T-Mobile Just Launched A Smartphone Revolution. Did You Notice?

by Asif Khan

I love T-Mobile. For years, they have been my MOST favorite wireless carrier. Besides being the least expensive and having a great pre-paid plan, they were the only US carrier to deploy a feature called GSM UMA which allows you to make calls over WiFi when no GSM reception was available. If you live in a hilly area like I do with spotty cell reception or if you travel overseas and need to make calls in a pinch, UMA rocks!

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Cloud Computing, Milkshakes and the Future of IT

by Asif Khan

Last summer, the CIO of a large law firm I had once worked with wanted to meet for lunch to discuss cloud computing. He was worried that the increasing use of “shadow IT” at his firm could lead to a serious security breach. He figured that if the IT organization could develop and demonstrate a cloud computing proof of concept, that could buy him some time to transition to a Service-Based IT model over the long term in order to mitigate the threat of his firm’s intellectual property being exposed.

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Marketing 101: Jobs-To-Be-Done Theory

by Asif Khan

On a sweltering summer day a couple years ago, I took my aging Lexus to the dealer for scheduled service and to prepare it for trade-in. The A/C was blowing warm air so I asked them to check it out, hoping it would be a minor fix.

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Here is an awesome post I found which nicely ties together my two passions: music and technology. Enjoy! -Asif

Music Machinery

Sometime in the last 10 or 20 years,  rock drumming has changed.  Many drummers will now don headphones in the studio (and sometimes even for live performances)  and synchronize their playing to an electronic metronome – the click track.   This allows for easier digital editing of the recording.  Since all of the measures are of equal duration, it is easy to move measures or phrases around without worry that the timing may be off.  The click track has a down side – some say that songs recorded against a click track sound sterile,  that the missing tempo deviations added life to a song.

I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK ( remix is a Python library that allows you to  analyze and…

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2013 Must-Have Device: Smartphone? Tablet? Or Both?

By Asif Khan

Sometimes inspiration comes from the strangest places. I took the family to Thailand on holiday in December. I noticed one of our tour guides had a 7 inch Android tablet and a Nokia feature phone. I asked him why he didn’t have a smartphone. He said he has the tablet, which is better. Then I noticed that there were smartphone ads everywhere but smartphone users were few and far between in Thailand. But I saw lots of tourists with a tablet-plus-feature-phone combo like our tour guide had. It turns out you can get really nice Nokia feature phones for $50 or less throughout Asia and buy SIM cards in every country for next to nothing.

This got me thinking that this combination was so much smarter than having an expensive smartphone, as we tend to have in the US. Here’s why.

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Working at Accenture: How Much Does A “Partner” Make?

by Asif Khan

Recently, the most popular search term that has landed people on this website relates to partner compensation at Accenture. This is a complicated subject but I think it is worth a discussion. I want to start with a few disclaimers though:  1) I am neither a Partner nor an HR compensation specialist, 2) Partners (and HR reps) don’t talk openly about compensation and 3) Compensation at Accenture (as in most companies) varies widely based on experience, geography and myriad other factors.

Also, keep in mind that I don’t intend to share anything confidential or proprietary. The following is based on publicly available information. But don’t worry. We will dive into some actual numbers. Let’s get started with some background.

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Has Apple Finally Jumped the Shark? Um. No.

by Asif Khan

We’ve all read the doom and gloom articles on the fate of Apple since the passing of Steve Jobs. This article anointed Jobs the Ronald Reagan of Technology. Several others started asking “WWJD” (“what would Jobs do?”) every time the post-Jobs Apple had a misstep (like Apple Maps). And one can convincingly make the argument that Apple is not the same scrappy underdog we all used to root for.

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Data Tiering: Been There, Done That, What’s Next? Part 3: What’s Next?

by Asif Khan

To recap what we covered in the Data Tiering series so far, in Part 1, we discussed the history and evolution of data tiering for moving data BETWEEN  storage arrays. In Part 2, we discussed how data tiering is being applied today to move data WITHIN storage arrays. In this, the third and final installment of the Data Tiering series, we will discuss what the future holds for Data Tiering (HINT:  we will transition to moving data ACROSS the data center). As always, these are just my semi-informed opinions and if I’m proven wrong in the future, I will deny everything :-).

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Data Tiering: Been There, Done That, What’s Next? Part 2: Done That!

by Asif Khan

About 10 years ago, I had decided that I needed a major career change. I felt that I had sucked the marrow out of my marketing job and wanted to try something new. I wanted to get more technical and focus my career on data center infrastructure technologies. I thought this track would train me better to take advantage of a trend I was starting to see forming. At the time, they called it Web 2.0 or utility computing. It eventually came to be called Cloud Computing.

Working at Accenture: “Location Independence”

by Asif Khan

One of the coolest things about working at Accenture is that you can live anywhere AND work anywhere in the world…sometimes simultaneously. For example, one of my coworkers lives in Chicago and had the opportunity to work in Sydney for six months. Another lives in Seattle and spent two years in Paris. I recently had the opportunity to work on a project in Helsinki for three weeks–but I committed to another project with a shorter commute.

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