Mapping new landscapes

I've been looking at how we can make better use of graphical representations of data. The power of "seeing" patterns is well known, but it is only recently we've had the computer power to make practical tools a reality. I have an idea to adapt LivePlasma to a real problem our engineers have relating documents to each other in what is fast becoming an unmanageable pile of content. More on that later.


In the meantime - visit LivePlasma and enter the name of a band you like. (I chose Zero-7, who are occupying lots of slots in my CD changer in the car!!). It pulls up information from Amazon about what other artists are related, using colour to convey style of music etc. Clicking on the relationships it displays makes exploring these very engaging and compelling. (I hadn't thought of the connection with Groove Armada or Nuspirit Helsinki - both of which I have in my CD collection, but this tool makes that more obvious!)

3D Phototourism

At the TTI vanguard conference in Barcelona - Steven Stetz from the University of Washington gave us a glimpse of the photo-viewers of the future.  In short he takes multiple 2D images (say from flickr) of a particular locatiuon and "stiches" them together to create a 3D model.

Very impressive stuff. The power of the navigation between the images is stunning.

Well worth seeing the video demos on his web site.  The part of the video on the Great Wall got my particular attention, gievn that my own charity trek there is onky a few weeks away now.

Quite apart from creating rich "phototourism" experiences I can see many business industrial applications for this, especially around large manufacuring plants, civil engineering etc.

Microsofts's Photosynth work is based on Steven's research. Also well worth a visit.

A new way of looking at Alice

We've been doing a lot of work on visualisation of data - mostly geographic - recently. Martin Brown, one of my project managers, drew this to my attention. It's part "intellectual toy" and part tool that graphically represents the raltionship between words in a text. (How it is done is explianed on TextArc's web site here.) Quite apart from looking cool it has got me thinking again about how we can make better use of the enormous graphical power available in today's PCs to make sense of the vast quantities of data we increasingly surround ourselves with. Our eyes are very good at detecting patterns that even the most sophisticted algorithms miss! I'm thinking about email and a smartner way to wade through that than Google Desktop!

Try it yourself here (java app)

If 2 minds are better than one then how about 2 thousand?

if 2 minds are better than one...
Originally uploaded by lynetter

I've been a great admirer of Lynette Webb's insights into new media and the impact of the Internet.

I also *really* like the way she uses CC images from Flickr to illustrate her points (and not just because she's used my own images!!)

This particular example really got me thinking - especially about why it is so hard to get teams at work to buy into this!

What a difference a month makes

A crashed laptop, corrupt backup and huge workload have all contributed to a lack of postings recently. I now have Livewriter reinstalled and have a backlog to catch up with!

Looking at my last post - I am struck by how fast the whole geoWeb space is moving. The big annual geoWeb bash (Where2.0) of course - so it was a good time to release new products.

Since this relates to a project I'm working on I'll be posting quite a bit on this topic.

In the meantime two things:

1) If you add "view:map" after a search term in Google...it will map the results. Try "Fi view:map" for a map of where Formula One races are held.

2) A great description of why the geoWeb subject is important and Google's strategic commitment to it, by Google's MichaelJones:

Google "my maps"

Google raised the bar again on easy "location intelligence" apps on the web when it introduced "my maps". So much of the information we interact with has a geographic or location component and navigating and exploring this graphically is much more compelling than traditional approaches. I liked these examples:

Where programing languages were invented (with colour coded flags for each "major epoch" of evolution!)

Famous Movies shot in the UK (the locations of everything from Tomb Raider to the Hunt for red October)

Magellan's voyage round the world (interesting use of line thickness to highlight additional information)

Our Earth as art (Cool sat pics!)

We'll be exploring the use of this to support our TrekChina initiative later in the year.

Reasons to work at Spock

Spock is a start up search engine focused on finding people – plugged by Tim O’Reilly himself! So I took a look at the site…..it looks like a great idea. As usual I was interested in the culture and energy in the company, and how “connected” it seemed to be. I was impressed by the pseudo-subliminal marketing (adding the line “Spock is Awesome” at the foot of the registration “thank you” box is a clever. Stuff like that really works). But it was the “jobs at Spock” page that convinced me they were switched on. The top reasons for working there were:

5. Free lunch every day and tons of snacks to keep you full all day.
4. We still have a very small engineering team. You won't be a cog in the wheel here
3. Giant flat-panel monitors for all engineers and a new Mac or PC.
2. You get to work with Jay.
1. SPOCK has potential to be a part of every Internet user's daily life!

I’ll leave you to find out about Jay yourself. And I'm 100% behind the giant flat panels. These guys really know how to attract talent!

The other thing that got my attention were the job titles, three of which were:
• Backend Rails Developer
• Crawler Architect
• Information Retrieval Engineer

I love the way new technology creates the neeed for new roles and skills. I am pretty sure no one could explain what a Crawler Architect is to my dear old mother!

Timeline History of Computing

Timeline History of Computing - Wikipedia
A colleague sent me this link today. Quite relevent as I'm currently (for a side project) looking to bring alive a "time tunnel" to physically show how computing has evolved and to extrapolate the future. (It's sobering to think that just 20 years ago most big businesses were still using punchcard systems somewhere!!!!)
Anyway - this wikipedia article might not look pretty but it reminded me of lost gems like the Apple Lisa and the Commadore PET (on which I did my degree project!)

Polycom® & Skype

Much though I hate the idea of plugging an individual product - this handy device is worth saying something about. A Polycom that plugs into my laptop and works with skype for the most amazing quality of audio conferences or calls. And also much handier to carry around than my previous headset - which was always getting in a tangle.

Polycom® Communicator C100S - polycom communicator, communicator, skype phone.

So...to navigate information you move your mouse and click? Think again!!

This is a really interesting set of experiments into a User Interface where the last thing you do is click!

Can you resist it???

:-)

Ms. Dewey

I must be slow because I only found Ms Dewey on the net a few weeks ago. And it was only tonight that I had time to spend with her. (Why does it feel so odd typing that!???).

To quote Marketplace from their blog back in December "Microsoft's trying to generate buzz for its new search engine with a live-action sexy librarian character with an attitude. Ms. Dewey is her name"

Ms Dewey is a real person (played by actress Janina Gavankar) and has tugged at the bits and bytes of many a geek (see I'm in love kinda). She's cleverly integrated into a Flash interface for MSN's search engine. It's done really well, but after a while the novelty wears off.

I am left wondering however what the future holds for avatar interfaces. Ms Dewey is strangely engaging, but obviously a bunch of cleverly stitched together clips. What if she could be generated in real time and "really" respond to user interaction? Would that be a good thing or not?

Everyone needs help with the new system!

Carol, our communications team leader, sent me this today. It's a subtitled clip from a Norwegian tv show and shines a comedic light on human reactions to new technology. I'm quite sure that people have always been the same and always will be the same!


I think this might be pressed into service the next time I have an audience who push back on something new!

When is a kudge not a kludge?

There is a certain snobbery in many business IT depertments that I'm sure didn't used to be there. Perhaps the efforts of SIs and Consultants over the years to "talk up" the "right approach" has rubbed off. Applications development has to go through a number of steps (mostly linear - although every now and again a "fast path" iterative approach makes a bid for respectability. The effect of this is that lots of simple functionality simply doesn't get delivered - there is too great a design, deploy server, test etc overhead.

In my very first job we'd design important systems properly - but frequently would deliver new functionality to people that asked for it on the same day!!

I was thinking these thoughts last week during a very impressive "hands on" presentation by Francis Carden, the CEO of OpenSpan. They produce an excellent tool for creating composite applications that run on a users desktop! I can hear lots of IT Architects saying "NO!" - but, but tools like this really do have a role to play.

The Semantic Web

At MIT, in Boston yesterday I met for an hour with Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) to discuss our early plans to explore how the Semantic Web can be applied to real business challenges we have.

The Semantic Web has been attracting a lot of attention recently with initial applications up and running in many places (of which more in a few weeks time). The trouble is that it's hard to define to a laymen.

My own definition is:
The sematic web is a goal – a future evolution of the word wide web – where data itself has embedded “meaning” that allows it to be understood and used automatically to perform complex tasks that currently require human “intelligence

In other words:
The www is about link between web pages
The sw is about relationships between things

For example - at present if you find a photograph on the internet of a place you'd like to visit there are a number of (sometimes tricky) manual steps to find out - exactly where the photo was taken, finding other photos, perhaps some write ups on others' experiences of visiting, information on how to get there etc. In the seamntic web - all of that information would be automtically associated and easy to find.

Flickr problems explained

The good people at Flickr posted a blog entry to explain why their mighty system went a bit haywire a couple of days ago: "Tonight's problem - an explaination.

I'm struck by a few things
1) How enormous Flickr has become - up to a billion images served each day!!!! And yet most people have never heard of Flickr! The Internet is BIG!
2) The informality of their explaination. It's quite sincere, and yet not in the usual "business speak" that say a corporate IT shop would use to explain any problems it has suffered. (I wonder if they'd "get off" with that if Flickr was a business critical app???)
3) As usual with any application (or anything) that is a success is their attention to detail. The permalink for the blog posting points to a page called "crapola.html"!!!!!

Pipes: rewire the web

Lots of hype around Yahoo's launch of Pipes. Lots of well deserved hype in my view.

