In the film “Night on Earth,” Italian comic Roberto Benigni plays a taxi driver tooling around Rome one August morning at four. His flag’s up, he’s bored, and the streets are empty. “Dove sono i romani?” he asks himself, “Where are all the Romans?”
Where were all the BI people last week? Did they all go to Munich or Tehran? Or were they just resting up for the recovery?
Then I checked Twitter. Many of them had been there all the time. Still, I was bored.
Then on Saturday, Ken Rudin’s email came in announcing his new address. On Monday, LucidEra’s sad news.
At 4 on recent mornings, I suppose LucidEra execs were wide awake and staring into the dark. Mark Madsen emailed that he had an inkling, but I was surprised. This wasn’t supposed to happen. LucidEra was one of the interesting companies, one of the bright lights. In January, I had written a column for TDWI about possible expansion of the Pipeline Healthcheck. Others would go down, but not them.
On the other hand, it was a startup. They often fail, especially now. And I’m sure that chief marketing officer and co-founder Rudin and vice president of marketing Darren Cunningham will land well.
The movie is more fun. Someone finally hails the cab, a priest. The driver feels no reverence. He invents a long “confession” to amuse himself, and it works so well on the drive across town that he doesn’t notice the priest’s fatal heart attack.
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