IDC Forum: Is IT creativity dead?
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Pouring fuel on the debate over whether IT provides a competitive advantage to corporations, a pair of prominent industry observers Monday offered starkly different views of the role computer technology can play in transforming business strategy.
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Following up on yesterday's piece about Demo-like conferences. Eric Norlin proposes that the economics are still out of whack. The people providing the value, the people attending the show, should get in for free. The demoers should pay. He has a point. In my HyperCamp proposal, that is how it works. The premise is that in 2007 everyone who attends is as much press as anyone else (everyone's a blogger) so what's the justification for some people getting in as press (i.e. free of charge) and others paying $2500.
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An idea I've been thinking about for a while and looking for an opportunity to do is a "flash conference" along the lines of the flash mobs that were so popular a few years ago.  Here's how it would work... Some event happens that focuses the attention of bloggers, one where there's a lot of ground to cover and at least two or three different ways to view it, one where the combined expertise of 5 or 10 bloggers would make a big difference.  The event would last at most 3 hours, would be webcast live, and be edited into a 1 hour program within 24 hours.  As many of us are waiting for delivery of Leopard, the new Mac OS, it seems that this may be an opportunity for such a conference. We'd have to find a facility in San Francisco that could house this. There would need to be room for 20 or 30 people, and it must also have decent networking. Then the question of who would we turn to for expert opinions. Some ideas... 1. A Mac software developer. 2. A gadget blogger (Engadget, Gizmodo, etc). 3. A creative artist (it is a Mac after all). 4. ??? 5. ??? This is meant to be an instant idea. I have asked the question on Twitter and your comments are welcome here as well. Update: Loic Le Meur has volunteered the offices of his SF startup to host the flash conference. Cooool.
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I got an interesting teaser in the e-mail this week: âStudy Suggests Nearly Half of All Leaders See a Disconnect Between Strategy and Execution.â I wonât say who sent it because they blew the execution: The so-called study wasnât posted anywhere online, and when I called the number, theyâd already left for the weekend.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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I've been saying this ever since I started blogging.  When you have a product to announce, start a blog (if you don't already have one) and announce it. Before there were blogs, I wished Infoworld or PC Week would give space to the lead developer of the product, whether he or she is a marketer or technical, even the CEO if they wouldn't assign a former reporter or ad guy to write it, and tell us what you meant when you designed this product. Who were you thinking of and what would they do with it. And where does it go? What does 2.0 look like if it's 1.0 or 3.0 if it's 2.0.  I like it when people like Zuckerberg, Andreessen or Canter write a blog post that tells you without pulling any punches what the intent of the product is, in their own words. I'd like to hear what they said to the team that worked on it. I'd like to use my imagination. That's why I don't like Steve Jobs' keynotes, he's telling you what Eddie Haskell would say about the product to Mrs. Cleaver. You never get the intent when it's filtered by the press. And many of the people that call themselves bloggers, love them and bless them, aren't anything like bloggers, and they're everything like the bored hired writers that used to work at CNET and Fortune. In fact, many of them are exactly like them (because they are them).  We live in the age of DIY, that means if you have something to say, just say it. PS: Here's a picture of three child actors from Leave It To Beaver, taken when they're in their fifties. From left to right, Eddie Haskell, Beaver and Wally. Time Waits for No One.
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Game animator I-Wei Huang is getting rave reviews for his steam-powered robots. How does he hack RC kits with steam engines? And will he ever make a rideable robot? By Griffin Wright.
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Open Source methodology has gained some ground in one of the last places you and I might expect: In the development area of corporations. Consultants are calling environments like Sourceforge Enterprise Edition a Digital Development Environment.
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Hasin Hayder asks a question in his latest blog post that some in the PHP community have been wondering for a while now - is the International PHP Magazine dead?   I am a subscriber of International PHP Magazine for years. I bought the subscription looking at the back issues. They were sexy, resourceful and yup, very good. But I think these guys don't care about the magazine anymore. It became just a funny stuff for them. All the readers/subscribers and viewers doesnÃ¢ÂÂt bring any value to them. Look what they are doing actually...   He points out six things that the magazine and its staff are doing including RoR articles in an issue, content on the site that's way out of date and the smaller size of recent issues. Comments to the post point out that there has been issues released but that the magazine is published by a non-technical company that just might be pushing this particular publication aside.
