All my blog posts.
Business Model Generation
Business model generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and ChallengersWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
This is a great book for inspiration on generating new business models or disrupting old business models.
The book co-created with many people who joined in the workshops that are graphically portrayed in the book.
There are many worked examples and illustrations of the process and outcomes.
I particularly like the iconography in some of the workshops and will include them into my repertoire.
A little more detail on the process and a prescription of how to run the workshops would take the book from great to excellent.
Buying Systems
There are many problems associated with system selection and procurement.
The can be caused by too little due diligence, poor communication, mismatched expectations and wishful thinking.
I’ve listed out a few I know about.
Marchitecture
Marchitecture (aka Marketecture, from Marketing and Architecture) is usually a sticks-and-boxes diagram that explains a concept as part of a marketing proposal or product propaganda.
Marchitecture explains the composition of a product or system in terms that relates to the business problem or features that are relevant to the reader but may not reflect reality. This is similar to the logical and physical concepts in database design where the logical database design reflects the business problem and the physical database design is how the data is efficiently stored in the database management system. In Physics the explanation of how atoms consists of electrons whizzing around atomic nucleus can explain many physical properties of atoms as a system but greatly oversimplified the actual internal structure of the atom.
Marchitecture becomes a problem when it is misused as a template for designing a system, assessing the feasibility of construction, or providing project estimates for the systems construction without the step of translating it into a high-level design. Marchitecture should be reverse-engineered from the high-level design (or preferably working prototype or actual physical system) not used as a starting point which should concentrate on what is needed not how it is implemented.
For more details on Marchitecture:
Marchitecture Architecture - IT Director (http://www.it-director.com/technology/content.php?cid=6173)
Drupal 7
Drupal, the open source content management system, has now reached version 7.
Version 6 was originally released on 13 Feb 2008 and has suffered from a difficult administration dashboard, the need to add extra modules to make the system usable and a painful process to upgrade the core and extra modules.
Drupal 7 resolves many of these issues and now balances the power of configurability with ease of installation and maintenance.My only very minor complaint is the status report highlights the need an additional core PHP files to enable a file-progress bar – I would prefer to be able to suppress this alert.
Apart from this niggle this is a very welcome upgrade of Drupal although I will be sticking to WordPress for blogging.
Drupal 7 will only be ready for production-use for mainstream site when other modules such as Mollom anti-spam module are released as version 7 compatible and even then some site administrator may wait a few month for any remaining security issues to be uncovered and resolved.
Evernote
Evernote (www.evernote.com) is cloud based storage system for notes, pictures and PDFs that provides web and native clients for a wide range of browser, desktop sand mobile operating systems.
Unlike most cloud based services which only have browser-based web clients and email facilities, Evernote also has rich native clients for Apple MacOS X, Windows Vista/7, RIM BlackBerry and Apple iPhone/iPad.
The native clients for desktop systems also have clipping tools for browsers and screenshots. The native clients make the service far more useful in capturing and searching for information and provide access to the materials when offline or if the service ever becomes unavailable for some reason. The notes can be categorised using tags to create hierarchies and relationships in addition to the more traditional folder structures.
Evernote search indexing performed on their servers based and includes a text recognition in pictures, with handwriting to some extent, alongside keyword searching in notes.Evernote also provides an API so third party services can provide additional functionality and reuse Evernote functionality instead of creating their own implementation.
The free account is limited to uploading 40MB per month whereas a premium account provides a 500Mb per month limit, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) data encryption, the ability to upload any file type and search with PDFs.
[Disclaimer: I have no relationship with Evernote other than being a full paying customer of their subscription service]
Livescribe Business Digital Pen
I have been using a LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen for several months and it is a very useful device for keeping my notebooks in digital form without the need scan every page.
It also means I can have multiple notebooks for home, office and travel and never worry about forgetting to transport them. A couple of issues with the Pulse smartpen is the size was quite bulky to carry and use plus as it is cylindrical it would tend to roll off the desk. Also as the Pulse is aimed at students device security and identification were of no significant concern to the designer.
Yesterday LiveScribe annouced the new Echo SmartPen which now provides password security and a more suitable smaller form factor for business use. The use of MicroUSB saves the need to carry a dock around and also as this is the new standard for mobile phones there will only the need for one cable for charging and synchronisation for all future devices.
