The Silver Lining

Just when the world was looking bleak…Iraq is neverending, Wall Street is ending, both Presidential hopefuls are mum on how to fix the mess we’re in, gas is on the rise yet again, the Jets were less than pitiful tonight…you get the idea…

…I happen across a post from a colleague, Dan Herman, and am thrilled with the opportunities which can be created when we choose to do what we should instead of only what we can.  For example, many companies sit on patents whether or not they are actually using them, simply because they “own” them and they can.  The innovative Eco-Patent Commons is about Big Business releasing some of these unused, yet potentially viable and environmentally responsible, patents into the public domain in the hopes that someone out there in the cloud will figure out how to make it work for the greater good. Something which should be done as a matter of course, one would think.

This idea started with IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook Conference and grew quickly to Nokia, PitneyBowes and Sony.  The list of member companies seems to be growing, too!  This month Bosch, Dupont and Xerox have joined.

Perhaps someone will find the silver linings buried in this fortuitous trove, and in our lifetimes we will see the Earth breathe as freely as before humans sullied her face…

I love this guy!!!

There are some people in this world who are simply wired right…

Not only has Dean Kamen invented the iBot, a wheelchair which goes up stairs, the Segway, a two-wheeled, self-balancing human transporter, as well as a relatively inexpensive way for remote villages to easily purify water, but he is now crowdsourcing the “next big application to benefit society” from the world’s young mobile developers.  The $150,000 contest, “Calling All Innovators,” was announced today at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC by Kamen and sponsor Nokia.

I first saw Kamen on Sundance Channel’s Iconoclasts with Isabella Rossellini, of all people, and was blown away by both of them.  I had heard of both before of course, seen some of her movies and his inventions, but the program was utterly enlightening on what really interests and motivates them.  (A gem of a program BTW Sundance!)  I would have loved to have seen Kamen and Randy Pausch one on one!

Shiny New Chrome

Ok, I confess…when I first heard Google was creating its own browser, I cringed…flashbacks from the Microsoft/Netscape browser wars kept appearing before my eyes.  As an avid Firefox user and fan (the concept of tabs and add-ons is sheer brilliance!), I simply could not understand why Google decided to do it.

After reading this article, however, I think I now see Chrome’s shine — simply faster-and-more-secure wouldn’t do it, but true browser-as-platform capability just might.  @ITSInsider recently polled her Twitter followers as to how many brower tabs they had open and what they were doing in them, lending some insight into how people work with the new social media capabilities prior to Chrome.

Hopefully, with the addition of Chrome to Google’s stable it will also lead to a greater focus for Google on its Google Docs service so that we can all free ourselves from our MS Office shackles without sacrificing functionality.

Olympic thoughts

As the Beijing Olympic Games came to a close today, some thoughts started stirring…

First, I came across this amazing data model from The New York Times.  It not only shows this year’s medal count, but the counts from over 100 hundred years of past Games.  I think it’s a fabulous way to show data over time, the changes are far more obvious than a bunch of bars or even the raw data.

Some of the changes in medal counts and top or even participating countries are easily explained, such as in the boycotts in the early 1980’s.  Others are not so obvious.  I confess my first instinct was to assume cheating by the host country when looking at the 1896 and early 1900’s counts.  Upon further consideration, I think it more likely due to the great difficulty and expense of travel in those days which meant more athletes from the host country were present than the significant global participation we see today.  At least I hope that’s the cause!  It would be a shame if the modern Olympics have been dogged all along by biased judging, underage participants or doping charges.

This then led me down the murky path of “way back when…”  I was a horse-crazy little girl, and my Olympic dreams looked something like the storyline of National Velvet.  Though I have become an accomplished horsewoman, I have little skill nor experience compared to the athletes competing today. I still have Olympic dreams though, and they manifest around world peace.  Trite or improbable it may be, but what if we take a lesson from the ancient olympic truce, which in theory allowed safe travel to Olympia and to varying degrees stopped/prevented some fighting for a bit, and apply it to our modern Games?

Maybe we’ll get used to the quiet…the pointless bombs and shooting would stop, families would stop weeping, 24/7 news networks would go dark and politicians would have to quit their confused yammering about “withdrawal horizons” or how the “US doesn’t torture” and actually solve a problem or two to stay in office…truly Olympic dreams!

Sunny side of the street

One of the biggest reasons businesses and home owners have for not installing solar panels are their high cost.  This is due in part to two things: (a) the cost of manufacturing anything with silicon, solar panels’ primary component, is high and (b) the overall efficiency of solar panels is relatively low (15-25% max), thus you need a lot of panels to meet your electrical demands.  The low efficiency of panels implies the need for a lot of real estate that faces in a specific direction to ensure demand is met.  The net-net is that even though solar is a perfect solution as an energy source, we need to significantly improve how we capture and transform it into usable electricity.

“All of humankind’s power consumption amounted to only 15 terawatts in 2004, so converting less than 0.02% of the Sun’s power delivered to the Earth would have replaced all of it.”

Luckily, we’ve finally got some global attention on the matter and innovation is occurring!

• Changes in solar panel manufacturing, increases efficiency 25%
• Improving concentrated photovoltaic technology, increases conversion efficiency to 37.5%
• Major advance in inorganic chemistry that could lead to a cheap way to store sun’s energy

On a related note, if you’re looking for a solar charger for your electronics, check these out.

sublime and peaceful

sitting on the dock by the bay

I just wanted to share the most stunning day I’ve had at our shore house (Long Beach Island) this year (another pic). The picture on the left of this post was taken from the edge of our dock looking across the bay at the mainland, which is way over there on the horizon far past the marsh). For all those who think all of NJ is equivalent to Newark, I beg to differ…and it has reminded me that to be as productive as I need to be, I also need to take time to unplug, unwind and decompress. The Information Age is awesome in all respects, but even Gibson’s characters unjack every now and then.

