Virtual World – ThinkInBig

Spotting influencers and VIPs in LinkedIn with PowerShell – Part 2: “The Dark Side”

Published March 21, 2014 by Carlos Veira

Spotting influencers and VIPs in LinkedIn with PowerShell – Part 2: “The Dark Side”

What we have seen on our previous post may seem interesting and powerful. Essentially, what we are doing is opening the door to creating local datasets with personally identifiable information coming from our Social Networks. That's a pretty big deal. Therefore, there are a couple of things that we need to understand before going forward.

Privacy, Law and Ethics

Usually, on Digital Media, whenever you can access some information is because you have rights and permissions to do so. However, I would like you to consider the difference between “can” and “should”.…

The real cost of your Personal Cloud

Published August 7, 2012 by Carlos Veira

As time goes by, it becomes more common to see ourselves contracting services on-line. They are diverse, easy to consume, mature enough, convenient and economic. Some times we see our friends, relatives or colleagues consuming them and, once we get to know details about their experiences, we feel it is the right moment to start and experience the service ourselves.

OnlineServices-201208-0

Many of them are really economic (in the range of 1 to 5 euros/month), so we don’t feel the need of any sort of financial control.…

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The Limits of Shared Hosting

Published July 27, 2012 by Carlos Veira

Have you ever wondered which is the real difference among different offerings besides the fact that your applications run on a shared server? In fact, most of the times, this seems to be a tricky question because most service providers describe the boundaries and limits of their services based on the following common parameters:

The resource type and quota: storage, bandwidth, mail boxes, mail lists, FTP accounts, database instances, etc.
The underlying platform: Windows (IIS/Apache) or Linux (Apache) under whichever version.

… 5 Comments

Thinking about Cloud Strategy

Published May 12, 2011 by Carlos Veira

Thinking about Cloud Strategy

Cloud Computing has been a buzz topic for a while. I understand it: it promises exciting benefits and, therefore, everyone wants to be there. Obviously, that’s not new. Nevertheless, I happened to attend several Cloud Computing events recently and I couldn’t help having a strange feeling of “déjà vu”:

both Skeptics and Believers keep saying the same things over and over again.
there seems to be some confusion or lack of understanding about how different concepts and components relate to each other.

… 2 Comments

Productivity, Cloud and The Red Pill

Published June 20, 2010 by Carlos Veira

I remember, back in 1.999, when The Matrix showed us the “Blue Pill – Red Pill Dilemma“. Since then, those Pills have become a popular metaphor for the choice between the blissful ignorance of illusion (the Blue Pill) and embracing the sometimes painful truth of reality (the Red Pill).

I don't know what you think, but I feel that, most of the times, we behave like Matrix Citizens. Things change and happen so quickly that we often don't realise what is actually going on.…

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“Why cloud vendors lie to you and how they steal your money”

Published October 19, 2009 by Carlos Veira

The following video shows one of the best presentations I've happen to see describing one of the most significant changes we are living today.

This is a short description from blip.tv:

This session examines the concept of cloud computing, its benefits and risks and why it matters. We then explore the difference between private and public clouds and the importance of open source in this field. Finally we take a look at the future of this industry and use all these concepts to explain “why cloud vendors lie to you and how they steal your money.”

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Security & Privacy on Personal Mashups

Published September 13, 2009 by Carlos Veira

It is not new that there is an explosion of services around the web that can play a role in a user-based mashup. I won't count them all, because this will change after this note has been written. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just have a look to the Services connected by ShareThis or Ping.fm.

Many of these services will raise their own privacy questions/concerns. But, anyway, your questions may fall into these two categories:

How this Service Provider will manage my data.

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Mozilla on mashups

Published January 11, 2009 by Carlos Veira

There are also interesting efforts outside the “Spectra world” 😉 on mashups. Particularly, I like Mozilla Ubiquity because of two aspects: putting the user in control with a client-side approach and the interaction experiences. It is a very young project, but very promising. Just look at the prototypes and enjoy:

If you want to dream on the futre Web 3.0 a little bit, look at the Aurora Concept Video:

Aurora (complete video without commentary) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.…

Clouds, Mashups and … us…

Published January 9, 2009 by Carlos Veira

Last Christmas I, finally, had some time to read deeper and play around with some of the latest releases on the “virtual/cloud” world.

Playing with Office Live was a pleasant experience. Really powerful and with a different approach than the one offered by Google Docs & Spreadsheets. With the add-ins, you can share regular office documents on-line without loosing any office functionality; share a work session on-line. It is free. It worths a try.

I did notice that it is now easier to find Virtual Private Server Hosting on Windows and SharePoint Hosting services at really appealing prices.…

Category: Virtual World

Privacy, Law and Ethics