If you are interested in how an organization incorporates social networking into its operation, check out an interview that Guy Kawasaki conducted with Lee Aase of the renowned Mayo Clinic. Aase explains the history of the Clinic's use of social media and how effective it has proven.
Beginning yesterday Clear, the system whereby you could pay a yearly fee to be enrolled in a program which allowed you to bypass the long security lines at the airport in the U.S., had a message on its website stating the service was no longer available. Frequent business travelers really liked the system which was in place at about twenty airports around the country. The big question now is what will happen to all the confidential information collected on passengers? The Clear program which was owned by the Verified Identity Pass Company and founded in 2003 was unable to make a deal with its creditors and had to shut down
Social networks have been transformed by Facebook, Twitter, etc. These new technologies are lettting individuals and companies interact at the speed of light and sound. Read more about it in a SF Chronicle article.
Biochar ia a highly porous charcoal made from organic waste; the source can be any forest, agricultural or animal waste. Some examples are woodchips, corn husks, peanut shells, even chicken manure. The waste -- called "biomass" -- is cooked under intense heat, sometimes above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and in a few hours organic trash is transformed into charcoal-like pellets that farmers can turn into fertilizer. Gasses given off during the process can be harnessed to fuel vehicles or power electric generators. Biochar's high carbon content and porous nature help soil retain water and nutrients, while protecting soil microbes and ultimately increasing crop yields. It acts as a natural 'carbon sink', sequestering CO2 and locking it into the ground. Scientists are now looking to biochar to improve our planet's future.
From Sarah Wilson, Archivist at the Stanford Law School, comes note of a video discussion on Technology and the Future of the Book. Part of the annual conference of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the panel discussion was held on March 1. Panelists include eminent scientist Edward Feigenbaum of Stanford, Donald Lindberg, Director of the National Library of Medicine, Daniel Clancy of the Google Book Search Project, Stanford University Librarian Michael Keller and others. It's a two-hour discussion; I am told that one can skip the first 10 minutes of introductions.
Sierra Nevada Brewery in Chico, California is installing a system developed by EFuel that can turn sugar, water, and yeast into a high grade biofuel. BusinessWire reports that this system, called the EFuel100 MicroFueler, will take millions of gallons of discarded yeast from the brewery and use it, in combination with sugar, to produce an inexpensive biofuel (Stanford users can read this article online). The best part of the EFuel100 MicroFueler is that it can take unsold beer from the brewery and convert it to an energy source. If you can’t drink it, drive it. And next time you get pulled over just say, "Officer, it's not me -- it's the car!"
In an article entitled Lithium Batteries Charge Ahead, the magazine Nature reports that researchers at MIT have found a way to recharge batteries in a fraction of the time it takes currently. The implications of this new discovery are huge for everything from cell phones to electric cars, who wouldn’t like to be able to charge a device within seconds as opposed to hours.
No, it's not Elmer Fudd running for cover ... retweet is when you forward someone else's 'tweet' to your own Twitter followers. Guy Kawasaki has written a blog How To Get Retweeted, offering tips and techniques on how to get your own tweet disseminated by others. Aside from including a link to a description of Twitter (for those benighted souls still trapped in the 20th century), Kawasaki points to two sites that measure retweeting, as well as a list of the Twitterers with the most followers. Are we ready to tweet?
An interesting article in 2009 Jan./Feb. issue of BizEd magazine talks about the cell phones and how these devices literally transformed the way people communicate, conduct business, or just pass their time reading or watching movies. However, the main topic of the article is the future of mobile phones in the classrooms, specifically in business schools. Admitting, that the capabilities of the modern cell phones are not being used in teaching courses, the author sees that in the nearest future the mobile phones will became a standard tool of the education process. Technology is evolving around producing more and more applications for cell phones. Basically, the “phone” function is becoming just one of many applications. And talking about the applications, the accompanying material includes the listing of cool websites where you can learn how to use your cell phone for a variety of tasks. For more details, find the article in the periodicals display area of Jackson library.
"You are there!" So said the old radio broadcasts. But with Photosynth you are there, at the Obama inauguration, in the midst of the crowd. The technology on the CNN site allows you to look up and down, turn around. Photosynth takes pictures from individual volunteers and blends them into a continuous image or landscape. Learn more from a snazzy demo on Photosynth given at a TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference.
The term “cyber warfare” sounds like a game for Xbox 360, sadly it is not. Cyber warfare has become the focus of government and industry trying to secure data and services available through the internet. The Center for Foreign Relations has put together a narrative of how cyber warfare developed over time entitled The Evolution of Cyber Warfare. It’s easy to see how governments could be threatened however companies are also at risk. Frontline produced a show highlighting the development and challeges encountered by an intelligence group dedicated to investigating attacks in cyberspace and what we can expect the future to hold. You can watch the CyberWar! in its entirety. The table of contents of the report entitled Cyberwarfare 2008-2018 gives an idea of which companies are active in combating cyber warfare. The Georgia Tech Information Security Center has written a report entitled Emerging Cyber Threat Report for 2009 in which it is easy to read how vulnerable corporations are to attacks.
Computerworld has released its tenth annual list of Premier IT Leaders for 2009. Their awards honor men and women driving innovation in the IT realm, taking on new roles and executing new strategies. The list includes highlight pieces on a number of the best and brightest, such as Viji Murali, CIO of Washington State University, Anthony L. Abbattista, VP of Technology Solutions at Allstate, Timothy Cox, CIO of Onstar Corp, Jo Lee Hayes, VP of Enterprise Technologies at Sallie Mae, and many more. See the full list in our latest issue on the Jackson Current Periodical rack.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a non-partisan research and educational institute – a think tank – whose mission is to formulate and promote public policies to advance technological innovation and productivity internationally, in Washington, and in the states, released a State New Economy Index to measure the economic structure of states, showing which states are leading and which are lagging in the country's transformation to a global, entrepreneurial and innovation-based economy.
Overall, the index report uses twenty-nine indicators (listed on pages 11-14), divided into the following five categories that best capture what is new about the New Economy: 1) Knowledge jobs, 2) Globalization, 3) Economic dynamism, 4) Transformation to a digital economy, 5) Technological innovation capacity.
View report
Everywun, the website that allows you to support a worthy cause by simply clicking online, pulls communities and resources together for great causes. For example, pick a charity badge of your choice from Everywun and post it to your blog as follows. Each subsequent click on the badge by your visitors generates income from a corporate sponsor that has contracted with Everywun in an effort to support that charity. This badge is for US Education & Connectivity: using technology and the Internet to support education in the US.
Lack time and money to do good work? Everywun is a great solution.
SFGate, December 5, 2008
This is the first in a series of blogs which focuses on crime in the internet and what companies are doing (or not) to try and stop it. What brought this up? Well several things. First was a research request that came in requesting background information on cyberwarfare. Who knew something like that existed? Then a friend of mine had one of her social network sites hacked into. How safe are social networks really? Finally, a report this weekend by 60 Minutes on fraud in the online gambling industry prompted me to write this series.
