Innovations!

Aggdata: Data Collections in CSV format

2009-02-14T07:50:00.000-08:00

Aggdata is a simple, yet powerful innovation.

Chris Hathaway has been working on Aggdata for almost three years to "make data more accessible, portable and reliable".

Aggdata collates data from the web "into one file that is very raw and portable, which makes it easy to integrate into any application or website".

You can order a custom list and take discounts on packages.

The free lists are available here, which includes:

Download a file of your interest to see how powerful this can be.

ImageMagick

2009-02-03T21:57:00.000-08:00

ImageMagick is an image manipulation software suite compatible with more than 100 image formats. It is a GPL compatible Open Source software that may be freely used, copied, modified, and distributed.

Use it for Format Conversion, Transformation, Special Effects, GIF animation sequence and many more operations.

Look at a list of tools that use ImageMagick, including a FAQ on ImageMagick Usage.

Other related resources:

Open Source Images
Moving to Freedom: free software, free culture, free association
Innovations in Digital Asset Management, Circa 2008

Free Business Process Modeller

2008-12-19T07:56:00.000-08:00

The BizAgi BPMN Process Modeler is offered as a freeware to entice advanced users to go for BizAgi's BPM Suite .

If you are starting out with Business Process Modeling, this is an interesting tool to explore.

Download here.

A Thinking Tool

2008-10-02T09:24:00.000-07:00

Eliyahu M. Goldratt's claim (to fame) is his scientific Thinking Processes that have helped solve some permanent problems of business (and day-to-day life as well).

An incredible innovation indeed!

It might be useful to develop expertise is using the primary thinking processes - Current Reality Tree, Evaporating Cloud, Core Conflict Cloud, Future Reality Tree, Negative Branch Reservations, Positive Reinforcement Loop, Prerequisite Tree, Transition Tree, Strategy & Tactics.

Would a software help?

Ivan Appel thinks so! He is working on jThinker - an open-source tool for visual flowcharting of thinking processes.

Subscribe to jThinker announces mailing list, that is going to be released "very, very soon!"

Best Instant Communities

2008-04-04T23:20:00.000-07:00

5 Best Instant Messengers Compared & Analyzed | The Best Article Every day

Lifehacker asked their readers for their favorite instant messaging applications, and over 550 comments later, they have culled it down to the most popular five:

Digsby (Windows)

Integrates with all IM networks as well email and social networking (Facebook and MySpace included).

Pidgin (Windows/Linux)

Formerly known as Gaim, this cross-platform, open source IM client has over 3 million users.

Meebo (Web)

The "most popular web-based chat application", Meebo supports all popular chat networks, video and voice chat, and even an iPhone interface.

Adium (Mac OS X)

The "overwhelming favorite" chat app for OS X, Adium has some great features - is highly customizable, extensible with plug-ins, and works across all your favorite IM networks.

Trillian (Windows)

Trillian has "lost a lot of users to newer apps" but they are promising a Mac release along with an iPhone version.

Now, which is your favorite?

Facebook: Benign or Evil?

2008-04-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

Eric Elden shares "Significant new features coming to Facebook: More privacy, and chat":

The new privacy features are built around the concept of the friends list that Facebook began testing last December, where you can manually sort friends into lists that you define. Now, you’ll be able to use these lists to decide who gets to see what about you. A list can be totally private, so you can do things like upload photos and share them with your “college friends” without letting any other Facebook friends get access.

The company says users have been asking for these features as the site continues to expand across demographics and countries and users’ friends become increasingly diverse.

Also:

Facebook Chat, which has been rumored for a little while, is coming within the next several weeks.

He concludes:

Many people who started using it in college are now using it at work, with friends from high school and family members. More significantly, two-thirds of Facebook’s 65 million monthly active users are now outside the US. Just 18 months ago, 90 percent of users its users were within the US. The vast majority of users in other countries aren’t students.

....................................................................................

Elsewhere, a significant number of people are debating whether Facebook is benign or evil!

Kristy Ward, in The psychology of Facebook, writes:

Before Facebook was created, people that quietly observed others were referred to as Peeping Toms. These voyeurs, unnoticed in their activity, were deemed as disturbing individuals and social deviants. ... ... ...Why is Facebook so popular? Behind closed doors, are we all inherently narcissists and voyeurs?... ... ...Our society has an obsession with deviant behaviour. Take Britney Spears, for example. Her most recent antics have been plastered all over US Weekly and OK! Magazine... ... ...Maybe Facebook is both a narcissistic and voyeuristic outlet where all the creeps can come together and rejoice.

