The Search SIG of SDForum has a really interesting talk on March 30, 2010 about social search with the co-founder of Aardvark, Damon Horowitz. When I saw that this talk was coming up, I was immediately drawn to it for a few reasons. First, social search is a somewhat new idea, the definition of which differs depending on who you talk to or what you read. Second, I’m an active Aardvark user and I was interested in some of the inner workings of this very effective and powerful service. More…

The topic for the SDForum Software Architecture & Modeling SIG meeting on March 24, 2010 was titled Building a Search Engine in the Social Media Era presented by AJ Chen, Technical Architect, Healthline Networks Inc. The presentation started off by reviewing some of the issues that the social media environment bring forth and then jumped into various search architectures from traditional, to real time, to social, and finally semantic. More…

The theme for the latest SDForum Cloud Services & SOA SIG meeting was increasing performance of coud computing. The talk included three presentations that went over network communications, application, and storage.  This seemed like it would be an interesting talk and my expectation was that I might learn something useful that a startup or small tech company could use. It was not entirely useful for this purpose. More…

On March 16, 2010 I attended the SDForum meeting of the Business Intelligence SIG at SAP in Palo Alto. The topic was “Web Analytics 2.0″ presented by Avinash Kaushik, the author of Web Analytics: An Hour a day and Web Analytics 2.0. Not only was the subject matter of this presentation interesting and informative but also the speaker, Avinash, is quite a dynamic and interesting. I was informed and sometimes even entertained by Avinashes stories and analogies. This is one of the best SDForum meetings that I’ve been to so far. More…

SDForum2KeyThe SDForum Emerging Technology SIG had a very interesting panel on March 10, 2010 regarding emerging languages. The SIG organizers came up with the topic by posing the question, “if you’re going to put together a web app, what language would you use?” I thought that this panel was very informative, the questions were deep and mostly on topic, and the panelists were knowledgeable. The only problem was that the presentations were lightning fast so I could take notes fast enough butit only felt too fast from a note taking perspective. More…

As this blog post demonstrates, not everything that I post will be purely about software engineering. Marketing and branding is somewhat related because if your product does not have a strong brand and nobody knows about it, then nobody will get to experience your beautiful code and your wonderful new product. And so on March 8, 2010 I attended the the SDForum Maketing SIG talk on Building a Strong Brand . The following are my notes from that event.

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