The 60 Minutes report entitled How Online Gamblers Unmasked Cheaters tells the story of how online poker players uncovered the fact that someone was cheating. It turned out that one of the employees of an online gambling website was able to see everyone’s cards and cashed in on millions of dollars. What makes prosecuting especially difficult is that any online business generally works out of multiple locations in terms of the servers being housed perhaps in Europe, the programmers in Asia and the management in the United States. The article, on which the 60 Minutes report is based, in the Washington Post entitled Players Gamble on Honesty, Security of Internet Betting, estimates the online gambling industry to be worth about $18 billion a portion of that $4 billion is brought in by online poker alone.
 Yahoo! (YHOO) announced today that Jerry Yang, who helped build the company and has been its CEO since June last year, is stepping down. Upon the appointment of his successor, Yang will return to his former role as Chief Yahoo! , and will remain on the company's board.
"Having set Yahoo! on a new, more open path, the time is right for me to transition the CEO role and our global talent to a new leader. I will continue to focus on global strategy and to do everything I can to help Yahoo! realize its full potential and enhance its leading culture of technology and product excellence and innovation," said Jerry Yang. Read the story in New York Times .
Th!nk began in 1991 in Norway. By 1998, it produced 1,000+ electric runabouts sold in Norway. In 1999, it was bought by Ford to meet California's Zero Emission Vehicle mandate. By 2003, EV program ended in the US and Ford sold Think. In 2006, a group of investors purchased Think for $15 million. Now Think's chief executive, Willums has raised about $93 million, much of it from Silicon Valley, to help lift Think off the ground.
The company opened an office in Menlo Park, Calif., earlier this year with plans to sell cars statewide in 2009.
Seattle Times, 7/18/08
Related news
Eric Schmidt was recently interviewed by James Manyika at McKinsey on Google's view on the future of business. It is part of McKinsey’s ongoing work exploring technology's evolving impact on business management and the economy.
You may view the video at the McKinsey site.
In a race to unlock the mobile platform market, Google's Android software used on G1 is a variant of Linux, a free open-source operating system which will allow programmers to write future applications for Android. G1 costs $179. The good news is that consumers are expecting handset-makers in the very near future to come up with Android-based phones at much lower prices.
View related WSJ announcement on YouTube
HP, Intel and Yahoo are building a cloud computing global project that will consist six distributed computing centers around the world. The trio has partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority in Singapore, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the U.S. and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany each of which will host one of the six “centers of excellence.” The other three will be hosted by Yahoo, Intel and HP.
The idea of cloud computing is that large-scale computing tasks can be handled as efficiently, if not more so “in the cloud” meaning by thousands of Internet-connected servers stationed in data centers around the world. Instead of spending truckloads of cash for servers and the space to house them and the personnel to run and maintain them, why not lease the capacity you need from providers in the cloud?
Story at businessweek.com
Watch YouTube's What is Cloud Computing?
The Tesla, the 100% electric car by Tesla Motors, opened a store last month in Menlo Park at 300 El Camino Real, just north of the Stanford Shopping Center. It's designed as a showroom and partly as a museum type exhibit, showing prototype models used in designing the company's electric car. -- San Francisco Business Times
The car was conceived by Martin Eberhard, and was named after Nikola Tesla, an eccentric late 19th century genius inventor. Driving the streets of Palo Alto in 2003 when Eberhard was looking for his next project, he began to notice that the same driveways that held a Prius often also had a Porsche 911 or other luxury sports car. "It was clear that people weren't buying a Prius to save money on gas - gas was selling close to inflation-adjusted all-time lows," says Eberhard, "They were buying them to make a statement about the environment." So why not, he reasoned, allow this deep-pocketed clientele to make that statement driving a car that exceeded the performance of a Porsche?
Read the Tesla story in Fortune Magazine
Watch YouTube's Tesla Electric Car with Eberhard and Elon Musk, Chairman of Tesla Motors.
Also, The unveiling of the Tesla Motors Electric Car and Interview With Elon Musk Tesla Motors
Have you noticed that it has become more and more difficult to read through a long article? Do you think and work in 'bullet points'? You are not alone. According to an article in the July/August issue of the Atlantic Magazine, "Is Google Making Us Stupid", the Internet has changed the way we process information. There has been no long term study, but short term studies suggest that people use a form of 'skimming' when reading non-fiction, jumping from one source to another and rarely reading past two pages before moving to another site. The author contends that although we are reading more today, the way we read can impact our ability to analyze and interpret nuances in the text. You can read the full story online or in the print copy in the periodical display rack of Jackson Library -- although I must warn you, the article is 6 pages long.
Now, did you get all that, or were you skimming ?
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talks about the blending of contents, commerce, advertising, and communities in the next 10 years. For example, if you are watching a golf match with Tiger Woods, you can use your clicker to point at the golf ball and the product/price information will be in display for you to place an order right at that moment. All advertising inventories and consumer demand will be sorted out by algorithm and with the killer application "search," the right ad will be delivered to the right place and at the right time.
Watch more Ballmer video at washingtonpost.com
The blurring of contents and advertising also delivered by Kodak CMO Jeff Hayzlett
I recently lost my cell phone and this article caught my attention.
TryPhone beta has 12 handsets so far, including such popular items as the iPhone and the Motorola Razr 2 for customers to take a look. The company hopes to have between 100 and 150 handsets up by the holiday season, says marketing director Leila Modarres. It also plans to increase the interactivity of the virtual handsets.
Check it out. For someone like me who has used only one model that comes free with a subscription, TryPhone saves time and money in identifying the popular ones and the best ones that are out there. Before I go to an AT&T store in my area to actually try out different phones, I should already have a pretty good idea what I am looking for.
The IPO of the Chinese B2B web portal Alibaba.com last November raised a near-record $1.5 billion—at the time trailing only the $1.7 billion generated by Google Inc. in 2004 for the largest IPO haul by an Internet company.
The Alibaba Group—the parent of Alibaba.com—is China's most impressive Internet outfit. Founded in 1999, it comprises six main businesses. In addition to its B2B and the Taobao consumer auction portals, it owns China's most popular Internet payment company, Alipay, which solved the credit card problem with a bank transfer workaround. Alisoft, its Internet-based business management software, delivers tools that allow Taobao customers to communicate before making deals. In 2005, Alibaba acquired its search engine Yahoo! China. The newest entry, Alimama, allows Web publishers to list their advertising inventory, complete with prices and other pertinent information, and then advertisers can scroll for publications that match their needs and click to complete a deal. Alibaba has 4,400 employees working in 30 sales and marketing offices in China, Europe, and the United States.
Corporate Counsel, May 1, 2008
Weblog Strategic Sourcing Europe on Alisoft
Wikipedia on AliBlog
Customer Communications in North America
On 3 April 2008, Alibaba.com started their first official blog targeted for the international small and medium sized enterprise (SME) community, with a special emphasis on communicating with merchants in the United States. Their blog, the AliBlog, is marketed as "the latest word from Alibaba.com on our news, events, and community" while promising to be an official source for information and opinion from an employee's perspective on Alibaba.com.
I’m back from the world of car manufacturers to talk a bit about the cell phone world. Bloomberg Markets has a great article in the May issue entitled Google’s Wireless Gamble. With profits from their online advertising down and the company still growing Google is trying to find other ways to make money. In case you haven’t seen their stock it has taken a nose dive and is basically back where it was a year ago (US:GOOG). They are developing an operating system for cell phones. The system will be named Android and will be released this summer.
