Interesting post on Tech Republic...

In order to survive the IT talent crunch, CIOs need to stop looking for people with particular certifications or technical talents. They need to look instead for technical people who are willing to learn.

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Frankly, I have to agree. In my last professional incarnation I had a "lively discussion" with an IT director who said his group could not support MySQL because he didn't have anyone with a background in it. I told him I could loan him my interns. They learned in on their own. Willingness and capacity to learn should be a priority. By the way, his department subsequently lost all its funding for being unable to support the mission and we went to an ASP.

Thought provoking interview discussing "generative" software and devices vs. closed devices here.  Harvard Law School professor and tech guru Jonathan Zittrain warns of trouble in Apple's strategy.

Excerpt:

Since your book went to print, Apple has announced a Software Development Kit for the iPhone. Isn’t that good news for generative technology?

Apple wants to have its cake and eat it too. Who doesn’t? But systemically, what it’s doing is a real danger. It could be the best of both worlds, but I worry that it’s the worst. It certainly doesn’t undercut the thesis of the book—much as I'd like it to, to the extent that I’m predicting a world I don’t like, I’d much prefer to be wrong and have a world I like.

This is why words like “open” don’t really capture the stuff that matters. That’s why I bothered to deploy this word “generative.” In my vernacular, what Apple is producing is also what Facebook apps represent—what I call contingently generative technologies. They’re generative until they’re not, and the ax can drop any time, on the whole enterprise or on one app at a time. And that kind of winnowing is very worrisome to me.

With the first version of iPhone, Steve Jobs said, “We will control everything that’s on the phone; you don’t want to load up apps and have the phone not work; this is more like an iPod than a PC.” That’s sterile, non-generative technology. Then it gets hacked. I think reports of widespread hacking are overplayed. I don’t trust the statistics, and if the hackers share the fruit of their labors, others may not want to void their warranties. The cat-and-mouse game is different here because of the ongoing relationship the vendor has with its product. It’s one thing to take something home and hack it; it’s another to know that it’s talking to the mothership 24 hours a day, and at any moment it could be changed.

The next version of iPhone, Steve Jobs said, “OK, we're going to have a software development kit, because good stuff is happening despite our best efforts, and we might as well harness that.” The thing to look at is how the legal and technical architecture Apple puts out for software development by outsiders compares to the architecture we’ve had for 35 years with the PC. The answer is: They’re very different. Once a PC leaves a factory, it’s out of Bill Gates' control. That’s why you couldn’t demand that he should shut down a P2P system.

Whereas on the iPhone they’ve built an architecture that says, “If you want to write software for the iPhone, first you’ve got to pay us for a software development kit. Second, you can’t just shoot the software over to somebody who has a phone, and you can’t just put it on a shelf in a store for someone to buy and put on their phone. All software for this phone must go through the iPhone Apps Store.” The most recent version has something called Ad Hoc, where for a fee you can have 100 people share your app without going to the store. How that’s enforced is still not clear. But for mass distribution, it goes to the iPhone Apps Store, Steve Jobs takes a cut, and he reserves the right to reject, prospectively or retroactively, any software he doesn’t like, for any reason.

We have only hints about what those reasons will be. There was a slide he had up when he introduced the SDK in February of 2008 that said what won’t be available in the store: porn, privacy, bandwidth hogs and unforeseen.

That's the point where I say, “Yikes.”

This could be attractive enough to the dark energy of the hackers, so they no longer create code for Windows but for the iPhone or Facebook apps, but then that code could be killed at any moment—by Apple for its own reasons or by the government telling Apple you have to kill it. I think that’s a real worry.

Fast pased, entertaining, informative presentation (great example) on digital identity from Dick Hardt at Sxip Identity:

http://identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/

His Blog is here: http://identity20.com/

Visa Inc. debuted its Visa Business Network on Facebook Tuesday, to connect small business owners on the social networking site.

Visa (NYSE:V) will award a total of $2 million worth of Facebook advertising credit as part of the initiative. The first 20,000 U.S.-based small businesses to each get $100 in advertising credit to us on Facebook.

The move is also a plus for closely held Facebook by attracting Visa and its huge marketing budget to the social-networking site.

San Francisco-based Visa designed its Visa Business Network to help connect small business owners with a global network of peers and advisers from among the more than 80,000 small businesses already on Facebook.

Visa says its network on Facebook will help small business owners expand their customer base, manage their business better and exchange ideas with other businesses and advisers.

"Working with Facebook, Visa is breaking new ground by harnessing social networking to connect business owners," says Antonio Lucio, chief marketing officer at Visa.

http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2008/06/23/daily18.html?f=et51&ana=e_du

The Sun Blog community is about to hit 5000 users with an average of over 21 blog posts per user. That is great participation from Sun's 34,219 employees worldwide. Evangelist and all-around-cool-Sr. Program Manager Linda Iskrocki posted this:

Got Blog? A great Sun blog to follow is Kevin Chu's.