thoughtexposed

Despite the sustained financial & social difficulties in our daily lives, it is encouraging to come by such proof that clearly demonstrates continued collective human empathy.  When the selfless acts of individuals & collective human curiosity can lead to simple yet significant goals, this author finds much solace and reassurance in the underlying kind nature of humanity.

The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people's willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining it's destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.

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During a presentation at 2008 South by Southwest festival, audience members got a rare glimpse into Apple's design process.  The presentation was given by Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple.  According to Lopp, the process involves: Pixel Perfect Mockups, a.k.a. prototyping. Admitedly this process takes a significant amount of time but it is akin to a magical wand that eliminates ambiguity and removes needs for correcting any mistakes down in the process.

10 to 3 to 1. Apple designers start with ten mockups for any product or feature, with room to design without restriction. They start to apply the various restrictions (design aesthetics, projected pricing, user friendly UI, etc) whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong design.

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Web development is popular because it's fast, versatile, and relatively inexpensive.  But that doesn't mean the alternatives don't have advantages and merit of their own, and in some cases the Web's weaknesses might outweigh its strengths.

With the advances of hardware processing power & software functionality, it is viable to re-visit the original reasoning behind developing applications for the web.  In addition, it is viable to also re-visit the definition of web application, especially in the light of increased popularity around Rich Internet Application (RIA) models like Microsoft Silverlight,  Adobe Air, and AJAX technologies - that seek to blend thin & thick client application deployment. For the sake of healthy discussion lets look at some areas where web-based applications stack up against system based programming.

• With the traditional web-application model there is a front-end thin Client UI that functions in the framework of browser. This UI handles rudimentary user input, generic input validation, graphics rendering, display of the output.  The real processing happens in the middle-tier integration layer and back-end database.  With the advent of cheaper processors and memory, even the bare-bones computers of today, can put an enterprise grade machine of a decade ago, to shame.  Thus, we want to ask, is it time we reassessed such traditional model.  Is it viable for us to shift some of the over-burdened processing load towards the front-end. With increased demand of information consumption, more and more load is being put on the integration & back-end layers, to a point where scaling data-centers to meet the demands is becoming challenging.  The middle-tier also suffers from security vulnerabilities both in integration & demand load.

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But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie. Social media, in essence, is bumping up against its own ceiling, no longer able to serve the needs of those living within its walls... Lets face it, social media today is a mess.  I say this with love nonetheless.  Yes I love blogging, yes I admire twitter, and I appreciate LinkedIn. However with so many channels competing for my profile, I am constantly trying to keep up with friends across all the various channels just to exchanges "Hey what's up".   Case in point the advent to several applications that summarized your and your friends' activities on Twitter - Friendfeed, etc.  With so many social networks with so much of social media, our respective online selves are practically encroaching on multiple personality complex.  If you are one who has spread yourself thin across the social media-scape or you are one who is in the business of monetizing on Social Media, readwriteweb, publishes an article, providing glimpse into the changing face of social media.  It points to 10 areas of consideration:

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How will our children and our grand-children, for that matter, our great grand-children, remember us? How will they know us?  Will they have to resort to looking at our cached Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn profiles?  Will they have to peruse the many blog entries on Wordpress.com, Blogger.com?  Will they go in history to read through the many tweets we left behind through twitter.com?  Will they have to view the many digital photos we post on Flickr.com,  Picasaweb.google.com?  In our technology centric lives today,  we are contanstly connected with each other, to the world, through not only computer but mini portable devices like iPhone, Blackberry.  Some of u s have even taken up microblooging every moment of our day and our sensory experiences.  I pause to ask, in this contant recording and archiving of every moment of our lives, are we missing out from being the 1st person 'experiencer' of these moments?  After all, our respective experiences of our respective lives, are really meant for us to experience first person as opposed to being the recorder behind that camera or phone?  How often are we truly enjoying an experience with our own senses without becoming the operator of some techno gadget recording the experience for later viewing on a monitor?

The fine line between what's worth documenting and what's not is a hard one to define. We immediately assume that the most important, the biggest, the most incredible moments are those that should be recorded. But it's these very moments that are best to experience live, with our full focus.

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Like the rest of the world and its processes,  enterprise Innovation Management has also evolved.  Organizations that fail to recognize this evolution has remained in the archained state of innovation, even to the extent of not doing any innovation at all.  The business of Innovation is not an easy concept to grasp for many.  For many, a linear, day-to-day thinking is more or less all that is comfortable.  For those who truly persue excellence in Innovation must also master managing the changing face of Innovation.  To some 'managing Innovation' can be a falacy of concepts.   However, identifying and appropriately fostering the applicable Innovation patterns, in an organization, can be the key to success in innovating.

The innovator's dilemma, ... affects companies whose success and capabilities can actually become obstacles in the face of changing markets and technologies. There is no more important an issue on the agenda of top management than driving innovation.  