Looking at Apple and its famous CEO, Guy Kawasaki, Apple's former chief evangelist, admits "Steve proves that it's OK to be an asshole." The Wired Magazine April 2008 cover story is about none other than Steve Jobs, Silicon Valley legend, charismatic genius, and ... corporate tyrant ? Maybe so. But GSB Professor Bob Sutton in his bestseller The No Asshole Rule, while noting the man's legendary offensiveness, exempts Jobs from the excoriation he gives many other, uhh, you-know-whats. Typically, an insider told Sutton that Jobs could demean his staff to the point of tears, yet "be almost always right." Sutton was even shocked, shocked to find himself defending Jobs on national TV recently; he feels that most horror stories about Jobs apply to his reckless youth. In addition to Jobs, author Leander Kahney points to the Apple legacy of opacity and secrecy that has helped the company stymie competition while flying in the face of conventional Silicon Valley culture. Read how Apple and its CEO repeatedly break the Valley's rules -- and succeed.
Each year the MIT Technology Review provides a list of 10 Emerging Technologies to watch for. This year biofuels lead the list with signing of the Energy Independence and Security act signed into law which will provide funding and support to develop alternative fuels. Many of the other technologies surround computing and health. For instance better ways to diagnose illnesses and improving the way computers work and wireless power is delivered. Read all about these technologies and how they might impact our futures in the April edition of the MIT Technology Review.
Silverlink Communications® Inc., the leader in healthcare communications, introduced at the Health 2.0 Conference, a fundamentally new capability to healthcare communications – called Adaptive HealthComm Science(TM) – a discipline that combines decision science methodologies and analytics with personalization technology. This proven approach merges world-class communications techniques from consumer industries with the unique characteristics of healthcare, to drive healthcare behaviors in scale. By leveraging Adaptive HealthComm Science, healthcare enterprises can dramatically improve the effectiveness of their communications programs, improving the member experience and driving down healthcare costs.
BusinessWire, March 04, 2008
The special, March/April 2008, issue of Technology Review presents its annual listing of top emerging technologies in various industries and their frontrunners. Among those is Frances Arnold. He is designing better enzymes capable of breaking down cellulose found in biomass which can be used as biofuels. Another example is physicist Marin Soljačič, who is working on creating wireless power technology, e.g. transmitting electricity to devices without cables. To find out what all new technologies are about, read the article in Jackson Library or online.
Google is getting into the Web site building business, enabling just about anyone to quickly set up and update a Web site with pictures, calendars and video.
"We are literally adding an edit button to the Web," said Dave Girouard, general manager of the division overseeing the new application. All sites created on the service will run on one of Google's computers.
Google acquired many of the Web-site tools when it bought a Silicon Valley startup, JotSpot, last year.
Washingtonpost.com
Well, the sun is not coming out in Palo Alto today, and rain is on the way. The title of my blog has to do with an article in The New York Times about Silicon Valley becoming a world leader in cheap and ubiquitous solar panels for the masses. The author suggests some of the valley’s best brains are captivated by the challenge of prodcing low cost solar panels and they hope to put the development of solar technologies onto a faster track.
Local police departments, including Palo Alto, use a public database by Public Engines, a private company that works only with government entities, to plot daily crime incidents using Google Maps. 45 agencies now use the web site, which launched last spring in Washington, D.C. "Citizens can do a search in their particular community to see what's going on in their neighborhoods," Sgt. Sandra Brown of the Palo Alto Police Department said. After a recent burst of national publicity, the site handled more than 100,000 visitors in a single day.
Reported in Palo Alto Daily News
Researchers at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom have designed an interactive color Sudoku game, one of many programs designed to explore the interplay between logic and perception as humans interact with computers. Empirical Modelling, what the scientists call this approach, pays more attention to what humans take into account and provides a practical means to explore problems that aren’t so cut and dry.
In the case of color Sudoku, it can mean a mix of perception, expectation, experience, logic, and of course, color discernment.
Reported at MSNBC
Related blog on Sudoku
Many people, especially teenagers, don’t necessarily equate loading things on Facebook with publishing to the world, but that is exactly what it is. The whole world is watching -- or at the very least the police are watching, as chatty criminals brag online about their many nefarious deeds, including homicides, rapes, vandalism, underage drinking and other miscellaneous crimes. Pictures of high school and college students swilling beer or pounding down shots have landed many a student in front of a judge, according to the January 13th issue of the Burlington Free Press. This gives credence to the Carnegie Mellon University study, "Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks", in which authors Ralph Gross and Alessandro Acquisti point out that most users of social networking websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Friendstar underestimate the security and privacy of social networking sites. Author beware !
The topic of December issue of Red Herring is the rapid development of high-tech industry in Israel. You’ll find an interview with Orna Berry, Israel Venture Association Chair, who attributes the country’s success in maintaining the leading position in today’s global economy to huge investments in the early-stage ventures among other factors. In the interview with Shimon Peres, the Israeli president reveals some major directions of developing the economy such as massive switching to electrical cars in the near future and becoming an incubator of the solar energy. Another set of articles talks about close relations between Israeli new enterprises and Silicon Valley in creating new ventures and collaborating with VC companies such as Benchmark, Sequoia Capital, and Greylock Partners among others. You’ll find an article devoted to the state of biotech research in Israel, its successes and challenges. For more, read the magazine in Jackson Library's Periodicals section.
"Emerging IT Trends Impacting Higher Education … and Tools to Deal with Them"
Presenter: Dr. Jan-Martin Lowendahl*, Gartner analyst
Date: Thursday, January 10, 2008, 9:30am – 11:00am
Where: Room L103, Littlefield Building, GSB
Who: Open to all Stanford faculty, staff, and students (Free; limited to 30 participants)
Summary: The higher education environment is culturally complex, with a wide variety of stakeholders and rapidly changing technologies. How do you know what matters, when so much is relevant and important? What should be a priority? We will take a look at some of the IT trends impacting higher education and discuss some simple tools that can be used to bring order to this increasingly complex situation.
*Based in Sweden, Dr. Jan-Martin is a Gartner Research Director focused on higher education technology strategies including identity and access management, governance, learning technologies, and academic and administrative systems. Prior to coming to Gartner two years ago, he was the CIO at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden where his main focus was infrastructure strategies and governance. He holds a PhD. in chemistry from Goteborg University.
Registration and Question:
Registration is free and is limited to 30 participants. To register, contact Ann Groves, Higher Education Executive, Northwestern Region, Gartner, Inc.; 650-366-4942 (office); 510-821-0938 (cell)
In partnership with IBM, information giant Google is moving to use a network of perhaps one million servers to bring access to massive computing power to universities around the world. As BusinessWeek (12/24/07) puts it, this could potentially lead to Google becoming the world's primary computer. The brainchild of Google employee Christophe Bisciglia, the concept utilizes a vast network of servers called a 'cloud' that can store mind-numbing amounts of information. The scenario seems to fit Google's own corporate vision of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible. Other organizations that may be poised to use 'cloud power' include Yahoo!, Microsoft and Amazon. Read more online or in Jackson Library.
McKinsey Quarterly reports eight new ways of doing business that will shape the economy in years to come. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.
