"I believe the Texas Legislature should act immediately to outlaw non-compete agreements for non-owner employees. Why? Non-compete agreements are bad for business." Having been on the wrong end of one of these agreements, I agree with this argument. Bear in mind, however, that this does not mean that it is OK to steal IP. IP should be protected via NDAs/CDAs, etc…

"5 types of content were included in the survey:
1. white papers
2. case studies / success stories
3. podcasts / audio files
4. video
5. product brochures / data sheets

Here are some of the survey findings:
* white papers were thought extremely or very influential by 44%
* brochures were the least influential at 33%
* 48% responded that case studies were very or extremely influential
* videos only hit 39%, but it's interesting to note that studio quality was considered important by 93% – casting doubt on that do-it-yourself idea being touted by social media folks. Well, at least for tech purchases."

"Smile & Move is a call to positive action… to be happy and do something… a reminder of how we should approach our work (whether that work is done in the office, on the field, in the classroom or at home).

It's about mattering to the world, all with a smile."

"As marketers, we not only need to be accountable, but also effective. To be effective means we need to have goals and objectives and then achieve them. Those objectives need to play a role in creating customers. Tracking marketing's role in customer acquisition is a direct reflection on both the accountability and effectiveness of our marketing programs. (and potentially our alignment with sales)"

"Chapman's argument smacks of, "Well, we've never given the PMs the chance to do the most important part of their jobs, so we'll just get rid of them altogether.""

"If you're a SaaS company with product managers and are considering sending your PMs to one of these courses, I wouldn't bother. Save your money and spend it on some things I'll list out later in this piece. I think that all of these courses and programs are rapidly becoming obsolete and the current generation of methodologies and techniques they teach to product managers are not relevant to an on demand company, particularly one that has built the type of business architecture you need to survive and thrive in SaaS."

"In an ideal world, encrypting sensitive data at the application layer is likely your best choice. Practically speaking, it's not always possible, or may be implemented entirely wrong. It's really freaking hard to design appropriate application level encryption, even when you're using crypto libraries and other adjuncts like external key management. Go read this post over at Matasano, or anything by Nate Lawson, if you want to start digging into the complexity of application encryption."

"In a nutshell, the more secure you want to be and the more you need separation of duties, the more you will need granular enforcement and changes to your applications. Each option that is moved outside the database means you get more complexity and less application transparency."

"Well, because Sales Insights eliminates a lot of the guesswork about lead value. And, it's a native Salesforce.com application they've really tried to make intuitive to remove the barrier to adoption companies would have if they threw yet another tool at the sales team."

"It's not that I am against PCI-DSS per se, it's just that we should not need PCI-DSS to begin with. We have gotten so wrapped up in the discussion on securing this credit card data and the payment system that we have somewhat forgotten that the merchant does not need this information to conduct commerce." – When will we "own" our data and stop the madness of proliferation? We need to reach the point where it is cost prohibitive for companies to collect and horde our identities. When that occurs, then only a handful will decide to incur the cost, primarily because they can still make money by doing so.

"Everybody is wrong. When you adhere to the famous "four Ps of marketing" and talk up your product (the first P) you end up with egotistical nonsense. Nobody cares about your products. They care about themselves and solving their problems. Marketing is about understanding your buyer personas and creating information that they want to consume."