Greetings from Istanbul! It's spring break, and I'm on a ten day Turkey Trek with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. It's a student-led voyage that takes students to a particular locale, usually the home country of the trip's organizers, and then combines the must-see tourist destinations with meetings and info sessions with really high level people, courtesy of the H stamp.

I was talking to a prospect the other day and was amazed at how she talked about her customers. When I asked questions about her market, she couldn't get down to individual characteristics -- just big generalizations. It was like she was all forest and no trees!

If you have missed out on cloud computing, then one application of this may be coming to a city near you. Perhaps without realizing it, you may be using a cloud computing application such as Google Docs. Many may also be using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system such as that provided by SalesForce.com which is also on the cloud. Now you can see some further cloud computing applications when VMware Takes Virtualization on the Road With VMware Express.

I had an opportunity to stop by the 2009 South West Regional Agro-Pastoral Show, an annual exhibition for local farmers and craftsmen, here in Limbe this afternoon. Amid all the displays, one guy stood apart with some creations that can only be described as a near perfect marriage of form, function, green design and a borderline obsession with bamboo.

Just when I think I have the software landscape in Cameroon pretty well figured out, a guy like Djorwe Temoa comes along to turn all my assumptions upside-down. If iPhone development can be done in Cameroon's Extreme North -- about as harsh a computing environment as one is likely to find anywhere -- it opens up a vast range of potential footholds for software engineering elsewhere on the continent.

With a population of around one million inhabitants, Kibera is widely known as Africa's largest slum and counted among the biggest on earth. Despite the fact that many organizations have collected data on various aspects of Kibera, it has yet to be aggregated and shared as a public resource. As a result, the area remains a blank spot on Kenyan maps and knowledge of traffic patterns, housing layouts, health, water and community resources are largely unknown both to outsiders and the residents themselves.

I now have a Lenovo X200s. Another 12.1" screen machine that is really light and works great. Why did I switch my supplier? Honestly, because I wanted a machine that had a little better structural build quality (my Darter was a MSI barebones and started having structural issues near its 3rd year of life) and the X200s is just a little “better” (lighter and higher resolution).

One of the major areas that the Open Educational Resources (OER) community could greatly improve upon is the area of remixing; taking the openly licensed materials and using them, adding new material, and creating something original. This is why Open.Michigan provides to the public the ppt files along with the pdfs of the presentations created through the OER program.

With almost 2 billion downloads, add-ons have proven to be a huge part of Firefox's growth and popularity over the last 5 years. As Firefox continues to be adopted by non-technical, mainstream users, the security and consumer experience of installing third party add-ons becomes increasingly more important.

A little over four years ago I created my first Firefox add-on. Things were different back then: there were only around 2,000 extensions (we didn't call them add-ons), addons.mozilla.org was update.mozilla.org, and add-on developers always seemed to respect their users' privacy and choices without the need for Mozilla to get involved in telling developers what they can and can't do. Times have changed.

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