This post is the second in a series of thoughts on my recent experiences as a journalist “embedded” within a tech-centric public relations agency. You can find Part One here.
In that first installment, I talked a lot about how reporters and PR pros often find themselves at odds because they don’t really understand each other. This time around, I’d like to turn to how companies interact with external PR agencies and the media, and why they don’t always get the results they want.
Now … I don’t really expect companies to take my advice. There’s very little a PR agency can do to change corporate culture. A reporter might have a better chance, provided the barrage of negative press is big enough. But companies, especially large ones, tend to be set in their ways. Still, it’s worth pondering some of the things that, in theory, should be easy to change, but that I’ve encountered again and again. » More... »
Welcome to 2012! Once again, I’ve been remiss in keeping this blog updated, but I’ll try to do better this year. Remember you can always follow the latest from my Fatal Exception blog for InfoWorld in the box to the right!
With the rise of HTML5, a lot of folks wonder whether it might displace plug-ins such as Adobe Flash for rich Internet Application development. Adobe doesn’t see it quite that way. It sees the two technologies as complementary, and it’s putting its money where its mouth is. Adobe Edge is a new technology from Adobe Labs that aims to make it as easy to build complex animations in HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript as it is to do the same in Flash. It’s still rough around the edges, but it does make it possible to do some pretty remarkable things, especially if your goal is to develop banner ads, infographics, or other short animated sequences to be embedded in Web pages. Read on for more of 
Seven years after its IPO, Google is entering the next phase of its growth as a company. It’s impressively large by anyone’s standards, with $29.3 billion in revenue in 2010, nearly 30,000 full-time employees, and offices in 42 countries. And yet Larry Page, now Google’s CEO for the first time since 2001, still seems to view the company as a cross between a startup and his old Stanford University grad project. It’s neither, and it faces difficult challenges. The legal environment around Google is tightening even as it goes head-to-head with the industry’s largest companies, and the changes it must make to remain competitive may mean tomorrow’s Google little resembles the fun-loving Silicon Valley darling of yesteryear. Read on for the rest of my analysis of 
In 2007, venture capitalist Paul Graham declared “
