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Alex Lindahl
Editor, OpenEconomist

Alex Lindahl is the founder and editor of OpenEconomist. During the day he works in sales and runs software publishing at Acquia, an open source startup that is commercializing Drupal.

Articles by this author:

  • The Importance of User Experience
    By: Alex Lindahl
  • Acquia Updates Solr Search, Hosting Stats, & Design Competition
    By: Alex Lindahl
  • Ushahidi: Tracking The Gulf Oil Spill Through Crowdsourcing
    By: Alex Lindahl
  • OECD Urges Open Business Models for Economic Growth

    The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) just released a report stressing that boosting innovation and entrepreneurship will be key to bringing us out recession. The think-tank's report explains how governments not only need to encourage supply, they need to create demand for innovation. This is obviously crucial in the commercial world for new products and companies. However, demand for innovation here isn't nearly needed as much compared to innovation needed to tackle today's greatest challenges.

    By: Alex Lindahl
  • Spindle Law Crowdsources Legal Research

    Spindle Law is a new startup that aims to use crowdsourcing to make legal research easier for lawyers. In their own words, Spindle Law is a "community of lawyers reinventing the legal treatise." The site combines wiki-like features, social publishing, and granular taxonomy.

    By: Alex Lindahl
  • Tracking Entrepreneurship with Open Data

    Startups that develop web apps played an important role in bringing the internet to what we know as "web 2.0" today. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, and others redefined the web to be "socially" enhanced making it easy to share, form connections, and track what users "like". Ironically, it may not be startups who lead us from community-type websites to the next generation of the web.  Instead, we're starting to see governments and NGO's leading the rally for open data initiatives and linked data, which are both becoming the foundation for the growth of the semantic web.

    By: Alex Lindahl
  • Drupal for Publishers

    Publishers love  Drupal. We see this everyday at Acquia. They make up one of our largest group of customers including the Slate Group, Thomson Reuters, and MotherJones.com. We’re seeing publishers continue to adopt and migrate existing sites because they leverage thousands of modules, features, and monetization capabilities of Drupal. This is no surprise due to Drupal’s inherit social capabilities, custom content types, media and third party integration, and flexibility to customize or build on the CMS in any way you desire. In observation of this growing vertical adoption of Drupal, our partner Phase2 Technology realized they were building common features in all of their publishing implementations. Naturally, this led them to develop OpenPublish, and now, a closer partnership with Acquia that bundles packaged solutions for the distribution of Drupal.

    By: Alex Lindahl
  • Open Source Business Models

    Demand and adoption of open source continues to increase and is fundamentally changing enterprise software. According to Forrester Research's report, 'Open Source Software Goes Mainstream,' open source software is a #1 priority for software development decision-makers. Another report from IDC, 'Worldwide Open Source Services Forecast 2009,' open sources services is expected to double from $4 billion in 2009 to $8 billion in 2013. Governments both here and abroad are adopting open source, too. You might have heard about the Obama Administration's Open Government Directive. Earlier this year, the United Kingdom revised it's open source action plan stating "We will require our suppliers to provide evidence of consideration of open source solutions during procurement exercises. If this evidence is not provided, bidders are likely to be disqualified from the procurement."

    By: Alex Lindahl