2019 Nutanix .NEXT Conference

Nutanix held its annual .NEXT conference this year at the Anaheim Convention Center. Word was that about 7,000 people were in attendance. There is a lot happening in the Hyperconverged Infrastructure space now as the large legacy vendors look to make a place in this market. The growth of HPE, Dell, and Cisco in this space have legitimized the HCI market and brought new interest to the products.

The Gear I Use 2019

I haver been getting a lot of Questions about my setup lately, so I figured I would run over a quick list of things I use to produce these videos.

Quick Update: Sorry I have been absent, I had a series of cascading computer failures that ended up with me swapping out a motherboard and the drive. I am back now with a bunch of pent up content that will be coming shortly.

The CIO Journey

I have spoken in the past about the changing nature of IT. Businesses are increasingly becoming IT organizations. This is being driven by data becoming a strategic asset and driving top-line revenue. As IT moves from being a cost center to a profit center, it also moves from the sole realm of the infrastructure groups to the lines of business. Gartner published a somewhat controversial statistic that CMOs have larger technology budgets than CIOs.

SXSW 2019 Interview with BYGmusic

One of the big themes at SXSW this year was the importance of Influencers, and in particular Micro-Influencers. BygMusic is a company founder by Krish Sharma, a Grammy winner, and Mike Alden. The idea is to source bands with a following and connect them to advertisers who see value in their fan base. This helps the Marketers reach audiences that have been challenging to access and it gives musicians a way to monetize their music.

SXSW Part 1 Activatons

I am trying to catch up on all of the video I have from SXSW. Here is part 1 which focuses on the SXSW scene and “Activations.” For those unfamiliar with the term, “Activation” this is what they call branded experiences that companies put together. They take over businesses, empty buildings, parking lots, and parks. They transform these spaces into all manner of intriguing experiences.

The Right To Repair and Repairable Devices

Last night, as I was adjusting my new Uplift standing desk (which is awesome BTW), a speaker on the desk collided with the shelf above which was just enough to cause a candle to wobble and fall directly onto my trackpad. As you can see it completely shattered. Although it is still functional, it is just a matter of time before this gets worse.

SXSW 2019: A Talk With Access Partnership

Every time I go to a website these days, I always have to click on that, "I agree to using cookies",” button. It is fairly silly as pretty much every site I have gone to for the last ten years has used cookies. I would be shocked if I got a pop up that said, “this site doesn’t use any cookies at all,” because then I would be wondering, how do they pull that off? This behavior is being driven by attempts to conform to GDPR requirements.

SXSW Wrap Up

SXSW is the most important technology conference of the year. There, I’ve said it. The problem is, very few people in IT are aware of it, and that is a shame. This is the one show of the year that not only highlights emerging technology but wraps it in context. This conference is also very international with different countries showcasing their unique companies, technologies and talents. We can get so lost in our own small world that we miss new market opportunities and technologies from around the globe.

Update Your Chrome Stat

There is a new zero day Chrome vulnerability that has been reported to have been exploited in the wild. This one seems to be pretty severe and speculation is that it can lead to remote code execution.

The CVE, CVE-2019-5786, hasn’t hit the NIST vulnerability database yet, so there isn’t a ton of information on it other than, “Use-after-free in FileReader. Reported by Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group on 2019-02-27.”