She concludes:
Don’t deny your creepiness. Find me on Facebook — but maybe I’ve already seen you and you don’t even know it.

Deirdre Molloy, having recovered from the addiction of facebook ("useful, work enhancing, fun, valuable, diverting, strange, compelling, addictive, aggravating, blundering, wasteful, alienating"), took copious notes at the SXSW Interactive keynote interview with 23-year-old Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and shared what Mark revealed:

“We’re just trying to build an infrastructure on top of which people can operate.”

“People should be able to be heard without any large organisation of millions of people. The world is an increasingly complex place and we need something – an infrastructure – on top of which people can communicate and do it [organise] from the bottom-up.”

“In terms of community we consider it to be a very personal thing. People aren’t being forced into any community, it’s more about allowing them to communicate more and keep in touch with people.”

She concludes:

Egad, Zuckerberg posits Facebook as platform for mass diversity shocker! And yet it’s not so clear-cut. Maybe Mark’s been reading Jaron Lanier? Or perhaps his advisors have been. In turn, spare me the conspiracy schtick; I think it’s a whole lot more confusing and interesting than that. In my book (sic), as both a creature and driver of the complex world, the Facebook story is not over yet – whether you consider it evil, benign or a panacea for all ills.

It’s been an interesting year now social media’s gone mainstream. We’ve lived it, and learnt a few lessons. The gist of it all? Like the SXSW interview, it’s been messy.

What about you?

Which side of the fence are you on?

Ning - Create your own social network!

2008-03-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

What should users, unhappy with existing online networking sites, do? The answer is simple: go ahead and create your own online social network!

Ning, an exciting innovation in the online networking space, was founded in October 2004 for users to create "your own social network for anything -- in less than two minutes, for free -- with the ability to customize your network any way you want."

See a video on "What is this Ning thing all about?"

To understand the Ning philosophy, read a blog post by Marc Andreessen (who earlier co-founded Netscape Communications) where he shares how his social network service, Ning, crossed 100,000 networks.

So, go ahead and create your own social network and/or join an existing one like:

The Freedom Movement
Fibromyalgia - You're Not Alone!
Peace and Collaborative Development Network

For more, checkout the featured networks at the Ning Blog.

Free advertising for your blog!

2008-03-09T06:13:00.000-07:00

No registration is required, and no account needs to be maintained.

Simply, provide your URL and BlogUpp! reads your RSS regularly and puts up a snapshots on other blogs where BlogUpp! is activated.

A similar thumbnail is shown on your blog, leading to to a mutual advertisement network!

It is completely free!

Carebadge - Power Your Cause

2008-02-19T22:51:00.000-08:00

A few geeks, including Saar Gur, got inspired by the The LIVESTRONG™ Yellow Bracelet campaign, which raised over $50 million for the Lance Armstrong Foundation through millions of individual purchases.

They went ahead to launch Carebadge (Acquired - Facebook Causes) - with a mission is to raise awareness and funds for any cause that you care about (for-profit or non-profit).

Their dream is to power every cause on the planet with a Carebadge.

You can browse some of the causes here.

Antya - The End Result

2008-02-09T12:15:00.000-08:00

A new search engine, Antya, plans to provide "THE END RESULTS" (one interpretation of the Sanskrit term antya) in any search.

It is human powered (selection of web-sites is subjective and also based on user feedback) and has a "globally local" perspective. Its mission is to "To make all brands & businesses discoverable to the end user".

NComputing - The most innovative computing company of 2007!

2007-10-04T00:38:00.000-07:00

NComputing has won the prestigious 2007 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award in the category of Computing Systems for their Low-cost method of sharing a standard PC with as many as 30 users.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed over 800 companies in various categories, and fewer than 4% received an award.

Is there a prize?
No!

But, the organizers claim that there will be extensive coverage in The Wall Street Journal's three global editions as well as on wsj.com and Dow Jones Newswires.

They will also honor the winners at an awards ceremony on October 24 in conjunction with Dow Jones VentureWire's Alternative Energy and MicroVentures conferences in Redwood City, California.

The Awards helps the winners obtain venture-capital funding or an increase in sales.

Gaming Excellence - Flight Simulator X

2006-06-27T23:41:00.000-07:00

In an interview with Hal Bryan, Flight Simulator Community Evangelist at ACES Studio, developer of the Flight Simulator franchise. He touched on what it’s like to work at ACES, the research and development required to master a flight simulation engine, and what’s new in Flight Simulator X.