Here are a few highlights:
1. Cocreation -- company harvesting talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. For example, the Linux operationg system was developed over the Internet by a network of specialists. It is estimated that roughly 12% of all labor activity in the U.S. economy could be transformed by distributed and networked forms of innovation.
2. Consumer as innovators -- for instance, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is created by its distributed customers. Another example is Threadless, the online T-shirt store that asks consumer to submit new designes for T-shirts to be voted on by the community at large.
3. Outsourcing -- companies parcel out work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks. Topcoder, a company that has created a network of software developers in order that companies can access this talent pool instead of employing experienced engineers.
4. Extracting value from interactions -- companies invest in interactions may find smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value that is difficult for their rivals to replicate.
6. Unbundling production -- Amazon.com, for example, has expanded its business model to let other retailers use its logistics and distribution services. Unbundling enables the supply side to raise asset utilization rates and therefore their returns on invested capital. On the demand side, unbundling offers access to resources and assets that might otherwise require a large fixed investment or significant scale to achieve competitive marginal cost.
Read the article in December 2007 issue of McKinsey Quarterly
"That a 57-year-old divorced Greek immigrant would become the reigning queen of online political chat might come as a surprise to the legions of teens and twentysomethings who frequent forums on the web known as blogs. But that's exactly what Arianna Huffington did." So begins 'The Blogger', the cover story for Worth magazine December 2007. Two years ago Huffington launched a blog for political wonks; it is now one of the hottest sites on the Internet. Her Huffington Post, founded in 2005, attracts 3.5 million visitors daily. Read this fascinating interview with Huffington, at the Jackson Library periodicals display.
According to Jeff Lipton, Managing Director of North American CleanTech Investment Banking for Jefferies & Co., clean technologies is experiencing an investment boom as it moves into mainstream business sectors. The overall performance of 'cleantech' IPOs has been positive, with the only the biofuel sector underperforming. Read the complete story -- "Cleaning Up in CleanTech" -- in the Library, Fall 2007 issue of AlwaysON. Also in the issue is the GoingGreen 100 Top Companies list.
Gamers of Nintendo's Wii complained about "aching backs, sore shoulders, and Wii elbow." In Wii Sports, a game that comes with the console, users mimic the motions used in sports like bowling, tennis and baseball. Wii features digital sensors that let users virtually play the game. Since its debut in November of last year, 9.27 million units have been sold. In addition to turning Wii into a new form of exercise, it is also used in hospitals to treat physical therapy patients.
Active video games like the Wii can fight child obesity, according to a report published by the Mayo Clinic in the January 2006 issue of Pediatrics.
A research team at the University of Toronto is developing a "therapeutic video game" to treat children who suffer from hemiplegic cerebral palsy, a condition that can partially paralyze one side of the body. If the children regularly use their weaker side, their motor function can improve.
Read more on Nintendo Wii in Mindshare , Time, News@UofT
On September 19, I blogged EU vs. Microsoft = $688 Million Fine about the EU ruling which upheld a previous decision concerning Microsoft’s market dominance. At that point Microsoft could have filed another appeal. In the meantime fines for not complying with the first ruling have been accumulating. Today Microsoft agreed to share the code to some of it’s server with competitors thus allowing them to write programs compatible with certain Microsoft servers. In essence agreeing to abide by the original ruling put forth by the European Comission in 2004. Read more about it at the Financial Times, CNN and Bloomberg
UC Berkeley has begun to publish its lectures on YouTube, the first university to team up with the video-sharing site to offer full courses online. It's the latest move to bring higher education to the masses through the Web.
"YouTube is an extension of our reach," said Ben Hubbard, co-manager of webcast.berkeley.edu, the program that gathers the lectures and makes them available online. "We feel strongly as a public institution that we should be providing a window into the intellectual riches of our university." Some 200 clips, representing eight semesterlong courses on bioengineering, physics, and chemistry, etc. are available at youtube.com/ucberkeley. More courses are expected to be added.
UC Berkeley already was posting videos on Google, which acquired YouTube last year for $1.65 billion. Before the videos were shifted to YouTube, they were viewed 1.3 million times and downloaded 700,000 times. On UC Berkeley's local site, the school's lectures were seen 4.3 million times last year. And on iTunes, some 2 million podcasts have been downloaded since April 2006.
So guess which one has received the top view? A lecture from the School of Information and Management Systems, SIMS141 Search Engines, Technology, and Business with Sergey Brin, Co-Founder, Google receives a total of 46,414 views so far.
Source: SFGate.com
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is far from replacing barcodes completely but it’s used in a wide variety of industries and continues expanding into new geographical locations. Here at Jackson Library we even have a periodical devoted to the subject, the latest issue of which contains an article on RFID magic mirrors ... coming to a shopping mall near you. Here’s how they work.
You walk into Bloomingdale's (let’s say) and decide you really must have that elegant Edwardian princess gown, but not in cherry satin -- but you don’t have enough time to compare sizes or try on other colors, nor do you wish to make the purchase without consulting your fellow fashion mavens, none of whom are present. And it would please you immensely to leave the store with said gown in hand since three nights hence you intend to wear it to an exclusive upscale dinner party (yeah, right). Outside the dressing room you discover a three-panel interactive mirror with touch-screen menu. The mirror reads your RFID-tagged gown and then virtually displays it in all colors, lists all sizes, and recommends accessories. By uploading contact info from your cell phone you then IM your fashionable friends attaching a hyperlink containing your fashion choices. Any 'hot or not' feedback from your pals would then be displayed on one of the mirror panels to facilitate decision-making. “It’s the way women shop,” says Robert Savage, president of Nanette Lepore’s in Manhattan. “They like to have input.”
At Britain’s Nick Tentis Living Retail Theatre, magic mirrors will also serve as customer style guides enabling access to detailed information on clothing. “But most importantly … the tag will trigger the lighting and music in the fitting room to change based on the qualities of the piece the customer is trying on.” Slip into an evening suit and “the lighting will dim and the music will adapt to represent the night-time dining environment where the buyer likely will be wearing the piece.” And if a clerk isn’t handy to snag you another size, alert the mirror and a clerk will be dispatched to assist you (yeah, right).
With such efficiency-enhancing applications including self-automated checkout, monitoring high rollers at casinos, keeping toilets from overflowing, and tracking everything from wheels of parmesan cheese to shoppers’ personal preferences, it’s easy to see why many businesses regard RFID as a cost-effective tool for building customer loyalty. But if in the marketplace “loyalty is [merely] an allegiance to the next big thing and the next cool brand” (1 to 1 Magazine, Sep ’07), and if RFID can be used to track you as well as your shopping profile, then ostensibly advantageous RFID applications may ultimately tune in frequencies of distrust among freedom lovers everywhere.
A nine year legal disagreement between Microsoft and the European Union came to a head on Monday when the EU court upheld an appeal to the decision passed in March of 2004, that Microsoft will have to pay 497 million EUR and a portion of the legal fees for abusing its market dominance. The entire question revolves around whether it was legal for Microsoft to bundle its Media Player product into Windows and deny rivals “source code” information about Microsoft’s system which would allow them to make their products interoperable with Microsoft’s products. The appeal was struck down and this means any further appeals would only apply to technical legal issues. The actual ruling can be viewed or read online. A similar case was struck down in the US courts, that one concerning IE being bundled with Microsoft and essentially making Netscape defunct.