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No talent? No problem. Thanks to technology, the age of instant gratification expands to include wannabe writers, too.
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Here's a problem that some investment dollars help solve. Apparently, the TechCrunch 40 conference isn't streaming to the outside world because the Palace Hotel has incredibly lame networking, and they won't allow conference promoters to bring in more wires? This is what I hear, although it's not confirmed. Emails to the conference promoters yesterday were not responded to.  I've also received emails from a number of companies announcing products at the show who want coverage on Scripting News, so my interest is not entirely idle.  So what does it take to establish one hotel in SF as the default tech conference hotel? Networking! Geez, you'd think it's obvious by now. We do things that require networks. Look in any conference room around the world for a clue. And supposedly San Francisco is the central node in the network of technology bringing all this great stuff to the rest of the world. So where is the hotel that gives us the very most basic technology to wire up conferences so that the whole world can participate?  Do we need to move the tech industry to another city? Someone please ask the Mayor or Google or someone in charge when they're going to fix this problem. It should have been solved in 1997, and it's already 2007.  BTW, here's a clue: there are some great business opportunities, beyond conferences, for the first physical location in downtown SF to solve this problem. Just ask Loic.
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Blog: How close is modern science to an era when technology can restore lost motor functions. Scientists say we're getting close-but a huge effort still remains.
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Blog: Exploring future product opportunities using the iPhone's components
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While huge progress has been made toward &quot;user-centric&quot; identity, I still have problems with &quot;user-centric&quot; anything. The point-of-view is still outside the user. It's still organizational, corporate. If you're &quot;centric&quot; about users, where are you? Right, outside the user. And inside something that's, well, not quite human. Or worse, that's super-human. Not a peer, but a superior. \
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Continuing the thread from yesterday. I got absolutely nowhere, some people suggested I use a smart playlist, missing the point that I'm a developer working on a podcatcher, not a user trying to use iTunes as a podcatcher. I'm sure it's an excellent way to subscribe to podcasts, but I have my own ideas how podcatchers should work, and I want to integrate them with other stuff I'm working on. Integrating with iTunes is proving to be quite a challenge, or maybe it's an art, we'll see.  As usual Mac users are superior sumbitches.  (Quoting the James Brolin character the first time we meet him in the third season finale of The West Wing.) Anyway, the search continues, I tried another more direct tack, and looked for glue for iTunes for UserLand, and bingo, there's a match, from 2001, a well-known Frontier programmer Sean Elfstrom, apparently converted glue for the Sonic SoundJam app that iTunes used to be, before Apple acquired it.  I installed the glue in the OPML Editor. It's daunting, for sure, but let's see what I can get working.
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For anyone who has been using open source for a while, the current commercial enthusiasm for communities, collaboration, and all things Web 2.0, is rather amusing.  After all, the idea that users are not to be regarded simply as passive and grateful recipients of whatever is handed down to them from on high, but need to be treated as partners and participants who can make valuable contributions to the formulation and development of new products, is central to the way that free software works.  But some companies that are starting to dabble with Web 2.0 ideas are discovering that you have to be careful what you wish for when you solicit this kind of user feedback.  Just ask Michael Dell.
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[B]By IVANA MARTINI  Word to the wise, morsels: Never commit your brainstorms to cocktail napkins. I've been documenting the odd flashes of brilliance for some time, doodling inventions and scribbling pearl onions of wisdom between Gibsons.
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Aligning technology and business â what a concept. Everyone is talking about it, but to put things in perspective, I imagine the day after the wheel was invented the wife of the inventor got sick and tired of watching her husband roll it down the hill all day. She probably said, âCyxny, honey, why donât you make another one and put them on the cart?â