usual, and so I’d like to share some of the highlights with you here. A revampimg of our services for users is in the works as well, and I’ll share that too with you when it is finalized.
Aspects that haven’t changed much include:
- We ask all vendor clients to join a program called the Monash Advantage.
- Monash Advantage members get effectively unmetered quick-inquiry consulting, and more in-depth advice sessions as well.
- Our speaking and writing services, which vendors like to use for lead generation and general image-buffing, are generally restricted to Monash Advantage members
- The entry-level Monash Advantage price is $10,000/year
The biggest change from prior years is that there are now three tiers of the Monash Advantage, up from one.
- The Monash Advantage Lite is for small, tightly-focused companies with severe budget constraints. We offer suggestions and help them think through their most pressing issues, a few times each year.
- The Monash Advantage Basic is for more typical technology companies. We help them with anything and everything.
- The Monash Advantage Custom is for companies that want us to serve as core strategic advisors.
The early response to this tiering has been very positive, and we have had multiple sign-ups for 2010 at each of the three levels.
Another change is that we no longer require companies to join the Monash Advantage on a strict calendar-year basis. Now, it’s calendar quarters, and for Custom members we’re completely flexible.
Finally, we’re open to doing stock deals with seed-stage companies, at least ones that don’t compete closely with our other clients. For example, I’ve just started advising one stealth start-up in a hardware area that complements analytic DBMS, and I’m having a blast. I’ll disclose the names of any companies I have private stock in, as well as offering at least a capsule of what is publicly known about what they’re pursuing.
| Categories: Monash Research highlights | 1 Comment |
OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Word for WordPress blogging — a 65:1 ratio in cruft
I prepare most of my blog posts in OpenOffice. Most of the rest I write directly online in WordPress. I almost never use Microsoft Word.
The reason, simply put, is cruft.
When I copy a post from OpenOffice to WordPress, I invariably get a line at the top that looks like
<!– @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>
I delete that, which according to OpenOffice stats amounts to exactly 100 characters; I fiddle with the bullet points a bit; I add a title, categories, and a MORE separator; and I’m basically good to go.
By way of contrast, in a recent post I copied a sentence from a press release I’d recieved across Google Mail in .DOC format, forgetting to stage it into OpenOffice first. The cruft I needed to delete consisted of 6489 characters, namely: Read more
| Categories: Microsoft | 5 Comments |
Star Trek companions
Hat tip to Linda Barlow for a long list of allusions and references in the recent Star Trek movie, including the comment thread.
Meanwhile, this is as good a time as any to offer lyrics and music/video for the classic Leslie Fish filk song “Banned from Argo.”
Our proper, cool first officer was drugged with something green
And hauled into an alley, where he suffered things obscene
He sobered up in sickbay and he’s none the worse for wear
Except he’s somehow taught the bridge computer how to swear
Actually, this version has better sound and image quality, but the video part doesn’t speak to me.
Also:
- A collection of Dr. McCoy clips.
- A song combining Star Trek and The Hobbit.
- A video (large download) to Julia Ecklar’s beautiful song God Lives on Terra, with Star Trek:TNG clips interspersed with views of Wrentham, MA. (I previously linked a hilarious parody of that song.)
- Another Bob Kanefsky parody song, this one based on a specific Star Trek episode. (Melody and performance by Leslie Fish.)
| Categories: Fun stuff | 2 Comments |
I’m holding forth on public policy again
I was interviewed by Federal News Radio again, and will edit in a link to an audio file if/when they give me one. (Here it is.) The subject was the completion of the Aneesh Chopra/Vivek Kundra team for United States CTO and CIO, something I find alarming due to their lack of focus on the tough project management/data integration and privacy issues at the heart of government IT.
Overall, the interview went a lot better than my last one with the same station.
Interesting times in the Monash home
The set-up
I work from my house, as does my wife Linda Barlow. That makes it an interesting place right there, as Linda has published 15 novels, served two terms as a director of the Author’s Guild, testified as an expert witness on HTML technology in Federal court and, for variety, taught neurobiology at a local college. She is also a much better MMO player than I am.
