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.

Business model generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengersalexander osterwalder; Wiley 2010WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

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 (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, 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 (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]

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.

• 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/

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 received no inducements from Apple]
[Update: Fixed typo in cloud sentence]

I’ve found the software ideal for filling out official forms and also reformatted PDF documents ready to read on my Sony Reader.

All the usual composition features are present including printing to PDF, signing, stamping, adding bates numbers for legal documents and document security. In addition the PDF-to-Word conversion is one of the best on the market for retrieving text from a PDF document in a form that is high-fidelity from the original (document security permissions permitting)There is a download for free trial version that works for 14 days.

Nitro PDF Professional 6.0 – Free Download

DVD ripping has been possible for many years after the CSS (Content Scrambling System) encryption keys were compromised and DeCSS was created.

The digital rights management industry has learned that “security by obscurity” is not security at all. Most users of CSS cracking software claim it is used to defeat region encoding that stops DVDs being played outside their target market.Blu-ray (and HD-DVD) were designed with better encryption, AACS (Advanced Access Content System) from the outset but this still was compromised.

The technology also includes HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) which prevents digital recording equipment from recording the content by requiring the player and the television create a secure channel for the media.Blu-ray players feature extensible protection so the scrambling system can be upgraded so new titles can be better protected against copying.

This feature could be the reason that the studios preferred Blu-ray over HD-DVD.

The latest copy protection mechanism for Blu-ray is BD+ which 18 months ago was hailed as protection that will take 10 years to break. It features a virtual machine that authorized players use to run scripts to access the content. This virtual machine deliberately makes reverse engineering difficult by changing the way instructions are executed depending on the context.

Proving that nothing is unbreakable, SlySoft has cracked the latest BD+ scrambling system and can copy all existing titles as noted in this press release: http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=24602 Macrovision, who develop the BD+ scrambling system, will no doubt respond in due course with better technology to defeat SlySoft.

The lesson here is that continuous development is required to protect digital rights.But overall, is digital rights management worth all the inconvenience to the customer?