Cloud

I don't believe in gamifying enterprise applications . As I have argued before, the primary drivers behind revenue and valuation of consumer software companies are number of users, traffic (unique views), and engagement (average time spent + conversion). This is why gamification is critical to consumer applications since it is an effort to increase the adoption of an application amongst the users and maintain the stickiness so that the users keep coming back and enjoy using the application. This isn't true for enterprise applications at all. This is not only not true for enterprise applications, but gamifying enterprise applications is couterproductive that makes existing task more complex and creates an artificial carrot that does not quite work. A design philosophy that we really need for enterprise applications is flow. I am a big fan of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his book " Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience ." I would highly recommend you to read it. Mih...

I go to a lot of conferences and quite a few people, including the ones that I mentor, have asked me how they can effectively network at a conference. Here are five simple but effective tips. Start practicing them at local meetups and refine them for large conferences. Connect before the conference:  Your networking efforts should start as soon as you decide to go to a conference or even before that. Go through the speaker list and search Twitter exhaustively to find and follow these folks, either directly or via a list. Interact with these speakers on Twitter to ask them meaningful questions. Also ask them if you can have 5 minutes of their time at the conference. Look up on LinkedIn and Plancast to identify who is going to be at the conference. Ask the organizer to send you a list of attendees. Some organizers would happily oblige. If any of these folks sound interesting, follow them on Twitter and reach out to them with a request to see them at the conference. Be specific about...