Monday night, however, things got interesting in another way. On the whole, I’m not apt to be particularly celebrity-struck. I grew up in Beverly Hills; worked with bunches of politicians, Nobel Laureates and Fields Medalists at Harvard; talk for hours with some of the tech industry’s biggest names; and have met some extremely popular authors through Linda. Still, I thought it was cool to be Twittering back and forth with LeVar Burton, of Roots and Star Trek fame, especially when he sent a direct message that read, in its entirety, “Exactly!!! Well said.” But unfortunately, that wasn’t the most interesting part either.
The flare-up
While I was tweeting away in the middle of the night, I heard a shout from Linda. It turned out that we had a fire on our 49-year-old electric stove. (A burner had failed to turn off, a plastic cutting board had fallen onto it, and flames had started.) Read more
| Categories: Monash Research highlights, Personal | 14 Comments |
Should we include my blog A World of Bytes in our general feed?
As is pointed out in the right-most column of this and every other blog page, we publish five blogs, all written by me. As per the boilerplate:
- DBMS2 covers database management, analytics, and related technologies.
- Text Technologies covers text mining, search, and social software.
- Strategic Messaging analyzes marketing and messaging strategy.
- The Monash Report examines technology and public policy issues.
- Software Memories recounts the history of the software industry.
But I actually write a sixth blog too, which has taken over much of the role previously filled by The Monash Report. It also overlaps coverage of internet technologies with Text Technologies.
That is A World of Bytes, which I write for Network World. Read more
| Categories: About this blog | Leave a Comment |
When law meets technology, and you can help
I’ve been arguing passionately for years that technologists and policy-makers need to work together on ensuring information systems meet life-and-death needs without compromising essential liberties.* This is obviously a tall order, and last night something struck me — the case of electronic health records should be handled first, basically because it is free of the national-security rigmarole infesting other kinds of privacy issues.
Please take a look. (And please overlook the UI at those links. It’s been embarrasingly bad, especially in the matter of bullet points, ever since I started blogging there, and this month it got a lot worse. I’m sorry.)
Then please help, by advancing your take on these ideas by any means at your disposal. It’s going to take years to get all this right. Freedom hangs in the balance. We need to start NOW.
Discussion is also underway on Slashdot.
It’s been one of those weeks
Dashing cross the Pond
Flown there by BA
Computers crashing ’round
Coughing all the way (hack, hack hack)
It’s been a heckuva week — personal computer crash, Massachusetts’ electrical outage, two-day trip to the UK, and the flu. I’m badly backlogged on email, blog posts, and the holidays.
I’ll catch up as best I can, starting this weekend.
| Categories: Personal | Leave a Comment |
You can help with one of the most important public policy issues of our times
I’m pretty passionate about electronic freedom these days.
Issues of privacy and liberty take at least five forms:
- Censorship
- Admissible evidence in court
- Admissible evidence in investigations (not exactly the same thing)
- The consequences of damaging information leaks from the government to the private sector
- Potential chill on useful technologies (e.g., electronic health records) caused by any of the other four kinds of issue
Taken together, that amounts to much of the Bill of Rights – or other countries’ equivalents — plus a whole lot of life-saving technology on the side. I.e., it’s more than huge.
That’s from a detailed recent post that ends with a call to action:
Please join me in raising awareness. Blog yourself. Send email to those who might have influence. Or – and this one’s really easy – just go to the suggestion page at www.change.gov and help draw the incoming Administration’s attention toward these crucial issues.
Please, please do at least one of those things. There’s still enough time for freedom to be preserved, since the worst practical threats are still some years off. But if it doesn’t happen during an Obama Administration, when will it happen, in the United States or the rest of the world? The time to make a difference is now.
I’ll be on DC-area radio Monday 11/17. An MP3 will be available.
I am to be interviewed at 7:28 am Monday 11/17 on Federal News Radio, AM 1500 in the DC area. That’s also an internet radio station. The producer writes:
We’ll zap this interview to the entire Maryland/VA/DC tri-state area. We’ll also stream it live at federalnewsradio.com. And afterwards, we’ll archive it online in its entirety (MP3 format).
Hopefully I’ll get a more precise link to the archive once it’s up, in which case I plan to edit it into this post.
The subject is what Obama should look for in a CTO, and what the Obama Administration’s technology priorities should be. This interview was surely triggered by my post arguing the new United States CTO needs to be more of a CIO, and the Slashdotting of same.
Related links
- MP3 of the interview
- My rant rebutting the attitudes represented by the interviewers 🙂
- Freedom even without data privacy
| Categories: Monash Research highlights, Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |