Subject Matters

This blog was moved to SubjectMatters.WordPress.com

I installed Pocket Blog at my Qtek 110 and I am writing this post using it. Now l can post wherever l am. True meaning of ‘communicator’ word now is much more clear.

Having at moment some troubles with it I still think I will make it work properly.

Corporate RSS - Applied has some ideas “for corporate RSS feeds to external constituents including; your partners, your vendors, your customers, remote employees, etc. “

Kevin Werbach provides interesting summary of what we are seeing around us: “Something that gets me quite jazzed these days is the way so many innovations are linking up and leveraging one another. It’s not just, ‘hey, check out that cool company!’ Blogs, search-based innovations, tags, and so forth allow both new startups and established platforms like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! to build on one another. The emergent whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

800-CEO-READ Blog (Jack Covert) recommends “A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age” by Dan Pink:

A Whole New Mind looks at the right brain/left brain differences and shows how those historical issues are radically changing. As I learned during a weekend in Vermont with Tom Peters, Dan Pink also believes that: “The MFA is the new MBA.” Pink points out that design and traditional “right brain” thinking will be the course of the future. The first part of the book gives a primer on how the brain works with great stories from Pink on how his brain was scanned and stimulated and how the different parts of his brain responded. He then goes into pages and pages of supporting stories and examples from his extensive research. Excellent reading!

Pink states that we are entering the Conceptual Age and to prepare for it we need to improve six essential abilities. They are: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning. These abilities are the chapter heading for the final six chapters. At the end of each of the chapters, Pink has a Portfolio which is a combination of tools, exercises, and further reading culled from his research and travels that can help you sharpen each sense.

Tom Foremski writes for SiliconValleyWatcher:

I was at HP Labs Tuesday morning, chatting with Josh Tyler and Philippe Debaty about their work in trying to determine how people will use camera phones. A primary goal of HP Labs is to be able to predict novel uses of consumer technologies and develop supporting computer products or services.

But in today’s world, these researchers are realising that they cannot do things the old way, and that they have to get out of the labs.

If you want to discover aggregate social behaviors around photos and sharing, take a look at Flickr’s millions of users. There are communities on Flickr that could not have been predicted. And this is true of all true platforms–in the current sense of technology platforms for groups: unpredictable behaviors and communities will arise.

Using 20 HP Labs researchers is not going to reveal many, if any, novel uses. How many people using a platform technology would it take to flag the potential for large aggregate social behaviors, I asked? ..

Clearly, these researchers will need to change their approach. They should be out on the Internet crouching in the bushes and taking notes on what people are doing, and then determine new product development. In fact, these should be boom times for anthropologists. Surely, now is their time(!)

Spotting potentially large aggregate social behaviors, and being the first to monetise them, is going to be the name of the game in the consumer digital space.

Dave Pollard develops concept of online collaboration tools pack:

Ideally, using a combination of

1. Skype (free global VoIP telephony),
2. White-boarding (everyone online can see what anyone posts to the white-board),
3. Document-sharing and
4. Mindmapping or some similar session annotation tool (everyone can see what the group’s ’scribe’ has documented as the findings, decisions and next actions from the collaboration)

would be a close approximation to an in-person collaborative session. But that’s a lot of technology to juggle on your screen, to hog and interfere with your bandwidth, and (if you opt for the more powerful tools in these categories) can also require some outlay of money. My experience has been (thanks in no small part to the valuable insights of online communication wizard Robin Good and Skypemaster Stu Henshall) that video-conferencing (seeing the people you’re talking with online) is a “nice to have” not a “need to have”, especially when bandwidth limitations force you to choose which applications to have running at any one time.

I am confident that, as bandwidth and processing power continue to expand, we will soon see:

• A single, free, reliable, easy-to-use, professional-looking application that will provide what I’ve called Simple Virtual Presence — the four applications listed above plus the option of videoconferencing (illustrated above), and
• A simple, free, easy-to-use collaboration space where the results of the online collaboration sessions, and a library of relevant resources and links, are stored, with wiki-like capability so it can be maintained by any and all in the group.

Paul Graham about good writing:

A lot of people ask for advice about writing. How important is it to write well, and how can one write better? In the process of answering one, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay on the subject.
I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison discusses with BusinessWeek his plan for taking on SAP in the corporate-applications software market:

Jack Welch said unless you’re No. 1 or No. 2 in a business, you should get out. We’re No. 2 now, but we don’t want to be No. 2. We want to be No. 1. Culturally, it’s difficult for people at Oracle who are accustomed to being the leader in databases to play catch-up behind SAP. They’re a formidable company, but we have a shot at catching them.

13 Things That Do Not Make Sense Michael Brooks writes “New Scientist is reporting on 13 things which do not make sense. It’s an interesting article about 13 areas in which observations do not line up with current theory. From the placebo effect to dark matter, it’s a list of areas in need of additional research. Explanations could lead to significant breakthroughs… or at least new and different errors in scientific observations. Now there are 20 interesting problems for Slashdotters to work on, once you combine these with the seven Millennium Problems!”

No Secret Plan at Google? Lloyd Dalton writes “A number of smart folks have speculated that Google might leverage its computational resources to create some kind of massive online application delivery platform. Here’s why they are probably wrong.” One of more intelligent insights into Google, and it’s pleasantly devoid of theories of Google taking over the world.

CeBIT Video Coverage Charbax writes “I walked around CeBIT 2005 for two days with a headmounted colour camera connected to a harddrive Mpeg-4 recorder in the pocket (the Archos Pma430) and an external microphone. The result is hours of CeBIT video coverage . - check for some Siemens set-top-box, Intel high-tech car, KiSS-Technology 1080p DivX Video-on Demand-players, Chinese and Taiwanese Pmps, WiFi SIP phones, a remote-controlled Linux-running Canadian airplane. And more videos to be added tomorrow. All videos are on BitTorrents.”

I am here and I am ready. To start this blog. Hope I am also ready to develop it continuously. I have been trying to find free WordPress hosting for some time. At least I have found what I was looking for.

In case you are interested what I am going to “blog” here I will give you some idea. I am 30. Working for major international consultancy. In Europe. And, to make it more complicated, in Russia. In a few words I work at a place where IT meets business processes. I have some past software development background and degree in management.

I keep an eye on what is happening around us: all this futuristic forecasts, emerging technologies, new business models, web, search (and rock’n'roll! :) , telecom, etc. These are the themes which are pretty popular among bloggers. And to be honest I can not promise this blog is to be very fresh and unusual.

But what I am going to try is to show such kind of information “filtered” through my perception, making my own accents and referring to other’s thoughts which I consider to be the most important, fresh and promising. That it.