Welcome to Pikasoft!

Welcome to the Pikasoft web log -- a friendly meeting place for commentary on business, processes, and software. I'm John Repko, and I'm one of the primary administrators of the blog. My main area of interest is software, and I'll be posting frequent commentary on this site.

In the technology world (the TED world really, as computers and communications intertwine) there are four main technology waves, all about to converge.

• Data everywhere...
  • The first is an idea I call "data everywhere." Google started it -- showing and capturing the value to be had from making all the worlds information available. Google's advances are the start ... you can find all that data. But what can you do with it?

• Analytics and Visualization...
  • This takes on a lot of different forms: Hadoop to give mapreduce to the masses, NoSQL data stores to enable "column-based searching", and rich presentation tools like Tableau to draw the insight out of the data. So ... is this mainframe-ware, or what?

• In your hands...
  • The iPhone started it -- the key breakthrough wasn't any specific thing in its technology, but that it broke through the barrier separating "computing" and "consumer electronics." Here was a smart device that everybody had to have! It is only incidentally a "Phone," and the iPad should take things to a whole new level. Still, the phone-ness is critical as an idea, so you can link...

• To your friends, acquaintances, family and co-workers!
  • Social linkages and the social graph matter, but locality matters even more. "Being" is good -- but "Being With" is much better. Facebook and Twitter were an interesting start, but Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and other similar services will really push the edge where computers and communication meet.

It's going to be a whole different world, and Pikasoft hopes to participate in it and talk all about it.

Drop on by often for the latest in this evolution of insanely great advances in technology.