Written by Alora on December 14, 2009 – 11:58 am
As a business owner, part of my job every day is to stay on top of the news — particularly as it relates to both my community and my industry. Once upon a time, that would have been courtesy of a subscription to a local business journal or a few targeted trade publications. But these [...]
Written by Alora on April 27, 2009 – 1:09 pm
This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. The fact that we started off as a services company is what allowed us to get started and to avoid having to rely on outside funding. But it was transitioning to a product company that allowed us to grow and scale, and to ultimately [...]
Written by Alora on April 24, 2009 – 12:07 pm
Ask anyone who got into an internet-based business prior to 2000, and you’ll hear nostalgic “good old days” stories, the way my grandparents talk about ‘when Kennedy was President.’ It’s hysterical to hear, and it saddens me endlessly to think about how long ago that was, but it really was an exciting time — and [...]
Written by Alora on April 23, 2009 – 2:06 pm
People who did not meet me until at or around my 25th birthday would never believe it, but in school, I was the Queen of Slackers. Truly. School was too easy, too routine and I spent too long doing it to be able to breath new life into the experience. I could dodge classes, do [...]
Written by Alora on April 22, 2009 – 11:58 pm
I had a couple of discussions this week that got me thinking back to the early days of my career. Aside from leaving me feeling older than I care to think about, it did spark a pleasant memory or two that I’ve been mulling over since. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how early career choices [...]
Written by Alora on April 21, 2009 – 11:41 am
It’s been years since the evangelism for Agile development started truly gaining momentum. Super sexy buzzphrases phrases like “reduce time to market,” “improved ROI,” and “lower development costs” have all been invoked to support the case for adopting an Agile methodology over the old-school Waterfall approach. The fact is, most experienced professionals have lived through [...]
Written by Alora on April 13, 2009 – 4:16 pm
Over the past few months, I’ve been more closely aligning myself with the Enterprise 2.0 community of professionals. Though I have been in technology for my entire career, and in Web 2.0 for at least part of that time, and implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions quite extensively in recent years, I had not previously made a [...]
Written by Alora on April 13, 2009 – 1:49 pm
At South by Southwest, Brazen Careerist author and CEO Penelope Trunk was quite emphatic that, when starting a new business, having a geographically distributed team is rarely possible. She said this on her panel, as well as again when we spoke in person. She was a strong advocate of the notion that, for the first [...]
Written by Alora on March 30, 2009 – 9:27 pm
It’s probably a weird thing for a vocal atheist to quote, but there is something about the famous prayer that has been resonating with me more and more lately. Well, maybe not the “God” part of it, but the recognition part. Grant me strength to accept the things that I can’t change, the courage to [...]
Written by Alora on March 30, 2009 – 9:23 pm
A year ago, Austin-based Convio launched a company blog: Connection Cafe. Unlike so many other company blogs, Convio decided to take a slightly different approach with the hope of gaining slightly different results. While many organizations opt for a CEO blog — particularly companies with in-demand CEO’s, like Convio’s Gene Austin — or a blog [...]