For example, FSX features a number of new aircraft, including the de Havilland Canada Beaver, the Air Creations trike ultralight, and the Grumman Goose among others. To build the planet, they use data from NASA, the US Geological Survey, Jeppesen, and a variety of other sources from around the world.

GamingExcellence is a comprehensive gaming website which provides up-to-date news and editorials for a variety of platforms.

Blog media company - Corante

2006-06-19T12:28:00.000-07:00

Corante is the "The world’s first blog media company, a trusted, unbiased source on technology, science and business". About their readers, they say "Corante's community of more than 450,000 monthly readers aren’t just casual observers of the sector - they're the individuals on the cutting edge, the early adopters and innovators who are creating the technologies, building and running the sector's best companies, and dreaming up the applications of the future."
Pronunciation: [core-AUNT (as in haunt)]

IT and Business consulting blurring

2006-06-16T00:51:00.000-07:00

The accelerated convergence of business and IT processes has also meant the blurring of lines between IT services vendors and traditional business consultants, according to Bo Di Muccio, program manager for consulting services at IDC. Paul Weinberg reports at echannelline.

"This increasing link is causing all of the general management consultancies [i.e. strict business consultants] to build up their technology focused capabilities. Five years ago, there would have been completely different lists of companies doing IT consulting and business consulting; now there is more of an overlap."

"The growing convergence of business and IT -- in dialogue and in fact -- has obscured many of the strict distinctions between the IT and business sides of consulting services. While the nature of the activities and players in these markets still warrant treating IT and business consulting separately, the primary implication of this convergence is that the business consulting market is more closely tied to IT than ever."

All of the four top GMCs -- McKinsey, Boston Consulting, Bain & Company and Booz Allen Hamilton --- are also conducting consulting in IT, CIO advisory, intellectual property and outsourcing, observed Di Muccio.

In addition, he continued, the large accounting firms are quietly rebuilding their consulting practices that include the addition of IT to the mix as their post Enron agreements to stay out of consulting are expiring.

Although IT vendors like Hitachi and Fujitsu are looking at getting involved in business consulting this is not an area for the novice, continued Di Muccio.
"This is not an easy market to enter. The expertise around the business process is not something you develop over night with limited capital."

The other issue facing the GMCs now offering IT consulting involves the shortage of IT talent, some of which is already being monopolized by the IT vendors, Di Muccio stated.

While IT vendors acquire companies, business consultants tend to grow "organically," he noted. "Business consulting has been growing more slowly than other areas of consulting."

As business consulting services rush out to hire IT talent and build up technology expertise "their ability to deliver across business and IT functions is becoming less and less of a potential differentiator," added Di Muccio.

"Therefore, business consultants will increasingly be forced to find other ways of differentiating themselves, and one example is through the productization of business consulting offerings."

IBM Launches R&D Consulting Practice

2006-06-15T00:09:00.000-07:00

IBM to Help Companies Innovate by Maximizing R&D Operations and Investments
Marketwire reports that IBM Global Business Services unveiled a new management consulting practice intended to help companies produce innovation and competitive differentiation from research and development (R&D) spending.

Specifically, IBM's R&D Management consultants will focus on the following solutions for clients:

-- R&D transformation and optimization -- IBM consultants assess the R&D
business model to help R&D executives identify which areas R&D should focus
on from both an effectiveness and efficiency standpoint that will enable
the most impact to profitability and strategic differentiation. IBM
consultants also provide a roadmap and business case for R&D strategy,
management, vision and execution.
-- R&D Strategy -- IBM consultants develop product/services strategies,
business models and operating models (including people, process and
technology) that best link R&D strategy with the overall business strategy.
-- Product Innovation Management -- IBM consultants perform a strategic
assessment on the lifecycle of product innovation and provide a roadmap to
efficiency and effectiveness.
-- Portfolio management -- IBM consultants provide strategies and
management systems to create the correct balance and trade-off within a
company's product portfolio.
-- Collaboration -- IBM consultants help clients identify what types of
collaboration are beneficial and help create the structure needed to
support collaboration efforts within the enterprise and across innovation
networks.
-- Ideation -- IBM consultants assist clients with the strategies and
management systems designed to create and sustain the flow of innovative
ideas and to manage these ideas as a portfolio of assets.
-- Impact of future technology -- IBM consultants utilize a scientific
methodology to understand what future technologies may have an impact on a
company's product portfolio and provide guidance for how to incorporate
future technologies into future products.