 

Along with the traditional techniques - 'Measure Innovation' , 'The BCG Matrix', ' The 20% free time for employees to spend on any project they like' ; are in need of augementing with 'Crowdsourcing' with specific and relevant context with the right amount of processing and filtering of the ideas.  The below linked article, using namesInnocentive & BrightIdea to be two trailblazing in this space.   The article even points to Change.Gov where our President Obama is using crowdsourced input to facilitate change.

How Can Web Tech Help Enterprises with Innovation Management? by Bernard Lunn

Other Related Articles: Crowdsourcing: Consumers as Creators

A host of providers including Amazon (AMZN), Salesforce.com (CRM), IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), and Microsoft are helping corporate clients use the Internet to tap into everything from extra server space to software that helps manage customer relationships

An article on BusinessWeek.com posts yet another article of the 'Cloud Computing' trend in the technology industry.  The article points to some of the SAS giants in the industry along with exposing the newer growth trends of cloud computing into, 'Hardware as a Service' (HAS?).  All these services in their core are "all delivered over the Internet, on demand, from massive data centers". The article points to Merrrill Lynch's projection that cloud computing will surge to $95 billion over next three years in the global market. Microsoft ('Software-plus-Services'), HP, and Dell are already moving forward aggressively to provide such computing in the cloud to its public and corporate customers.   In this model a company essecially is outsourcing the physical real-estate, disaster & recovery of data, and maintenance of their technology to third-party.  At the onset this may seem scary, but supporters of cloud computing point to the reduction of $8 out of current $10 in operating costs for maintaining technol ogy.  They also point to an exponential maturity in relaibility of these technologies.  In addition, these technologies provide an a-la-carte pricing model allowing for strict expense control, a very attractive pricing proposition in this economy.  The naysayers on the other side, point to various goverance around ownership of data and complication surrounding such, if hosted on third party systems.  They also point to the virtual nature of such real-estate and the fact that server clusters maintained by 3rd party could not be under rigorous control as their own.   Needless to say this technology is gradually emerging, the enterprise use of this technology currently remain limited to non-vital data systems.  In 2009 this one is a very interesting development to keep a keen eye on, especially, heavy hitting companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, HP, and Amazon rapidly getting on the band-wagon.   How Cloud Computing Is Changing the World by Rachael King Related Entries: Cloud Computing to become mainstream in 2009 Other Related Articles: Sun Microsystems Acquires Q-layer To Expand Cloud Computing Offerings In Cloud We Trust Cloud Computing Begins to Gain Traction on Wall Street The Cloud is the New Dotcom  Latest cloud storage hiccups prompts data security questions

An article on mashable.com predicts 5 Web2.0 Business Models with tremendous growth opportunity in 2009. The author starts points to

• 'Co-Working Spaces' that lead to reduced cost and increased networking and sharing of intellect. 
• 'Bootstrapping & Growth Based Business' where the lack of VCs in current market will force business owners to create growth based plan and go at it on their own with a high risk and low tolerance of failure but also leading to larger share of profit and more control of future of the business in the absence of numerous investors hungry for the profit.
• 'Collaborative Tools' will keep travel and logistical expences down while work collaboration and increasing networking is done via tele-video conferencing & collaborative tools for peer design & construction. 
• 'Idea Marketplaces' where ideas are generated and sold exposing one's bootstrap effort to larger organizations for rapidly adding to their services. Making innovation a global proposition. Lastly the author points to 
• 'Workforce Marketplaces' a dicey and interesting sector to watch.  Although very cheap labor can be had for grunt work through international sites like, Rent-A-Coder and GetAProgrammer,  american talent can offer the talent and quality. 

  5 Web 2.0 Businesses That Will Thrive in a Down Economy by Mark Hopkins

In a downturn such as this, when nothing is safe, the risk/reward of investing in a new business that you really understand, with people you trust, suddenly looks less out there on the risk curve.

ReadWriteWeb.com publishes an article putting forth the argument that in the current economic times, Real venture capitalists can for some investors, be a very safe asset class to invest on. The author makes the distinction between Real VCs and Momentum VCs, and picking the Real VCs to be the chosen ones to invest on. Calling Reals VCs contrarian, the author states that these VCs invest when most people are scared and sell when everybody is bullish. He compares Warren Buffet as a Real VC hero. The author goes further and compares the traditional safe asset classes that are popular during economic downturns and puts forth the proposition that they are not as safe for investing anymore. Real VC Might Be the Safest Asset Class Today - Bernard Lunn Other Related Articles: VC Dollars Dropped 33 Percent In The Fourth Quarter, Down 8 Percent For All 2008

Yahoo and Microsoft will finally strike a search deal, video advertising on the Web isn’t working, retail bankruptcies could actually help e-commerce companies, and that M&A activity will pick up in the second half of 2009 (but the IPO market will be dead until 2010).

An article on Techcruch.com publishes 2009 Technology predictions from J.P Morgan & Barclays Capital analysts. There is a common theme of strategic partnerships and advancements in mobile and search technologies.  The author, Eric Schonfeld, summarizes the predictions from the two analysts. 2009 Tech Prediction Faceoff: J.P Morgan Vs. Barclays Capital - Eric Schonfeld