Into the cloud

Cloud computing has been steadily gaining momentum and validity in meeting enterprise needs and this latest global experiment from HP, Yahoo, Intel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE) and Infocomm Development Authority (SG) should prove interesting to watch.

The ambitious six-site project is aimed at developing an Internet-based computer infrastructure stable enough to host companies’ most critical data-processing tasks. The project also holds an unusual promise for advances in fields as diverse as climate change modeling and molecular biology.

The project’s large scope will allow researchers to test and develop security, networking, and infrastructure components on a large scale simulating an open Internet environment. But to test this infrastructure, academic researchers will also run real-world, data-intensive projects that, in their own right, could yield advances in fields as varied as data mining, context-sensitive Web search, and communication in virtual-reality environments.

Tim O’Reilly is concerned that though we may move into the cloud for all the right reasons, we will still use the old architectures and lock everyone in as we did with ERPs and other proprietary applications.

…the success of the internet as a non-proprietary platform built largely on commodity open source software could lead to a new kind of proprietary lock-in in the cloud. What good are free and open source licenses, all based on the act of software distribution, when software is no longer distributed but merely performed on the global network stage? How can we preserve freedom to innovate when the competitive advantage of online players comes from massive databases created via user contribution, which literally get better the more people use them, raising seemingly insuperable barriers to new competition?

The “internet operating system” that I’m hoping to see evolve over the next few years will require developers to move away from thinking of their applications as endpoints, and more as re-usable components. For example, why does every application have to try to recreate its own social network? Shouldn’t social networking be a system service?

This isn’t just a “moral” appeal, but strategic advice. The first provider to build a reasonably open, re-usable system service in any particular area is going to get the biggest uptake. Right now, there’s a lot of focus on low level platform subsystems like storage and computation, but I continue to believe that many of the key subsystems in this evolving OS will be data subsystems, like identity, location, payment, product catalogs, music, etc.

How do we ensure openness and interoperability prevail at the end of the day?  Seemingly irrelevant for something referring to clouds, but no less important to cloud computing’s success, how too do we ensure the right locations for the physical manefestations of the cloud?

Web 2.0 best practices and tips for the enterprise

I’ve recently stumbled upon (no pun intended) a number of insightful best practices and tips centered around enterprise collaboration, community management and social networking in general as well as around specific technologies/sites.  What are yours?

• How Your LinkedIn Profile Is Connected To Your Company’s Success
  [Steve Patrizi]
• Twelve best practices for online customer communities
  [Dion Hinchcliffe]
• 2008 Tribalization of Business Study
  [Deloitte, Beeline Labs and Soc. for New Communications Research]
• Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results
  [McKinsey & Co - see When Web 2.0 Works chapter - req'd reg]
• 13 Tips From My First Year Of Blogging
  [Dave Fleet]
• 42 Top Social Media Tips And Tools
  [Dave Fleet]
• Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint
  [Todd Stephens]
• Some Questions You Might Get Asked
  [Andrew McAfee]
• I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip
  [New York Times - Luis Suarez - req'd reg]
• When Group-Think Poses as Collaboration
  [Roy Youngman]
• Some Suggestions for a “CIO 2.0″
  [Vaughan Merlyn]
• The Trade-Off For Transparency
  [ThreeMinds - Marta Strickland]

The world lost a great soul today

A friend just told me Randy Pausch, famous for his Last Lecture at Carnegie Mellon, has lost his battle with pancreatic cancer today.  Though I am greatly saddened by his passing, I can’t imagine Professor Pausch would want tears.  So instead, I remind myself of his key tenets (pardon any paraphrasing) and assess myself, as he might instruct me to do:

1. Are you a Tigger or an Eeyore?
Lately, I think my inner Eeyore has been showing.  Frustrations at work and a few recent family setbacks are making me slightly psychotic of late.  I must remember to look at the glass as half full!  Thankfully, my acupuncturist is also helping me stay sane.

2. Don’t bail; the best gold is found at the bottom of barrels of crap
Now this one, I really needed to be reminded of…nothing significant is ever easy.  Getting my hands dirty, slogging through the crap and making progress, even slightly, is what will make me successful in the end.

3. Don’t complain; just work harder
Always good to remember and one I try hard to follow!  If I do complain though, I try to also have a solution or work around to suggest at the same time.  At least the conversation stays constructive instead of becoming defensive.  It’s the consultant in me…

4. Brick walls are there to prove just how badly you want something
Boy are they ever!  I often forget this one and become dejected at the first or second barrier to whatever I want to do appears.  My capricorn-ian stubbornness rarely lets me give up, but it keeps me from being happy sometimes.  Recently, however, I’ve been surprised by how my team and I can get things accomplished at the local government level by simply being calm, thorough and patient when the barriers to change are thrown at us.  There is something to be said for the power of the people…even if it takes 3x as long as you’d like.

Regardless of whether these tenets are of value to you, I encourage all who may read this to watch or read about Pausch’s Last Lecture and, if nothing else, be inspired by such a great soul as he.

Making the Most of Your RSS Reader

Thanks to @elsua for tweeting this excellent set of tips on leveraging your RSS reader.  I find there is so much out there, it gets harder and harder to feel on top of things.  I would seriously lose my mind if not for my RSS reader, the Wizz News Reader add-on for Firefox.  The site’s suggestion to not feel obligated in reading everything from a feed is spot on…think of it like scanning a newspaper, most people just read what’s important to them and scan the rest.  Good advice in this age of information overload!