The great strength of technologists is that we innovate constantly, always looking for a better world. The great weakness is that we sometimes fall in love with the solution, the technology itself, without regards to its applicable value in the real world. How do we determine if a given solution really has a chance of being adopted? The two biggest determinants of a solution are usefulness and usability. Usefulness "

Sometimes, you build marketing collateral for a market that is completely unexpected. And while on the way, it teaches you, once again, why Steve Blank, Eric Ries and Co. are right: everything you rationalize and think about is only an opinion about the way the market will react to it; facts exist only in the real world. I have a friend who is a very experienced technology consultant, Reuven Lerner.

Last week, Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm, and its fashion subsidiary Myntra, announced that they shuttered their mobile Web sites. According to the article, which has a good analysis on zdnet, their desktop Web site is still active, but they are considering shutting that down as well. Indeed, if you go to flipkart.com or myntra.com from a desktop browser, the site works just fine. Change your User-Agent to iOS or Android, and you get a link to their platform-specific mobile app.

Safes. They are big, heavy, and make us feel, well, "safe" about our valuables stored inside. Historically, safes were controlled by a series of complex gears that only the correct series, or "combination", of dials would open. I loved the illustrations for gears and other mechanical devices in David Macaulay's "New Way Things Work". Digital safes, whether the professional variety of the home variety, were created largely for convenience. They are faster to open, easier to share (and change) codes, and required less physical space for all of the gears.