I continue to ponder the implications of people with rare skillsets who are capable of making huge operational impacts on companies.  Skillsets like a combination of business knowledge and predictive analytics, of which I've recently become enthralled.

One of the areas that seem to be untapped so far but with a metric ton of potential is leveraging these unique individuals by way of hosted services.

Side Note:  I'm reluctant to use the word "Leveraging", by the way, because it is often used incorrectly.  When used properly and not by somebody who is simply trying to sound smart, it means that you get more work out of something than you put in.  (Hence the word lever, duh).  When used correctly it can increase your productivity exponentially, when used incorrectly it can bankrupt you, and when used by somebody who doesn't understand what the word means it is a synonym for the verb "to use".

I've really been enjoying my recent study of predictive analytics and data mining.  It's provoked me to think about the nature of value, how much of it there is lying around waiting to be uncovered, and what it takes to uncover it. 

It has also caused me to gain a much deeper appreciation for people who both have expertise in an area of business and the desire and drive to learn the skill set they can use to turn that experience into something extraordinary.

Um, that should really be Reporting ON the Future, but I thought this title was cooler :)

Anyway, what was the last thing you got really technically geeked out about?  (I'd really actually like to know, if you feel like sharing.  I dig stuff people are excited about.)

I mean, what was the last thing you saw that really made you say "wow, this is really going to change things"?

I haven't had one of those moments in a while but I'm learning something now that has me feeling that way.  You know, when you start thinking of the potential implications and it just takes things to a whole new level.

From my inbox this morning:

Heh, that's nice.  Hope the few cents they'll save on infrastructure costs is worth pissing off their customers who use this for storage like my wife used to.

Been banging this drum for a while:  Do not trust Software as a Service providers with the only copy or your data.

We will see much more of this as the economy continues its tailspin.

Over the past six or seven years, when credit was plentiful and the money supply was exploding, people were spending money like crazy, even to the point financing much of their consumption.  Giant flat screen TV's with low low monthly payments and so on.

This resulted in a flood of customers to most businesses, which steadily increased as our consumption society really started roaring.  A big problem for many businesses was that their infrastructure was not built to handle such a large volume of customers.

This created a bubble in the technology industry--products that were built to help businesses accommodate perpetual growth.  That growth has now slammed into reverse.

We bought my brother a vintage 1944 Underwood typewriter for Christmas.  I hadn't played with a typewriter in probably 15 years, and it was bizarre trying to write something on it.  I never realized just how much the text I put down tends to change and rearrange itself as it flows out of my head, thru my fingers, and onto the screen.

As I write something I jot down a couple of words to capture an idea, write a sentence or two about them, go back to the beginning, drag paragraphs around, and delete entire sections.  My workflow is flatly impossible on a typewriter.

I realized that if this typewriter was the tool that I had to work with there's no way I'd be generating as much content as I do.  It's just far too time-consuming and requires far too much planning in advance to generate a polished final product.

Every year I enjoy writing a post with my predictions for the next year.  It's a nice way to empty the old thoughts from my brains so there's room for new ones.  Plus I leave a trail of blog posts so I can see how my thoughts change from year to year.

In retrospect I've realized that each year tends to have a theme or two, and that the hardest part about making accurate predictions for a given year is identifying the themes that will drive it.

In 2007 the driving themes were social networking and online entertainment.  In 2008 the themes were distributed and mobile communication, with a dash of cloud computing sprinkled on top.

The theme for 2009 is almost absurdly easy to identify:  the economy.  If you thought 2008 was about the economy, just wait for 2009.  You truly ain't seen nothin' yet.  A deflationary black hole is sucking all of the money out of the economy and we haven't even seen the impact yet.

Every time I hear somebody talk about how the market has bottomed and the economy is starting to improve I mentally picture them in this position:

So if we're talking about the economy and you see me chuckle, you know why.

Hope is a great mindset to have and a fantastic slogan for winning Presidential campaigns apparently, but it is not such a great lens to view reality thru when you're trying to make money.

I'm on my way back to Boston after a great Thanksgiving with the family, and doing some reading catch-up on the plane.

One of the articles that I was really looking forward to reading was a new essay by Paul Graham (founder of the VC firm Y! Combinator), which is about (in a nutshell) the hidden cost of checks and balances--presumably the ones found in big companies--and I don’t agree with him at all.  This is the first essay of his that I haven’t been able to point at and say “yeah, he’s dead on with that.”  I thought he was going to discuss the finer points of skilled labor losing efficiency to time-consuming process (writing to startups like he usually does) but this post is directed to the companies who buy the startups' products. 

Instead of his normal sage advice to startups, this piece makes him sound like an apologist for poorly run startups.  I think his vision may be clouded by the current state of the economy.  I hope not by the economic state of the Y! Combinator startups, but I don’t think that can be ruled out given a glance at TechMeme on any given day.

A post by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch today really got me riled up:  The SEC has shut down Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending site.  This was up in the air until yesterday:

Yesterday, the SEC issued its formal cease-and-desist letter (embedded below or download PDF), outlining its reasoning for characterizing Prosper as a seller of investment, something prosper had vigorously resisted in the past by arguing that it was merely a marketplace matching lenders and borrowers. But the SEC is having none of that.

If this sounds familiar, it's because this is an exact rerun of what happened with the original Napster and the music industry, only worse in my opinion.

The key here is that Prosper itself was not lending or borrowing, it was simply matching up willing borrowers and willing borrowers.  It also provided additional services such as collection and tracking.  The HORROR.

The real fact is, if private citizens were allowed to freely lend to one another, the private banking cartel that is our central banking system would lose the little control they have over the economy.  The free  market would freely set interest rates and people and businesses would be free to do an end-run around our corrupt and bloated financial system.  The financial engineering that has allowed Wall Street to siphon off trillions of dollars in profit at our expense would be crippled.  The SEC is simply acting as the enforcement arm of our private national banking cartel.

Don't fall under the protection of the cartel?  Goodnight, chump.

Now LinkedIn and Microsoft are getting into the cloud computing game (by cloud computing I mean providing a platform for you to run your own application without a data center of some type).  LinkedIn, Microsoft (Azure), SalesForce.com, Amazon, Google, you name it.  Cloud computing is the new black.