All Blog Posts (799)

Note: I write this as a fan and frequent user of Facebook. In addition to helping my family stay connected with friends around the world, the site has helped our company find new customers and team members. I wish them well. That being said, there are many areas where FB really needs to get its act together.

Our company does a fair amount of advertising…

"APPLE REVEALS MASTER DETAILS OF WIRELESS CHARGING SYSTEM"…

VERSUS

Ok, ok admittedly it's not really a "shootout". We all already know SQL-based data sources are generally less performant and less scalable than their NoSQL counterparts, but they are also…

Business Solutions Conference Set for November 2nd in Kona

 Crushing energy prices, food security issues, and lack of meaningful, well paying jobs plague Hawaii Island. TechConKona, a high impact, one-day conference is addressing these issues with ideas to solve them, as well as providing valuable job skills in the fields of sustainability and technology on…

Ali Catalano joins Kamuela-based Kinoshita Communications as account coordinator. Ali will be developing inbound marketing and social marketing campaigns for clients such as Hawaii Resort Homes, Alzheimer's Care Consultants, Brilliant Studios by Tropical Imaging and more.

Ali joins Kinoshita Communications from…

Sometimes it seems like there is a new mobile phone or device announced every day.  It’s an exciting time when the things we could only dream about 15 years ago are becoming reality. What do we have to look forward to in the next few years and beyond?

Near Field Communication (NFC)

The technology allows interaction between devices and even unpowered chips or tags.  It’s already used in a…

Could it be that we building up to a collective moment against oversharing? That social media posturing, "like"-chasing and follower-building have created a backlash and a hunger for less exposed, more targeted, and more authentic forms of connecting? Perhaps so, judging by the intense interest around apps like SnapChat, Whisper, and Avocado.

Snapchat

Fueling the popular disappearing-photo messaging…

Whatever profession you are a part of it requires some set of skills in order to accomplish.  The skill is useful, or at least someone thinks it's valuable enough to pay you to perform it. At the beginning of your career you are learning many new things every day.  Your new job/project constantly pushes the boundaries of your experience.  As time progresses and you become able to perform your job with less assistance from mentors and co-workers. The great initial momentum at which you learn…

Just tried to explain what the floppy disk icon is for saving a doc to an 8 year old. Looked at me like I’m nuts. — Facebook friend…

It's a fun and fascinating part of my job to dream up of new ways to use social media for communicating and engaging with digital users. And with mobile devices, opportunities for social connecting are infused in every movement and moment. So much so that talk of social media addiction is sometimes greeted with a glazed-eyed blink before those eyes turn back to a Facebook screen.

Obviously, some deep-seated psychological need is being tapped via social media. And of course,…

There is no doubt that all of us have heard about the security breaches of numerous Fortune 500 companies.  From credit card information hijacks to content defilement, there is no shortage of news reports detailing the exploits of uber-hackers or hacker groups.  The companies that were aggrieved were so, in part, due to their size.  The acclaim for a hacker penetrating Wal-Mart or Citibank will be far greater than that achieved by taking down Joe's Pool & Spa.  But the havoc wreaked on…

My friend Ken Berkun recently sent me a link to a NYT article that was more amusing than anything I've seen in The Onion. Mr. Glanz inquires, "…

I came across an article on the New York Post via Hacker News: My Hell as a 911 Operator.  Following an overhaul of the NYC 911 computer system, the article describes the chaos stemming from the system’s inability to handle high call volumes and frequent…

Is it time to solidify those social media skills with a certification? We got a great online class that would do just that.

HISMTI is offering a Social Media Strategist (SMS) Certification training course through the National Institute of Social Media.

This is an online class that can be complete on your own schedule over a 6 week time period starting…

On various occasions in various settings I’ve been asked for my opinion on PHP as a web development platform. It is one of the most popular choices today, yet it is also one of the most criticized by experts. I personally have not touched the language for over a decade but it was once one of my favorite tools.

I remember doing professional web development during the first Internet boom in CGI scripts written with Perl. It was quite cryptic compared to the Java I was learning in school…

HiPPOs -- the Highest Paid Person's Opinions -- are a well-known pitfall and obstacle to creating a great web site or mobile app. Features or designs aren't chosen because they're what users need, but because they're what the HiPPO wants.

Well, another common pitfall is something worse than digital design by HiPPO -- digital design by a herd of HiPPOs. Usually, the powerful heads of several departments all want their desires represented. If they all got their way, the new site or app…

I work on Enterprise iOS applications for a large energy company and do not have access to an MDM, but I recently had a requirement to provide an in-app way to notify users when an update is available and a way to update it immediately if they choose to. Another requirement was that it must be completely managed within the company's network, so systems like TestFlightApp were not an option.  So I created a custom UpdateManager class that I reference in my AppDelegate as such:…

The key to making any jQuery UI component play nice with knockout.js is to use a custom binding.  From the knockout site, this is how you add a custom binding:

ko.bindingHandlers.yourBindingName = {