At SXSW Interactive, you’re elbow-to-elbow with folks that the Wall Street Journal calls “some of the most social, tech-savvy and innovative early adopters you’ll meet.” But since many Zenoss Blog readers couldn’t make it to the conference this year, I set out to bring some juicy bits of the event to you. What I went to investigate was: how are “south-by” types selecting their stacks to support rapid, disruptive growth for their new-fangled apps?
So today is the first in a series of blog posts via which I’ll give you a taste of SXSWi through “man on the street”-style interviews I conducted with the makers of drool-worthy applications. I chose apps you might find useful both professionally and personally. Maybe you just want to keep your fingers on the pulse of the industry. Maybe you find there’s never enough time to compare stacks with others, and probe as to *why* leaders made those decisions. Either way, I hope you’ll enjoy hearing from your peers, and being able to tell your friends that you know how they’re doing what they’re doing. Because I asked each interviewee to describe what capabilities their firm's application had to offer, what stack they’d selected to deliver these capabilities interactively, and – of course, being Zenoss – just what exactly the impact would be if they experienced unplanned downtime. I think you’ll appreciate the direct & forthright answers provided.
It’s likely you’ll hear more about these applications as they grow in adoption. They’re likely to really tick off a bunch of companies who have slipped into complacency. I know I'll be watching their progress, and I’d love to hear which applications *you* find most compelling, whether for your day job or for your personal use. But for now, enjoy your peek behind the curtains at SXSWi…hopefully next year you can join me there!
Having gone through the effort of hiring over 1000 IT Operations staff over at Rackspace, the team that founded TrueAbility felt there had to be a better way. So they created software that tests the abilities of applicants. So now, if you’re a hiring manager, *you* can locate and hire people who have taken their tests, or you can have an individual candidate complete the evaluation, resulting in a faster, easier, higher-quality hire.
Thanks to Marcus Robertson, Co-Founder & CTO, for explaining his app & his stack!
httpvh://youtu.be/xD6tS6Gb8sk
The personal app I’ll feature today is gui.de. It's like if YouTube and your favorite blog hooked up & had a baby. Whose eye color and outfit you get to choose. Or maybe it’s like Stitcher or Audible for blog sites. But they call it turning the web into TV.
You pick an avatar who serves as your personal talking head. And then you can supposedly run on a treadmill or drive a car while this avatar presents your feed to you. Lots of speech-to-text processing is provided by gui.de, and I’m eager to see, er, hear, how well that works for the international news I like to read. Somehow, I want to get Samuel L. Jackson's voice presenting colorful summaries of the current state of federal budget talks...
Thanks to Zachary Randall, Sr. Software Developer, for introducing us to his app & his stack!
httpvh://youtu.be/zISBSfcUaOE
I hope you'll tune in over the course of the next week or so to get more behind-the-scenes insights about the stacks making all that SXSWi creativity come to life. ; )
