In Boston, my commute was 90 minutes a day, in the car. In New York, it was 3 hours, each day on the train and walking across midtown Manhattan. Now in Michigan, I still spend 2 hours a day in the car. You might say I am proficient at commuting. With this proficiency comes many solutions for maximizing productivity during the commute. Here’s what I find helps and recommend to fellow commuters:
1. iPod / MP3 Player: The obvious. I won’t say much about it, as an MP3 player is ubiquitous these days. However, it also underlies many of the tools / tips below.
I was very fortunate to be offered a coveted pass to SAP’s Sapphire conference last week. This is one of the larger conferences in the IT industry and specifically targets senior managers and executives requiring large-scale applications. As a result, although I was there for my employer and focused my time on their solutions, I also observed some of the leadership styles by so many information technology executives attending this conference. The attendance was down – a sign of the economic times, but there remained a broad range of leadership styles represented by Speakers, Vendors and Bloggers. Below are observations on the leadership styles these individuals presented at the conference*.
Speakers & SAP Executives (Positive) While commitments back at the office prevented me from catching all of the keynote speakers and SAP executives presenting, I was able to get to most of the top keynotes. » Read more: Conference Leadership Impressions from SAP SAPPHIRE
I recently had someone challenge the benefits of social networking for the enterprise, suggesting there was no real value for such technology in the workplace. I came up with a quick list and decided to post it here:
Examples of benefits to social networking in the workplace include:
Collaboration: The more your employees can find out about each other, the quicker they can share ideas. For example, if you have a large number of staff, there is a great potential for duplicating research efforts. Through digital networking, it will be easier for your staff to self-identify complimentary projects and align their efforts.
Innovation: Your staff may have a great deal of common interests outside the office that could transfer into a profitable new line of business. For example, perhaps you produce electronics and an office club forms around bicycling. The result may be the greatest electronic innovation for cyclists in generations, produced by your company and not the competition.
Resource Identification: Content Management systems are great, but what if your staff does not use the right search term? Identifying experts within your company can be much easier, quicker and more cost effective through networking tools than traditional, structured, data hierarchies.
Stronger Community: As the famous Gallup Poll pointed out, employees with friends at work are much happier and more productive. Social networking will empower your staff self-identify individuals with similar interests, resulting in larger and stronger community within the workplace.
Increased Communication: Industry experts have predicted that social networking is much like email or the web itself – another evolution in communication mediums. As a result, it is not a question of whether to adapt social networking, but when. Mechanisms like chat and forum discussions further empower your staff to communicate more effectively and in a manner that is easy to capture and compile.
These are very high-level and I suspect there will be more as I think about it. However, I will keep running list here as I come across them. If you have some to add, I welcome your comments.
I should preface this one by stating it’s interesting what one’s mind thinks about when you are up for a 4 AM feeding with your newborn. However, I was sitting here staring at our Wii Balance Board during this particular feeding and remembered seeing some pretty fascinating hacks online.
The Wii system itself is pretty interesting. The use of relatively simple technology that is only moderately evolved from the days of the original Nintendo’s Duck Hunt emphasizes the ability of innovation in user interface to produce results as great as, or better than evolutions in graphics. But take that one step further and make these relatively simple technologies an open source platform for others to tweak and you have a plethora of opportunities for new Virtual Reality applications of inexpensive technologies.
Johnny Lee has shown how a nominal additional investment in hardware can produce a digital white board and highlights the benefits for educational institutions. He also shows how reversing the sensor bar and controller can produce a head tracking, VR helmet-like imitation. More recently, the Wii Balance Board has been hacked by guys in a German Artificial Intelligence lab and can be used to navigate Google Earth and virtual environments like World of Warcraft and Second Life. Who wouldn’t love to surf, both physically and figuratively, over their city anyway?
It is fascinating how, like so many successful evolutions of technology, Virtual Reality is not hitting us overnight with some single leap in evolution like so many predicted. Instead, it is creeping in among us through the continuous evolution of innovative interface implementations.
For more material on this topic, check out YouTube Wii Hacks and / or the clips below. As a bonus, in Johnny’s Lee’s famous hack video below, he mentions how YouTube has really expedited the evolution of innovations like these. Roughly quoting Johnny, “In 5 months an idea has gone from experimentation on my desktop to a commercially available product.”
Johnny Lee’s Hack Video, including VR head sensor:
It seems like the topic of Mashups is getting a lot of press again lately. Conceptually, it’s nothing all that new and mashups have been around for several years. Wikipedia defines mashups as:
… a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.”
With IBM’s announcement of the release of Lotus Mashups at Lotusphere in January, we have another example of how Web 2.0 and web-as-a-platform solutions are presenting solutions for the early adopting enterprises. Still, the majority of mashups today seem to focus on map overlays. This is where I liked IBM’s positioning at Lotusphere – while they covered the mandatory examples of map overlays, they also really emphasized data-to-data and other non-(geographic)map mashups.
I took a quick look around for some of the more innovative and popular non-map mashups and here some that stood out:
Love-o-Graph: Don’t trust yourself, match.com or any other dating algorithms? Why not entrust the future of your love life to a mashup driven entirely off of your name and your prospective partner? I found the future for my wife and I is “open to interpretation”.
LivePlasma: A cool visual representation of connections between musicians, actors, films, books and so on from the Amazon API.
Secret Prices: A really cool site that combines data including online coupons and rebates with sales sites and opinion data.
Similarity Web: This site takes Amazon.com’s “Customers Also Bought” logic and provides an impressive visualization of similar products.
Google vs. Yahoo: With this mashup, you can compare the results of a search as reported by Google and Yahoo.
With IBM’s investment in enterprise mashups solutions, we move from one-offs and technically challenging solutions requiring programming expertise to a common business platform. Then we look at examples like those above that range from the entertainment to consumer focused. It is clear there are many great opportunities for mashups beyond the geographic maps and expanding solutions for average business person.
For more examples of mashups, check out Programmable Web. In particular, they have a somewhat dated article on increasing non-map mashups.
i appreciate that very much, Mr. animated electronics: RT @xtingu: We all need controoo^OOOOOOL! I need controooooollllllll... we all...about 5 hours agofrom TweetDeck *******
In Boston, my commute was 90 minutes a day, in the car. In New York, it was 3 hours, each day on the train and walking across midtown Manhattan. Now in Michigan, I still spend 2 hours a day in the car. You might say I am proficient at commuting. With this proficiency comes many solutions for maximizing productivity during the commute. Here’s what I find helps and recommend to fellow commuters: 
Matt Edmundson
MrLich
Al
PM Hut