This case is significant because it pits the question of what importance does intellectual property play versus a free and competitive market. This means that other Silicon Valley companies such as Apple, Google and Intel who are at odds with the EU in other court cases might not get it their way.
"The Science of Play". Wired magazine (September 2007) jumps into the inner life of Bungie Studios, and the new game Halo3. In addition to reviewing several features of Halo3 (for the closet gamers among us), author Clive Thompson tracks the development process for a new video game, peering over the shoulders of the testers. The aim is to invent new weapons and levels for the games and then monitor gamers as they "play the hell out of them". The piece revolves around Randy Pagulayan, who runs a testing lab for Bungie that looks more like a psychological research institute than a studio. Read more about the esoteric world of the video game studio online, or in the latest issue in Jackson Library.
Business 2.0 August 2007 Special Global Issue highlights the 29 best business ideas in the world. A taste of what's included: (1) the elimination of lawyers from contract creation, by the startup Negonation (via the platform Tractis), which allows anyone to create, manage and execute contracts online, (2) new company Obecure's tackling obesity with a drug that reduces craving for food, and fatty foods in particular, (3) the application of BitTorrent-type technology to phones, allowing users to send large files, like movies, via cell phone, (4) 'wave farming', encouraging firms like Oceanlinx and Wavegen to generate electricity from ocean waves and tap into the estimated $1 trillion wave energy market, and (5) 'mobile hotels' that can sleep dozens of people -- like Hotelmovil, a pre-fab unit that can be loaded on an 18 wheel-semi, driven to any site and erected in 30 minutes. Read all this and more online or in the Jackson Library copy.
The August 2007 edition of Wall Street & Technology lists the best IT managers on Wall Street on the Buy Side and Sell Side as well as the Exchanges. Each profile covers IT priorities, budgets and predictions on the newest trends and technology which will emerge in the next few years. You can also read some of the profiles online.
Free, interactive music sites like Pandora and Last.fm are a hybrid of radio station and jukebox. They provide a selection of streaming music to match your tastes, reported at washingtonpost.com.
You start at each by creating a profile telling the site which artists or genres you like. For example, at Pandora you customize a radio station by naming an artist you like. The site then serves up music with similar traits, which you can approve or reject by clicking thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. Last.fm uses a different tactic by asking you to download a small program that hooks into iTune and other music software, analyzing your collection and figuring out which artists would fit.
Both sites incorporate social networking so that you can also listen to your friends' stations. Put in enough time at these places, you probably will find yourself discovering new artists.
A newer site, Musicovery, invites users to pick music by genre, tempo, date and mood which can result in it segueing from a West Coast R&B band to a folk-rock group from Algeria.
And what about making all these portable? Imagine a site like this becomes available on your shuffle!
It is believed that tuberculosis has caused 3 billion deaths in human history. TB has been known by a number of descriptive names: phthisis, White Death, White Plague -- and consumption, because it seemed to "consume" people from within. Traditional treatment and diagnosis has not stopped the scourge. The August 2007 issue of Wired profiles a little known company, Akonni Biosystems, that is working to develop a new tool called TruDiagnosis. The tool combines microfluidics, microarrays and engineering into a handheld device that uses a small sample of spit or blood to reveal, in a matter of minutes, the presence of bacteria or virus. A quick test that would identify the particular strain of TB would help doctors target the strain and treat it before it had a chance to take hold its human host. Akonni has developed test for many pathogens many drawn from the CDC’s list of bioterrorism agents. This new tool should move diagnosis into the 21st century.
Technology Review magazine (July / August 2007) in its cover story argues that the Web and the Sim (the simulated world) will soon merge into a combination of mapping applications and social virtuality they call Second Earth. Second Life, which started a mere 4 years ago with a one-square-kilometer patch of 'virtual earth' has grown to 600 square kilometers and almost 7 million users. Author Wade Roush observes the parallel development of mapping technology, and suggests a coming convergence into a single new 'Metaverse'. He cites David Rolston, CEO of Forterra Systems, who coined the term '3-D Internet' to describe this scenario. Also discussed is David Gelernter's Mirror Worlds, with its detailed vision of a virtual earth. Check out the article in Jackson Library (or, one can register for free access on the magazine site.)
The biggest? Siemens. Most profitable? Grupo Iusacell. Number 23 on the list? Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai. Uhh, what are we talking about? BusinessWeek's 2007 Information Technology 100, its ranking of top tech performers. The bad news? Missing tech titans, like Dell, not on the list. A table includes revenues, revenue growth, ROE, shareholder return and profits for the 100. Read it online or in Jackson Library.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shunned acquisition approaches to remain independent to execute his vision of creating “social graph” and to provide services to different demographic groups in Facebook. This asset, connecting people to create value, can be used by web services such as shopping or product recommendations. Although one can get product recommendations at Amazon, at Facebook the recommendation comes from someone you know.
Its competition MySpace ranked top, surpassing Google, as the most popular website based on US internet usage for June 2007 according to Hitwise data. However, many believed that Facebook has recently outpaced MySpace in gaining unique users. Since last September, Facebook has opened up membership registration to anyone.
And what about Google? "There's no network effect [on Google]. The fact that I use Google and you use Google doesn't make us any closer to each other," said Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal and CEO at Slide, a major widget company that is devoting part of its team of developers exclusively to making applications for Facebook.
Stories at Time, AdvertisingAge
Do Something, a youth organization in New York, has created Karma Tycoon, a free online video game to introduce teenagers to the nonprofit world, encourage volunteerism, and teach financial responsibility.
Players have to watch their budgets carefully as they set up a nonprofit organization — a homeless shelter, youth center, senior center, animal shelter, or performing-arts group. They also have to apply for grants and loans, and decide whether to pay for their organizations' expenses with cash or credit. They earn "karma" points by the number of people or animals they help, but lose points if they spend too much and their organization has to close.
The nonprofit organization has also created a guide to help teachers integrate Karma Tycoon into their lesson plans for grades seven to 12.
The JPMorgan Chase Foundation awarded Do Something a grant of nearly $600,000 over three years to develop the game.
Reported in The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) announced the results of research on transforming one type of bacteria into another type by transplanted chromosome. “The successful completion of this research is important because it is one of the key proof of principles in synthetic genomics that will allow us to realize the ultimate goal of creating a synthetic organism,” said J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., president and chairman, JCVI. “We are committed to this research as we believe that synthetic genomics holds great promise in helping to solve issues like climate change and in developing new sources of energy.”
More on the story at wsj.com
Technology trivia per washingtonpost.com
Which wireless carrier is the only one that sells Sidekicks?
- AT&T?
- Nextel?
- T-Mobile?
- Verizon?
Answer at washingtonpost.com (scroll down to the Technology Trivia Quiz box.)
Google uber alles? Michael Hirschorn in the June 2007 Atlantic offers up observations on Google. In 'The Hapless Seed' he takes note of prevailing anxieties that Google is morphing into some kind of universal publisher, upsetting the traditional publishing applecart and devouring everything in its path. Citing Jacob Epstein in The New York Review of Books, Hirschorn quotes "for the first time in human history ... the theoretical possibility that every book ever printed in whatever language will be available to everyone on earth with access to the Internet." But HIrschorn is unshaken. Encouraged by an apparent resurgence of book reading among teens, he highlights a new scenario with future "book ATMs", called Espresso. In fact, Espresso is already a reality. Read more in the issue in Jackson Library, or online.