Of course this is only the first step in something that will become BIG very soon. I'm half way through reading a book "Mashup Corporation" - written by Paul Kurchina (who I've been in contact for years and will hopefully meet soon) and Andy Mullholland (CTO for Capgemini) - a chroncle of "service oriented business transformation".

Here is a blurb "If you thought the first decade of the Internet was disruptive, you aint seen nothin' yet" "the next generation of web-related services and technologies is unleashing a raft of [new] business models that will reorganise the planet"

I tend to agree.

A few years ago I looked to help a friends very "physical" business go online - what he wanted to do needed to be custom built and would have cost too much. We could implement what he wanted today in an afternoon for almost free!!!

Pipes will bring a consumer slant to a concpet that will change the way we think about providing business functionality!

I'll leave O'Reilly to have the last (enthusiastic) word on this

Virtual Worlds and Croquet

I had a very interesting conversation with Julian Lombardi yesterday. He is one of the key drivers behind the Croquet Consortium who develop Open Source solutions for creating and deploying "deeply collaborative multi-user online applications"

With all the hype around Second Life it is good to recall that it's not entirely suited to solid business applications and that Croquet can be a much better platform. Business applications include:

1 Virtual Incident Command and Control

2 Educational and Training Environments

3 Advanced Visualisation

There is also an entirely new family of applications based on realising value from the creation of assets in the virtual world. (Not to be confused with creating a virtual physical world as in SL - but creating "assets" that represent information. Like "wikis on steroids" – evolving through collective actions of individuals)

Does it sound SF-like? Watch how quickly this evolves even by the end of the decade!!

Google's Master Plan

Google's Master Plan
Originally uploaded by jurvetson.

I don't know how I missed this on Steve Jurvetson's stream before.

An image of a somewhat tongue in cheek Google Master Plan! (Just how much tongue in cheek would be good to know)

Has to be seen BIG.

Google OS seems to have attracted a lot of attention. I wonder!???

Interesting that Richard Branson is just one step from a Rouge Scientist!!

Interesting too that this image has had 129,000 views on Flickr which is a vast number for an individual photo - so I'm guessing this has been blogged many times in the 20 months since it was posted.

The end of SAP as we know it?

I recently was on the judging panel of this year's IT Innovation awards. I was struck by how quickly software as a service is being adopted by small and medium sized enterpises! (Can't go it the exact examples much for now - until after the awards themselves).

So perhaps I'm especially tuned into articles such as this....
» IPO candidate NetSuite fires a shot at SAP | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

It seems very obvious to me that core functionality in the future will come from services usch as this. Businesses will benefit from It in the way they bolt of unique functionality arround these core services.

Of course big-corporate-IT will probably deny that this is likley to impact them.......but it will. A few more data points will give an idea of exactly when.

Worth watching!

The FASTForward Blog

The FASTForward Blog "a hosted discussion on Enterprise 2.0". Good stuff!

I found this through a button on Euan Semple's wonderful"the Obvious" blog.

Multitasking has reached warp speed

multitasking has reached warp speed
Originally uploaded by lynetter.

This got my attention because it's what I see my kids doing. But also it's increasingly what I see folks at work doing - although with varying degrees of success and failure.

As an observation of fact it seems to be true - however I'm not sure what impact it has on how effectively we work or even how efficiently!

The older generations try to multi task but don't quite get it
The younger generations at work would like to multitask more but we don't give then the business tools to do so!!

The flip test

Andrew McAfee (an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School) used the concept of a "technology flip test" to challenge thinking about the adoption of (in this case) blogs, wikis, RSS etc. in an enterprise. (See here).

Basically the test goes like this "Imagine that current corporate collaboration and communication technologies were exclusively platforms -- blogs, wikis, etc. --  and all of a sudden a crop of new channel technologies --  email, instant messaging, text messaging --  became available. In other words, imagine the inverse of the present situation.  What would happen?  How, in the flip-test universe, would the new channel technologies be received?

It's an interesting challenge!   In the case above Andrew uses it to argue that businesses are paying too much attention to the downside and risks and should adopt "Enterprise 2.0" solutions such as blogs and wikis faster than at present!

Vinnie Mirchandani picked up on the flip test idea in this posting.

He asked:

a) All technology vendors - What if consumer/retail brands dominated enterprise technology markets?
b) Outsourcers - What if Intel was a service provider?
c) Software vendors - what if companies only bought business process functionality as an outsourced service?
d) Hardware vendors - what if companies had little or zero IT capital budgets and little physical space for gear?
e) US Telecom vendors - what if US broadband/mobile markets were like the auto market and customers were used to Japanese and Korean standards?

I'll come back to some of these as they really do shed a new light on some ideas whose time has come and have far reaching implications for how we will soon use technology in business.