Boomerang

As I mentioned during my talk at Defrag 2009, the best corpus of sample email data we have is the email data dump that the federal government released after Enron’s collapse.  The corpus includes over 400,000 real email messages from Enron employees, and it’s ripe for analysis. The data is available on the web in a ton of different formats, but none of them are especially conducive to just picking them up and starting analysis,...

I presented the following slides at Defrag 2009 last week in Denver. I wanted to take a quick look at the different use cases for email vs. microblogging and make some predictions about how the email experience will be changing over the next handful of years.  To do this, I performed some analysis on the Enron email corpus and a half-a-million-message Twitter corpus to illustrate the differences in the way people use these services....

We’ve been seeing an increasing number of corporate customers look into SharePoint. The New York Times has a nice summary on the growth of Microsoft SharePoint that echoes our observation. One of the challenges that users run into is that they expect SharePoint to be the end-all collaboration solution. In reality it’s a bunch of pieces that let you build a collaborative solution.  In this blog post, I’m going to show you how you can...

Sunday’s New York Times included a column under their Ping business technology section that made a pretty convincing argument that the web and mobile technology are stamping out serendipity.  Instead, they argued, the opportunity to discover new things are being replaced with the opportunity to engage in groupthink – to discover only the new things that a carefully selected group of people (Facebook friends, Twitter followees, or...

Shaving is not something I usually think about. Every so often, I would end up clogging the razor and eventually cutting my face. After running into my friend Holly who is a brand manager at Gillette, I learned how to improve my shaving experience with minimal effort. Here’s how it works: Run water over the back of the blades. That’s it. I used to rinse the blade from the front (blades facing me) but it would eventually get clogged....

Congratulations!  You aced the phone screen, survived the (potentially grueling) interviews, and your offer letter is in the mail.  Awesome! You should absolutely go out to celebrate, but before you mail in your acceptance, you may want to figure out what if any strings are attached to the offer. I was too naive when I got my first job offer to think about things like employment agreements (or even to do a good job...

Before Baydin, Alex and I started another venture. Without going into too much detail it was a mobile, social game with an end goal of making users feel camaraderie with their fellow guys and gals. Who doesn’t want to make friends and feel the exhilaration of potentially meeting a significant other? We were on a mission to do great things for society, and by society, I mean the 18-30 year old singles who feel alienated after...

What do an irrational fear of rejection, the inability to talk to girls at a bar, and a startup in “stealth mode” all have in common?  I was riding the Orange Line en route to our Central Square offices last week, and I saw a sign advertising a study on Social Anxiety Disorder.  They asked if you worry too much about what other people think, worry that people might secretly think you’re stupid, and get more nervous than...