Toby Bell

No – it’s not the name of a law firm. It’s a business model. The concept behind this is that seatholders represent the lasting value toward enterprise software vendor stability – that gathering and then holding onto as many of those end-users as possible will keep one vendor afloat on a stable sea of maintenance [...]

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Doctors don’t want to be rated by users of Angie’s List and I
don’t blame them. Hear me out, as I’m sure it appears at first
blush that I’m much more sympathetic to doctors than I really am.
Of course, maybe it’s because I still have lingering pain in the
backs of my knees and I may need a [...]

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I still read newspapers, though I have alternatives. My local source, unfortunately, has recently fallen prey to “pastiche syndrome” – it’s now composed primarily of clippings culled from international services rather than being a reliable purveyor of local items of interest. I used to like the fact that editorial bias was once apparent in every [...]

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I cut my finger attempting to change a watch battery prior to flying from Asheville to Beijing a couple of weeks ago. Some may wonder how such a thing is possible. Yet among the jittery inhabitants of Planet Caffeine (PC) – where coffee is synonymous with oxygen – each of us can completely relate to [...]

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There’s a discreet neon sign in a window that you’ve driven or walked past recently if you live in a town of any size. “Fortunes”, it offers. And few of us dare go inside. Maybe we fear the image itself of the wizened gypsy woman we imagine waits inside. Maybe we fear being seen entering and [...]

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Think about the implications to reputation of an online world where more and more people and businesses spend a predominant amount of time interacting. A place where opinion, influence, anonymity, persistent data, ad-based search engines, few regulators, and criminal interests coexist and intersect at an unimaginable scale.
Is this person safe to date?
Will this surgeon heal me?
Is [...]

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PC World, Feb 4, 2000: Finally emerging from labs, new power sources like fuel cells and lithium polymer could revolutionize design and use of cell phones, PDAs, and notebooks.

IT World, October 20, 2008: Engineers at Panasonic have succeeded in reducing the size of a prototype methanol fuel cell so that it’s no larger than a [...]

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I have often been accused (quite unfairly, I might add) of simply ‘making stuff up’ for my own amusement and perhaps of others. And-an even larger slight-I have also been held in contempt for using Gartner’s blog purely for the purpose of self-indulgence and not even mindful of the fact that these musings should have [...]

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Gartner has published Cool Vendor reports across various technology markets for years. We’ve recently delivered presentations about Cool Vendors in the High Performance Workplace and Content Management at a number of PCC (Portals, Content, Collaboration) Summit events. While the content was interesting, the format was decidely less so.
In the spirit of better engaging our audiences [...]

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“Are you going to eat those peanuts?”
It’s surprising how many great stories–mostly untold–begin with that line. Surprising, too, how many begin at 37,000 feet over Denver in airplanes where drinks have just been served and the squirrelly man next to me with the oversized glasses, poor complexion, and cheesy toupee leans over nervously, yet expectantly, [...]

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