Innovate or Die

A contest sponsored by google and Specialized(a bike manufacturer) about innovative uses of bicycle power - click below to see a video of the AQUADUC T - the grand prize winner.



And click here to see all of the other contest entries Specialized: Innovate or Die

WiiMote multitouch from CynergyLabs

Building on Johnny Chung Lee's Wiimote example, CynergyLab in San Diego has created a multitouch prototype using a large screen display and IR emitters built into gloves. I'll bet Nintendo never thought of that!

Minds on Fire - Learning to Be

From John Seely Brown ( co-chairman of the New Deloitte Research Center at USC) and Richard Adler of the Institute for the Future comes this timely article on the importance of conversations in stimulating learning in communities of practice. The primary audience for the article is academics in higher ed, but the message is useful for any learning practice.

John's whimsical cartoons like the ones shown below make the article much more entertaining and understandable.


Here is the link:


http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823

Le Grand Content -

Meet Jessica Hagy

Jessica Hagy was my top vote from the 100 authors who crowd-sourced the Age of Conversation. So I naturally added her feed to my reading list and today found this enchanting visualization(3:57 minutes) which derives its design from her profoundly simple way of visualizing in what she calls "a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math."

Take the journey of Le Grand Content below- and subscribe to Jessica's blog - a few seconds a day and you will be entertained and enlightened.

The Original Powers of Ten movie -Charles and Ray Eames

Here is the original Powers of Ten movie produced for IBM. It'still as powerful as it was when first produced. Best to click onthe YouTube link in the picture here so that you can see it in full size. You can watch the mini image here but the larger image is much more impressive.  9 Minutes of video you will never forget.

When I first saw it, I was blown away - still feel the same way. From here on, I will use Powers of Ten as the base for our exploration.

Zoom from Compression to Comprehension -Visual Powers of 10

This image was the graphical interface to a demonstration of zooming similar to the way one zooms in on google maps for more detail.

Unfortunately the demonstration is no longer on the web I am hoping I can resurrect it from the original artist, Andries Odendaal. I did find it on the Internet Archive, but the links beyond the landing page are missing and thus the power of the demo is missing in cyberspace. Here is the InternetArchive from 2006 10 ways

Here is what I said back in 2006 about the demonstration. "From its content to its visual components, a photograph is filled with information. Choose a point on an image and delve deeper into it, linking one idea to another in a never-ending chain."

Try the "information" demo and you'll be intrigued as the zoom "box" takes you deeper into a mosaic of thousands of color images.

On the same site, launch the demo of lightand experience a photomosaic of light and shadow and the eerie, yet powerful gradual sharpening of resolution as an image chosen from the thousands that make up the 3D object and its lighting source "dissolves" into crystal clarity.

There's enough in these two demos to prove that " A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS" taken to the "next level" with a Powers of 10 visualization "platform".

Use your imagination to visualize your multiple social network friends pictures or images of shared projects having this capability of massively compressing large collections of images into tightly packed "atomic" structures - but allowing for the collections to be "decompressed" in Powers of 10 zooming.

The image sets could be driven by external RSS feeds to highlight areas of recent interest and the zoom to full size image could be automatically driven by the feed sources.

I will try to provide an example using google maps which have both the benefit and the detriment of being geospatially constructed.

Connect, Discover,Experience

3 minutes of entertaining informative video, with video vignettes selectable and augmented by brief topic bullets which serve as a way to select and replay each of the segments of the full video.

Great ROA - Welcome to the Visual Networking Experience. Cisco Systems, Inc



Makes me want to join the Cisco Human Network.

The Great Train Wreck of Social Networks - can we be saved?

John Maloney tipped me to Jay Deragon's Are We Headed for a Train Wreck?
which starts like this :

"Today’s social networks are “train cars” of conversations..... The “train cars” are fueled by today’s conversations and they are building speed, momentum and the attention of business. The velocity of these train cars, running on multiple tracks, is moving faster than anything in history and most businesses are not even aware that “the train is coming ...will there be a wreck at the intersection of people and business?"

Jay then quotes Doc Searls morose lament:

“Think of markets as three overlapping circles: Transaction, Conversation and Relationship. Our financial system is Transaction run amok. Metasticized. Optimized at all costs. Impoverished in the Conversation department, and dismissive of Relationship entirely. We’ve been systematically eliminating Relationship for decades, excluding, devaluing and controlling human interaction wherever possible, to maximize efficiency and mechanization"

To the rescue comes optimistic reader Daniel Robles with a view that conversational and collaborative nirvana may be just around the corner. He uses the data-information-innovation pathway popularized in Russell Ackoff's Paths to Wisdom diagram we used in our 1997 monograph The Knowledge Channel shown below:(1)

"The problem is that nobody has made a tangible connection between information, knowledge, and innovation - the current myriad of definitions made by important people are flat out wrong if not dangerous. Information is facts and data, knowledge is the rate of change of information with respect to time, innovation is the rate of change of knowledge with respect to time - The “in-crowd” still argues that you cannot measure knowledge and innovation directly. They fail to see that you can, however, measure the rate of change of information as a proxy for knowledge (first derivative) and the second derivative of information as a proxy for innovation. Whoever still thinks that knowledge is ‘intangible’ is living in a world that no longer exists....

...we can expect to see a true innovation economy - Web 3.0 will be predictive. A percentile search engine will calculate and combine strategic combinations of knowledge assets (from an computer enabled inventory) in infinitely unique and creative ways. Each combination will represent a business plan at a known probability of success. People will own knowledge assets and have perfect information regarding the inventory."

Devising such a model to represent these "strategic combinations of knowledge assets" such that "Each combination will represent a business plan at a known probability of success" has been the holy grail of the knowledge management clan for several decades.

Owning and having perfect information about your knowledge inventory is indeed a very exciting prospect. Can we avoid the train wreck?

To borrow Jay Deragon's blog tag line: "What say you?"

Link resources:

(1.) InnovationLabs Publications: The Knowledge Channel - Corporate Strategies for the Internet

(2) InnovationLabs Publications: Knowledge Channel Networks - Integrating Industry Value Chains on the Internet

(3)For my "antrail" to these resources see ddavison's Grazr Blog

Using the Wii Remote as a VR Head tracking device

Using the Wii remote as a low cost electronic whiteboard

The ignorance of Crowds?

I have been hooked, as have many others, on the potential of harnessing the power of mass collaboration as touted in Wikinomics, in which authors Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams argue that peer production can help businesses “take innovation and wealth creation to new levels.” ( see my Thoughts Illustrated: Network Innovation - a lesson from Apple. )

"Not neccesarily so" says Nicholas Carr in this thoughtful article from ManyWorlds:

"The open source (peer production) model can play an important role
in innovation, but know its limitations."

and....

"The bazaar should be defined by diversity,
but the cathedral should be defined by talent."

To see what Carr means by this important distinction link here:

ManyWorlds.com - The Knowledge Network for Thought Leaders on Business Strategy, Innovation and Futures.