Jon On Tech

Gather round, children. Let me tell you about my Dad. He’s a wonderful, smart man. He taught me to play chess when I was 3. He is also an orthopaedic surgeon, which means he fixes broken bones and things. He worked for many many many years in government hospitals until, about ten years ago, he moved from the operating theatre to the courtrooms, working in the medico-legal world.

Lordy, has it been a year already? Sure has. The 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM is out. You can get the report here courtesy of our friends at SiteCore. As usual it is worth a read, but here are the juicy bits.

It’s pretty addictive watching your blog stats, isn’t it? Remember when Google Analytics came to town and instead of waiting days to see traffic reports, you could see updates in mere hours. On a good day, you could sometimes see things in 15 minutes. Well, GA, there is a new new kid on the block, he shows you data in real time, and his name is chartbeat.

Sorry, so very sorry, dear reader. This isn’t a real post. But it is research for a real post. You see, I’m test driving a new analytics package which, on first impressions, is awesome. Problem is, my blog doesn’t get enough traffic to make any screenshots interesting. Which is why you are here.

We’ve got some more BlueWashing going on. IBM announced today that they’re acquired analytics and marketing vendor Unica for $480 million. It seems like a lot of cash to me, but then again IBM have got plenty and what do I know. I do know it follows quite shortly after they bought pure analytics vendor CoreMetrics.

A friend of mine just reintroduced me to my favourite game of all time. A curse on all of his houses. Civilization Revolution is out on iOS and, the bad news is, it is as good and addictive as ever. I don’t play games any more, trying to balance my time between my kids, my job, my blog and the odd bit of sleep. That’s all about to go to hell.

Where there is smoke, there is fire. In this case, it’ll be a shitstorm of a fire that’ll consume everything useful in it’s path. A bit like a Scorched Earth Campaign of Content Management. Of course I’m talking about the Autonomy/Open Text speculation, which isn’t actually going to happen. Surely.

Finally, finally, an acquisition I think I understand. Adobe have just announced they’re buying Day Software (press release) for about USD $240 million – just slightly less than OTEX paid for Vignette. Adobe’s re-entry into the CMS game is well overdue.

It was just over a year ago when a younger, more naive Jon declared the The Cloud is a Crock of Shit. Well, I’m a little wiser now and I’m overjoyed to report that, in fact, it isn’t. Cloud Computing is very real, and something you need to know about.

Paywalls are in the air. The Times have just launched their new site, and more will follow. No-one is quite sure how many people are going to cough up their cash for the content – we’ll just have to wait and see. For today, let’s just try to put the people that won’t pay into neat little boxes.