Akamai Technologies, iMergent, CyberSource, Ceradyne, Apple, Varian Semiconductor, Digital River, Netflix, Lifecore Biomedical. What do these companies have in common? They're all in the Business 2.0 100 Fastest-Growing Technology Companies (June 2007.) The annual list highlights a cluster of companies whose sales grew by 33% and profits by 90%. In addition to the ranking, the editors tell us revenue, earnings, operating cash flow, stock return, employees -- and just why the company is heading for the stars. Scope out the issue in Jackson Library, or see a version of the list online.
Maybe it was plastics when The Graduate came out, but today it's 'plasticity'. This afternoon in GSB South 150 alum Alvaro Fernandez and his colleague Dr Elkhonon Goldberg of the School of Medicine, NYU, discussed the science and practice of brain fitness, describing some recent research findings being employed by their firm SharpBrains. Dr Goldberg made the case that brain neuroplasticity demonstrably continues throughout life -- giving our brain the ability to generate new neurons. SharpBrains sees itself as a one-stop shop for those seeking practices to encourage neuron growth and ongoing mental acuity, using games and other tools. While some questions remain unanswered, this is clearly an area ripe for further research and development.
Wired magazine April 2007 issue offers us the Wired 40, their tenth annual list of the top 40 'wired' companies in the world. "They're masters of innovation and technology," the magazine proclaims, "global thinkers that dominate their industries and point the way to the future." Honorees include the usual gang of suspects: Google, Apple, Samsung, General Electric, Medtronic, Netflix. But they're joined this year by some new kids on the block: Baidu, the 'Chinese Google', and Japanese giant NTT DoCoMo, for example. Also included are 6 hot business trends for 2007. Scope out the issue on the Jackson Library Current Periodical rack.
As a child of television I have to comment today on an article in the New York Times called Coming Online Soon: The Five-Minute ‘Charlie’s Angels’. Sony Corporation and Sony Pictures who own the rights to many shows from the 70s and 80s have decided to shrink down those hour episodes to "minisodes" which are 3-5 minutes long. "Sony Television is planning in June to introduce an Internet-based service called the Minisode Network, initially offering the mini-shows for an exclusive run on MySpace. (The company may consider establishing a separate Internet channel called the Minisode Network later.)" At least you don't have to watch the commercials!
Business 2.0 April issue brings you "The 11 New Coolest Products on the Planet". That's the name of their cover story, highlighting the 2007 Bottom Line Design Awards. The awards, a collaboration between Business 2.0 and the consultancy Frog Design, considered 75 submissions. Winners include the WinePod, a winery for your kitchen, that ferments, presses and ages wine; the QR5 wind turbine for your backyard, that can power your house; and FogScreen, a veil of water vapor that can serve as a screen for computer-generated images. Read all this and more in the issue in Jackson Library, or an abbreviated version on the Web.
IBM is donating $45 million of software and 1,000 laptops to the U.S. Army in Iraq. They are hoping that the software will be used in medical services and with aid groups. The biggest question is how exactly will the donation be accepted? This is the biggest gift ever givent to the Army and for that reason sets precedent for gifts in the future. Read more about how this donation came about.
Internet technologies, such as web services, peer-to-peer networks, collective intelligence, social networks, podcasts, blogs, RSS, wikis, and mash-up, are used by companies to communicate with customers and business partners and to encourage collaboration inside the company. Early adopters are satisfied with the results of their investments. Executives who made the decision to invest think that the technologies are of strategic importance for maintaining the company’s market position. This global survey of executives is available at The McKinsey Quarterly.
Each year MIT’s Technology Review highlights 10 Technologies they believe are up and coming. This year among the most exciting technologies are: nanotechnology, a peer-to-peer video network, tightly focused light, personalized medical monitors and more. The most exciting field seems to be nanotechnology -- the shrinking of technology has increased the practical application of devices in many areas such as renewable energy and medicine. Check out Stanford’s research on using a genetic light switch to help people who suffer from depression.
We are living in the Golden Age of Medical Innovation. Thus the title of the cover story in the March / April 2007 American magazine. Innovation in drugs and medical devices is forging ahead; new treatments address breast cancer, macular degeneration, rheumatoid arthritis, prostate cancer and much more. This seeming progress is at odds with the popular notion that medical innovation and pharmaceutical progress are mired in the mud.
So says author John Calfee. He feels one reason innovations aren't more easily recognized is that these treatments often come from clinical trials of drugs already approved for something else, not blazing new products. Calfee argues "the usual methods for measuring progress in drug research simply do not work anymore"; industry critics nowadays insist on lauding only new drugs, ignoring 'me-too' drugs. "There are better ways to mark progress," Calfee says. Looking forward to even greater achievements, he cautions "Only unwise public policy can make the fire go out." Feeling healthier already? Read more about it in Jackson Library.
Consumers and manufacturers seem ready to embrace "green" cars, but there's little consensus on the best technology to achieve optimal "greenness". With competing "green" technologies, the good news is that more hybrids will become available for consumers -- and prices will come down. According to a special report of BusinessWeek, in the next 20 months, at least 30 new hybrid models will hit the U.S. market, which will bring the total number to more than 40 models.
Check out Today's Greenest Cars at BusinessWeek.com.
The apparel industry is leaning more and more towards the made-to-measure clothing. The boost to this trend is caused by appearance on the market the photo booth-sizes scanners which within minutes scan the person’s body and create true-to scale 3D digital model. The trend to custom apparel is growing but this process has its pros and cons. To learn more, read the article in the Feb. 12 issue of Red Herring in Jackson Library.
"Second Life was just unfundable." Who said THAT ? Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab and creator of Second Life -- the runaway sensation which drew almost a million new 'residents' in the last two months of 2006, doubling its previous population. This, according to an article in the February Inc Magazine. It began in 1999 when Rosedale quit his job at RealNetworks to realize his lifelong dream of creating a virtual-reality world. Many thought he would fall on his face, but real business in this secondary world is booming like never before. Companies like Toyota and Dell are getting involved; IBM announced it was spending $10 million in developing a presence in Second Life. Harvard University is incorporating it into its teaching. Do these organizations know something you don't?
To follow up on all the other Second Life postings in this blog, it turns out that Linden Lab and Philip Rosedale are doing quite well. The exchange rate for today is $1 = L$186 (Linden Dollars). Who wouldn't want their money to be worth almost 200 times more than what it is in real life. The Second Life website also gives you a complete list of what people are paying for real estate and other services. A February 5, 2007 Fortune magazine article estimates that about $600.000 is spent every day on Second Life with a yearly GDP of $220 million.
Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame talks about medical advances on his blog. He notes a paper by Doug Almond that studied the lives of babies in utero at the time of the great influenza pandemic of 1918. Almond observed that these babies grew up with an increased level of disabilities, lower social status, lower income, and the like. Levitt feels this underscores the fact that the past century’s huge gains in life expectancy were due in large part to small, simple measures like access to flu shots and clean water, rather than more expensive, dazzling medical technologies that are more heavily promoted. He draws attention to the FluMist vaccine, a nasal spray, and for increasing awareness of the need for flu prevention among young humans, in utero or out.