It will be interesting to see how the updated SmartPen functions in real use scenarios and what business use-cases emerge from this new device.
http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/press/releases/release_100719.html
FTC Disclaimer – I have not received an inducement and have no business relationship with LiveScrive other than being a previous customer.Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Apple WWDC
The Apple WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) is underway at the time of posting.The highly anticipated new iPhone has been announced with confirmation of some of the details already in the blogosphere and also some pleasant surprises not previously uncovered.iOS 4 Highlights, in addition, to those already announced:
- Name change from iPhone OS4 to iOS 4
- Bing search
iPhone 4 Highlights:
- Gyroscope added to existing sensors
- iMovie on-phone movie editing
- Front Camera for video calling (using Apple FaceTime)
- High Resolution ‘Retina’ display – 960×640 – 4x more pixels
- High contrast display – 4x more contrast
- Two antennas in surrounding bezel – WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS and UMTS/GSM
- HD 720p 30fps Video Recording
- LED Flash
- Apple A4 processor
- Dual microphone for noise cancellation
- 802.11n wireless
- HSPDA/HSUPA – 7.2Mbps down and 5.8Mbps up
The iOS 4 release date is 21 June 2010.The iPhone 4 release in US/UK/France/Germany/Japan is 24 June 2010.I’m surprised that FaceTime (also the name for IBM message collaboration solution) and iOS (also the name for CISCOs networking operating system) were chosen as Apple product names but I’m sure all with be revealed shortly.For more coverage see: http://live.gdgt.com/2010/06/07/live-wwdc-2010-keynote-coverage/
Apple iPad is here
The Apple iPad is finally here with a custom 1GHz processor, HD ready display and multi-touch screen in a very clean uncluttered form-factor.The Apple iPad has a decent 10-hour battery life which will make it useful for reading books, documents and watching movies. The charge-daily mantra of the iPhone is well established so the iPad could be a viable alternative to Kindle/Sony e-Ink platforms which have longer batter life but much less functionality.The high performance wireless 802.11n networking will help with downloading performance on home networks although public hotspot performance will need to catchup. The impact of the Apple iPad on already overloaded 3G networks must be of some concern for the potential carriers of the 3G version.If the browsing experience is as responsive as the Iphone/Touch then it will be a great browsing platform only marred by the missing Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight support.The price is in the luxury end of the market and I’m sure the memory will quickly seem very tight when loaded with videos. However, this the first generation of Apple iPad and capacity will grow with every new model. The lack of space could be offset by syncing to videos/music/documents over the intentet to remote iTunes libraries on home networks. A future feature could include selectively syncing to Apple’s subscription based Cloud services.What is going to be really interesting is what app developers will do with this greatly expanded screen real estate and slightly faster processor.Will I give up my netbook, iPhone and laptop – no – but I think my Sony Reader may be in jeopardy.[Disclaimer: I recevied no inducements from Apple][Update: Fixed typo in cloud sentence]
Mashable.com : 5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases
A recent Mashable.com article highlights Google Wave use-cases from the labs of various software companies including, most notably from an enterprise perspective, SAP, SalesForce.com and ThoughtWorks.http://mashable.com/2009/11/14/google-wave-use-cases/Business process modelling, customer service management and project collaboration are interesting innovations if they make it out of the lab and into the enterprises that use SAP, SalesForce and ThoughtWorks services.A key dependency for the more conservative enterprise is whether Google will offer Wave as a packaged solution (like the Google Search Appliance) to be hosted in the enterprise’s private cloud or will Google enhance their overall security model to protect data in the public cloud.Google Wave continues to be an interesting emergent technology and seems to have sparked interest from those technologists looking for the killer application of “Enterprise 2.0″
Barrelfish – A ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research Cambridge OS
Barrelfish is a research project being jointly undertaken by ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research Cambridge to develop an operating system that can scale across many processor cores.The issue with current operating systems is that they only scale to a few high speed cores because the fundamental design over the last thirty years have focused on optimising single threads of execution over mutiple processors using common shared memory structures.The CPU manufacturers have been focused on increasing the processor performance through clock-speed, cache-memory and pipelining enhancements. This was never going to last because getting the processor die smaller was getting more challenging to put more transistors on the chip and also getting rid of the heat generated by the semiconductors was reaching practical limits.The solution has been to step back on clock speed and put more processor cores on the die to still improve the performance of the CPU overall which now creates a challenge for developers and operating system designers alike.The ETH Zurich and Microsoft teams are working on challenging the design of the fundamental design of operating system which relies on too many central structures that are shared by all the cores creating coherence and consistency problems. Their model proposes using replicated state and using message based models to turn the cores into isolated islands similar to the design of GUI based systems and large scale Event Driven Architectures. The messaging architecture in the proposal in fundamentally messaging over RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) and it will be interesting to see how this develops.The fruits of this work on Barrelfish make take some time to develop into production ready code but this should go some way to address the problem of being able to use the many cores in future processors.This work is being published at Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on OS Principles in October 2009.See http://www.barrelfish.org for more details.
