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- Something to think about while watching the British GP this weekend...
- The You Experience demands more of online Business
- Cloud Computing; the Invisible Infostructure
- Innovation Brief
- Intel CEO Summit sets some technology directions
- Breed a better dinosaur?
- W3C proposes new working group for the mobile internet
- Why Google may not win the Social war - Guest piece by Vinesh Kurup, Managing Consultant, Capgemini
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Social Networks think again about business models
Some time back I commented on the fact that advertising cannot be the revenue earning business model for every activity, and in particular I wondered if Social Networks really had yet found the answer to this question, especially after FaceBook got hit for its ‘novel’ approach to ‘understanding’ and promoting its members' interests to advertisers.
It really does seem that the old model of dog years to mark Internet progress has re asserted itself as the speed of answers to posted thoughts and ideas seems to be going ever faster. I guess you may have read the MySpace announcement of a revenue earning business set up with the big music labels in competition to iTunes? If not then you can find a selection of posts. The official site is pretty worthy, and dull, to get the vibes on this from, so if you missed it the news report from InfoWorld is a good place to catch up, but some of the blogs are more interesting and the readwriteweb site carries a particular one that brings me to my point, with a comment on this being beneficial to the ‘long tail’ of music more than the mainstream acts.
Google Poetry
In a moment of beautiful peaceful
quiet Saturday morning
to the experience enjoyable
with the latest shooting
performance google
We write chess programs that can beat even the best Master. We land computer-guided vehicles on Mars, and usually it works. We develop new games that contain an amazing level of sophistication and detail. How reassuring that we still can’t construct software that truly understands human language and is able to translate effectively from one language to the other.
Nevertheless, I consider the first paragraph nothing less than computer-generated art. Just write an ordinary sentence – in my case in my native language Dutch - and then let the renewed Google Translate have its way a few times, transforming from Dutch to English, from English to traditional Chinese and all the way back again. Sheer poetry is what you get.
Ray Kurzweil and Douglas Hofstadter firmly believe that computers sooner or later will be spiritual and will think and act like humans. Well, the language skills of the machine may still require some rework. Think I’ll stick to Roger Penrose: the soul is not a deterministic algorithm.
Neither is language, I might add.
A thinking computer will contain the Emperor’s New Mind and it will speak the Emperor’s New Language. Nice poems, though. Try creating some of your own and please share your Google Poetry with us.
iPhone launched in Second Life
I thought, let’s discuss a bit about Apple.
Of course, there is no point in adding yet another hit to iPhone’s current Google Quotient (187 million, and counting..). So this blog-item is not about the iPhone. But mentioning the iPhone a few times, will definitely increase the visit count of this site. Especially when we combine mentioning the iPhone (or simply Jesus Phone, if you like) with mentioning Second Life. This could be done with an announcement like ‘Second Life citizens can now buy virtual iPhones; they have to wait for several hours in a virtual queue in their favourite shopping mall after which they can exchange cool, fake phone calls with their newly acquired devices; the little 3D iPhone retails for an amazing 499 Linden Dollars'.
Sorry about this. I promised myself never to discuss Second Life again – after summer nobody will anyway - but it was too tempting not to draw your attention to some of the practical experiences I have had with yet another Apple innovation. A few of you may recall an earlier blog-item, in which I described the new Nike+ combination of an iPod and a RFID-enabled sensor in your running shoes. I considered it to be much more than just a metaphor for applying new, fresh IT ideas to business.
The CIO Dog Food Wikinomics Experience
They say that dogs eventually start to look like their masters. Would this pertain to CIO’s too? You tend to think so. More than ever, the CIO is reporting to the Chief Financial Officer again. Shocked by the economic downturn and the increasing pressure of regulatory compliance, management seemed to have good reasons for that.
I wouldn’t dare to stigmatise anybody, but we can safely assume that CFO’s have not been selected for their uncontrolled, wildly imaginative and innovative ways. Otherwise, they would have become video clip directors or fashion designers. And it’s easy to see how an understated, restrained view of the world cascades through the chain of command: sooner or later, some CIO’s start to look and act like accountants.
Dreadful indeed.
Especially when recent research proves that boardroom executives once again see the innovative value and growth potential of IT. And they are relying on the CIO to provide the spark of inspiration. In practice, I see many CIO’s struggle to articulate a compelling technology-enabled vision, let alone that they successfully reach out to the business side of the company and convince it of the transformation potential.
6-word IT Stories
No doubt many of you are preparing for the Easter weekend. And just to prevent that you have to spend it in boredom and lethargy, I would like to invite you to join us in publishing your personal 6-Word IT Story. Hemingway once did it: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” and he claimed it was his best story ever. Wired did a nice round last autumn (including a good story from Eileen Gunn: "Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?") and The Guardian recently organised a similar challenge. But this time it’s different: this time were asking you, IT / business / architecture / software / transformation / innovation people to share your most thrilling adventures with us in the shortest possible way. Is it true that even the essence of our complex lives can be expressed in just 6 words? We’ll be anxiously watching the comments. To get you started, here’s a few of our own, very mediocre 6-words IT stories. You can do better!
Floated for days, could not blog.
Deadline approaching. We must act before
“When MSN crashes, society ends” (daughter).
Mumbai traffic was only the beginning.