Intel’s teraflop, a super new chip that does tera-scale computing which uses less electricity will deliver a supercomputer-like performance to PCs, servers, and handheld devices. Read more at Yahoo News, BBC News.
Time magazine highlights a bold new experiment in wikis. By March, more than one million leaked documents from governments and corporations across the globe will be available online in a new collective experiment in 'whistleblowing.' Wikileaks.org claims that it will use the same software platform as Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, to let users anonymously post documents and analyze them. In theory, this system will protect identities while exposing corruption worldwide. Skeptics argue that this is a thinly-disguised front for government covert monitoring. Judge for yourself.
The editorial staff of Red Herring magazine came up with events or developments that most likely will happen in 2007. The predictions range from very bad such as large scale cell phone virus attack to very promising, such as the birth of a head implant that will fight migraines, depression, and possibly blindness. To learn about all 10 predictions read the article in Jan. 15, 2007 issue of Red Herring and watch for the next year score box on how true the predictions are.
'Tag Teams' is the name of an article by James Fallows in The Atlantic, where he describes how taggers -- people describing various Websites with their own descriptive labels, 'tags' -- are creating new online communities of those with common affinities. The tagging site del.icio.us is highlighted, with mention of Flickr, Technorati and Slashdot. Writes Fallows: "No site makes creating such communities as easy as it should be. But ... the process is under way." Read more in the January / February 2007 Atlantic.
Have you ever wondered why we all drive gasoline powered cars? Well, Chris Paine has. In his new documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?, he asks why electric cars disappeared after a good start in 1996. Who is responsible the car manufacturers or the oil companies? Stanford is showing a free screening Tuesday, January 16th of the documentary. Here are the details.
BusinessWeek tackles one of the great curses of our time -- Alzheimer's disease -- with its special report 'Decoding Alzheimers'. One in 10 people over the age of 65 develops this affliction; over 85, it's one in two. One hundred years after Dr Alois Alzheimer identified the disease, 4.5 million Americans are patients. But promising treatments are at hand.
The December 18 issue of Red Herring highlights "Tech Tots", under-35 Titans in Waiting. Twenty-five young fire-eaters who may be shaping our world in the coming years are listed, including Elizabeth Holmes, who quit Stanford University at 19 to launch a startup that monitors people's blood status remotely, Weina Scott, a 17-year old CEO with three successful Internet startups under her belt, Amir Hasson of India, who has brought email to unconnected villages in his country, and Olaf Stiller of Germany, whose plan is to allow people to freeze their own stem cells. Other stars of the future include Jeremy Stoppleman and Russel Simmons of Yelp, a local site that hosts thousands of user-generated reviews, 25-year old Dai Zhikang, whose new company is China's leading provider of Internet community software, and Jon Johansen, 23, creator of software that permits iTunes on all devices. Fasten your seatbelts and brace for the Future ...
Venture capitalist Heidi Rozen often seeks the advice of her daughter about new technologies. "Investors themselves are aging, the technology - including social networking Web sites and mobile gadgets - is designed for, used by and sometimes built by people half their age" , the New York Times reports.
The December 11 issue of Red Herring magazine introduces you to a list of top entrepreneurs likely to have long-range impact on business and society, while trying to save the world at the same time ('Cleantech shines'.) Each year, the World Economic Forum picks its 'Technology Pioneers', and this list includes the largest-ever contingent of "cleantech" proponents. Among them: Martin Roscheisen, CEO of Nanosolar, Rusty Schmit, CEO of solar cell maker Advent Solar, Kenneth Lazarus, CEO of micro fuel-cell system Lillaputian Systems, Tim Healy, co-founder of EnerNOC, which offers software to manage peak energy demand and other features, and Mark Crosier, founder and CEO of DeepStream Technologies, which makes digital sensors that allow embedded metering of electrical products. Four cleantech mavericks in particular are highlighted; a list of all the WEF Pioneers is included.
Company insiders can be among the most costly and damaging to a company's IT system and, by extension, its profits and reputation. InformationWeek magazine (Dec 11) targets 'Insider Threats', noting that nearly two-thirds in a survey of over 600 security pros say that company insiders account for some portion of the financial losses of their organizations because of breaches (7% of this group actually estimate that insiders account for a stunning 80% of financial losses.) The article lists some typical 'insider profiles', such as the Almighty Creator, the Mad Bomber, and the Paybacker. It describes the case of Roger Duronio of UBS PaineWebber, found guilty of causing havoc to his firm's IT systems in 2002; Duronio was never subjected to a background search when hired. Author Larry Greenemeier goes on to offer caveats and preventive advice to company CIOs everywhere.
From the Wall Street Journal (Dec 8) comes a piece by Katherine Rosman titled 'BlackBerry Orphans', about how the hand-held device is beginning to influence family dynamics. Parents now act like their children, the article argues, trying to hide their compulsive use of the device from the kids. And the kids are fighting back against this new 'sibling'. Is a BlackBerry the latest addition to your family?
Do you know that you can now search for U.S. patents in Google? Google announced the release of Google Patent Search, which covers over 7 million patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). They expect to expand their coverage over time. This new search engine also offers an Advanced Patent Search page, which allows you to search by patent number, title, inventor, date, etc.
You've no doubt already heard about the revolutionary virtual world of 'Second Life', a place with its own economy and real estate. Learn a bit more from the iinovate blog. Included is a podcast with Second Life creator, Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs, who explains and describes Second Life, together with comment by the legendary Andy Grove. Also included is a narrated video primer on this virtual world.
According to the New York Times Magazine (12/3/06), U.S. government agencies in the wake of 9-11 have felt that they need a better way to take the thousands of disparate pieces of 'intel' generated every day and divine which are important for national security. So the CIA started a competition, resulting in the selection of an essay by CIA officer Calvin Andrus, titled 'The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community." Among other things, Andrus asked how the Internet became so useful in helping people find information. His ideas struck a chord with senior figures in national intelligence, who are now testing whether a wiki can help security analysts protect America.
Is your home smart already? Do your sprinklers turn off automatically when it rains? Do you get a text message when the windows or the doors in your home are opened? Well, these are just several functions which are now available to the home owners on monthly-fee basis from AT&T, iControl, and Nobu companies. More magic is coming from these and other companies-all striving to empower you with remote control over your home. And what you use for a magic wand? Just your cell phone. Find more in the article (full-text available on Stanford network) in Dec. 2006 issue of Business 2.0.
The Bay area is churning out quite a few online shopping startups that boast new features with the goal to separate you from your money, ladies.
Need help finding the perfect pair of jeans? Try Zafu. Try Like shopping, it will show you pictures of celebrities wearing selected accessories, shoes and jewelry you can click on to find similar items mere mortals can afford. Do you have something specific in mind but have had troubles finding it? Try NearbyNow and find products, brands and sales at nearby stores via the internet or by using your cell. For all you procrastinators out there you can use LicketyShip and they'll ship any electronics item you need to you within 4 hours.
