Money and Politics

Today, the US Senate voted against the energy bill (S.3044 – Consumer-First Energy Act of 2008 ).

According to Reuters, “the energy package would revoke $17 billion in tax breaks extended to big oil companies like Exxon Mobil Corp and slap a 25 percent windfall profits tax on firms that don’t invest in new energy sources.” MAPLight.org’s research team revealed that oil producers gave an average of $134,821 to each of the 43 senators that voted no and an average of $37,373 to each of the 51 senators that voted yes. (See Methodology below)

The 6 Republicans that broke with their party by voting yes got an average of $64,362 from oil producers, a stark contrast to the average of $134,719 given to each of the 41 Republicans that voted no.

Two Democrats broke with their party by voting no, Majority Leader Harry Reid - (NV)* and Mary Landrieu (LA). Senator Landrieu received $304,450 from the oil producers, while Reid received $38,350. Landrieu’s total is the second highest received by Senate Democrats (after Clinton), and the 6th highest overall.

Clinton, Obama and McCain did not vote on the bill

Performance Management

Performance management beginning (or maybe I'm slow) to get a lot of attention. Lots of new startups are entering the space and all the BI players have changed their messaging around.

Enterprise Mashups

It looks like Enterprise Mashup is catching on. Yahoo with their pipes, IBM with QEDWiki and twinsoft are all startring to push this form of technology along with the folks at my old company Kapow Technologies.

Salesforce.com Buying spree?

» Who will Salesforce.com buy next?

» Salesforce.com enters search engine marketing space...

» Salesforce.com seizes Sendia for SaaS, CRM mobility

Interesting to see Salesforce has started buying functionality

Web 2.0 Workgroup - A network of Web 2.0 resources

Web 2.0 Workgroup - A network of Web 2.0 resources

Mashup Hype

Interesting to see that salesforce.com also has started to use mashup as a concept in their marketing of new capabilities (http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/index.php?p=271). I predict that soon we will see any piece of software that combines multiple components being labels a mashup. This will seriously deflate the concept and ruin the opportunity for real mashups to flourish.

Finally Blogging

Hi
I've finally come around to start blogging. Lets see if I can come up with stuff that is worth reading. My primary interest these days are all kinds of software that help companies become successful - Stay tuned.