Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide | Video on TED.com

Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration? | Video on TED.com

Data visualization tool from Microsoft Labs, based on annotated web.

"If I can leave you with one big idea today, it's that the whole of the data in which we consume is greater that the sum of the parts, and, instead of thinking about information overload, what I'd like you to think about is how we can use information so that patterns pop and we can see trends that would otherwise be invisible.
...
So right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse. We talk about the curse of information overload. We talk about drowning in data. What if we can actually turn that upside down and turn the web upside down, so that instead of one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things, and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden? If we can do that, then, instead of being trapped in data, we might actually extract information. And, instead of dealing just with information, we can tease out knowledge. And if we get the knowledge, then maybe even there's wisdom to be found. "




about Gary Flake @wikipedia

Monday, April 19, 2010

Introduction - Google Cloud Print - Google Code

goal is to build a printing experience that enables any app (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer anywhere in the world.
...
basically "direct pdf" printing from web...
iPad printing: solved -- Engadget

Magical in its simplicity.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

podcast: Sizing Up Your Green Footprint | WBUR and NPR - On Point with Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Daniel Goleman, science journalist and psychologist. He’s author of “Emotional Intelligence,” “Social Intelligence,” and “Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything” (with an accompanying CD). His op-ed, in this weekend’s New York Times, was “How Green Is My iPad?”

Dara O’Rourke, Professor of Environmental and Labor Policy at UC Berkeley and founder of GoodGuide.com, a website that rates over 65,000 products by their personal, social, and environmental impact.

book: The Innovator's Dilemma



The Innovator's Dilemma

In book The Innovator's Dilemma, Harvard Business School Professor
Clayton Christensen asks the question: Why do well-managed companies fail?
He concludes that they often fail because the very management practices
that have allowed them to become industry leaders
also make it extremely difficult for them to develop
the disruptive technologies that ultimately steal away their markets.

Well-managed companies are excellent at developing the sustaining technologies
that improve the performance of their products
in the ways that matter to their customers.
This is because their management practices are biased toward:
  • Listening to customers,
  • Investing aggressively in technologies that give those customers what they say they want
  • Seeking higher margins, and
  • Targeting larger markets rather than smaller ones. 
Disruptive technologies, however, are distinctly different from sustaining technologies.
Disruptive technologies change the value proposition in a market.
They are typically cheaper, smaller, simpler and frequently more convenient to use.
Therefore, they open new markets

Because of experience and sufficient investment and new customers,
the developers of disruptive technologies are able to improve their products faster, and they eventually take over the older markets.



Principles of Disruptive Technology:
  1. Companies Depend on Customers and Investors for Resources
  2. Small Markets Don't Solve the Growth Needs of Large Companies
  3. Markets That Don't Exist Can't Be Analyzed
  4. Technology Supply May Not Equal Market Demand
He advises managers faced with disruptive technologies to:

1. Give responsibility for disruptive technologies to organizations whose customers need them so that resources will flow to them.

2. Set up a separate organization small enough to get excited by small gains.

3. Plan for failure. Don't bet all your resources on being right the first time. Think of your initial efforts at commercializing a disruptive technology as learning opportunities. Make revisions as you gather data.

4. Don't count on breakthroughs. Move ahead early and find the market for the current attributes of the technology. You will find it outside the current mainstream market.

Attributes that make disruptive technologies unattractive to mainstream markets are the attributes on which the new markets will be built.

Disruptive technologies initially under-perform the current technology on the attributes that matter most to mainstream customers.
The companies that succeed in commercializing them must find different customers for whom the new technology's attributes are most valuable.

The Innovator's Dilemma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apple Bites the Hand That Feeds It with New App Rules - PCWorld Business Center

Apple Bites the Hand That Feeds It with New App Rules - PCWorld Business Center

The Innovator's Dilemma

The Innovator's Dilemma
chapter 1, about HD industry

Thursday, April 01, 2010

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference | Alex "Sandy" Pentland
...indoor spaces of the city and the answers that can be gleaned from human movements within the interiors of buildings. Tapping into the potential of the phone to mine customer and employee location data within an organization leads to interesting results. From the movement of ants to how coffee breaks are scheduled, location based software can show habits that encourage and discourage productive behavior.

Waggle dance
is a method that bees are using to show to other bees direction to good food.
If enough many bees point to same direction, the whole hive moves.
Similar thing happens in human social networks:
when enough many people move to same direction,
the whole organization moves...