The cover story for the December 4th issue BusinessWeek 'The Soul Of A New Microsoft' reports a cultural shift at Microsoft. "The software giant is entering perhaps the greatest upheaval in its 30-year history. New business models are emerging -- from low-cost 'open-source' software to advertising-supported Web services -- that threaten Microsoft's core business like never before. For investors to care about the company, it needs to find new growth markets ... 'Things are different from the desktop world that most of the Microsoft guys grew up in,' says Michael A. Cusumano, a management professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has written extensively about the company." With Bill Gates planning to leave the company in June 2008, who will be the next generation leaders and take Microsoft beyond Windows?
A BusinessWeek article, The Dark Side of Second Life, reports on a recent virtual town hall meeting in Second Life, in which one of its creators, Philip Rosedale, known on the inside as "El Presidente," and Second Lifers discuss the latest crisis to befall the digital community where members interact, buy and sell goods, and build property worth real money. Software, such as CopyBot, lets people copy others' possessions - and puts the value of Second Life's virtual property at risk.
"It would seem the virtual world is facing a very real-world problem: crime. As more people have joined the global virtual community -- it now boasts more than 1 million members -- residents are grappling with how to secure property ownership and ensure public well-being."
Jouni Forsman, the Research Director at Gartner, thinks that in the future the telecommunications innovations will take place in the emerging markets. His conclusion is based on the extensive research on emerging markets that he's just completed. He states the reasons in his posting on Gartner's blog.
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, as keynote speaker at the Roads to Innovation conference at Stanford. Schmidt talks about opportunities in this new digital world, and how corporations cannot hold data hostage from users. As an example he gives the fact that cell phone numbers are now portable and the public can take this identity with them wherever they are. In the future he sees people accessing their information with whichever device they want. What has made this possible is open and standard protocols on the web. The Web has helped open up the possibilities to access information no matter which device you use.
Schmidt also speaks about what's near and dear to every librarian's heart, trustworthiness of a source and its content. How trustworthy is information put out by those who are not necessarily experts in their field? He speaks about how we are all playing the "poker of information" who can get away with presenting information to a public who believes them, without being sure where the content is coming from. You can view Schmidt's presentation (58:39 min.) at Executive Conversations with Christian Grant.
Read in the Mercury News an article on how a Palo Alto start-up, loopt, in partnership with Boost Mobile, one of the biggest youth-oriented wireless phone companies, plans to give the young men the freedom to continue social networking away from their computers. With a new service, about to launch, close to 4 million Boost customers will be able to create group of friends, keep track of them using the text messaging, pictures, and GPS technologies built into their mobile phones. According to James Brehm, wireless analyst with Frost & Sullivan, "This is the next step and it's a giant leap".
From Guy Kawasaki's blog comes mention of 'In Search of the Valley', a DVD from Steve O'Hear containing interviews of Valley pioneers like John Warnock (Adobe), Andy Hertzfeld (Macintosh programming whiz), Steve Wozniak (Apple), Craig Newmark (craigslist), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media), and Guy Kawasaki (The Macintosh Way.) Steve provides Guy with outtakes of an interview with Wozniak, not found on the DVD; 'Woz' discusses growing up in Silicon Valley, the Homebrew Computer Club, and starting Apple. Interested? Go to Kawasaki's blog for the extra footage ... and more.
The library has ordered a copy of the DVD.
"In the future, the 'P' in personal computer could stand for portable." How are PC makers preparing themselves for tomorrow's demand for information and entertainment anytime, anywhere? What is the future of hardware? How will corporate data centers cope with increasing amount of data flowing over the Internet and corporate networks? Check out the BusinessWeek Online's special report on Next-Generation Computing.
The November issue of Fast Company highlights Gordon Bell, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Labs (full text available to Stanford users).
For the past seven years, Bell has been 'lifelogging', creating a near-total digital record of his life. Every piece of e-mail, every document, every chat session, every site he surfs, every picture his portable minicam takes, is copied and tucked away using his custom-designed software, MyLifeBits. The result? A mass of more than 101,000 e-mails, about 15,000 documents, 99,000 Web pages and 44,000 pictures. This collection is giving Bell the ability to perform feats of memory reminiscent of Rain Man. He can produce the exact contents of a note in his office 30 years ago -- and who passed him on the street last month. Instantly.
The article includes 7 tips on building your own MyLifeBits. As author Clive Thompson says, "It's a crazy experiment. But perhaps it's craziest aspect is that soon you'll be part of it too -- whether you want to be or not." Crazy? Not for Bell, who says that with hard-drive space exploding and our society's growing proclivity to publicize our lives, computers and the Net are becoming capable of recording everything we see and do. "People say, 'Oh, what you're doing is revolutionary!' I say, 'No, no, it's evolutionary. Because it's happening to you. It's happening as you speak.'"
MIT's Technology Review includes in a special September / October issue 'The TR 35', young innovators under the age of 35 with this year's best ideas. They include, among others: Sumeet Singh of Cisco, creator of faster defenses against computer viruses, Ling Liao of Intel, using light modulation to radically increase processing speeds, William King of Georgia Tech, engineer of a nano-soldering iron, Jane McGonigal of 42 Entertainment, alternate-reality game designer, Edward Boyden of Stanford, inventor of artificial neural switching systems, Michael Raab of Agrivida, making fuel ethanol cheaper, and Alice Ting of MIT, who uses 'fluorescence imaging' to reveal the operations of cells in cinematic detail. Joshua Schachter takes honors as 'Innovator of the Year', for creating del.icio.us, an online bookmarking system that has become a grassroots hit for users to collectively organization information across the Web, while Christina Galitsky of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is 'Humanitarian of the Year', for her work in developing a technology for the Third World to filter arsenic from drinking water.
What a great idea! BusinessWeek tries to help strengthen your knowledge of new technologies in business. They have put out a podcast series, CEO Guide to Technology, which airs once a month and focuses on current topics of interest to CEOs as well as the average business afficionado. Topics covered are related to new technologies and how they can help improve business. Among the topics covered; VoIP (Voice over IP), Social Networks, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). The only down side, or upside if you have an iPod, is you'll have to download iTunes to play these interviews which average about 20-30 minutes.
Begin with O'Reilly's Guide to Web 2.0.
UC Davis Prof. Andrew Hargadon in his blog expresses concern about some disturbing trends in social networking. He worries that in relying heavily on online networks people might lose the value of relationships built with mindful, interactive, personal contact with others. To illustrate the growth in such networks, he cites a BusinessWeek article from September 11, 'Social Networks: Execs Use Them Too', which highlights how corporations are turning to online social networking sites like LinkedIn for their recruiting. Headhunters and HR departments are taking note. Is this the future of recruiting? Such sites are becoming useful in other areas as well, such as sales and marketing; the article notes how a location booker used one such service, Ryze, to find a castle for a corporate promotional.
Much has been made of so-called disruptive technologies that in the past broke on the scene, shaking up the corporate pecking order and transforming lifestyles. Now welcome ... The Next Disruptors. This is the title of the cover story for the October issue of Business 2.0. The 'disruptors' are 11 businesses authors Schonfeld and Borzo have identified to become new challengers to the current pantheon of Google, Skype, Citibank, Ford, Oracle, et al. Their list of suspects includes Netvibes, EEStor, Coghead, NextMedium, Salesforce.com and others. Major changes could be in the wind. After all, as the article starts off, William Orton of Western Union in 1876 asked of the newfangled telephone, "What use could this company make of an electrical toy?" And we know that story.
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