Interruptions aren’t merely annoying; they’re also bad for productivity. And when you multiply the interruptions made possible by email, phone calls, text messages, and Twitters across the entire US, the result is lost productivity on a massive scale: $650 billion in a single year. That’s according to research firm Basex, which chose “information overload” as its 2008 “Problem of the Year.” Failure to solve the problem will lead to “reduced productivity and throttled innovation.” The situation is dire enough that Intel’s Nathan Zeldes estimates “the impact of information overload on each knowledge worker at up to eight hours a week.”
With the looming threat of recessionary times ahead and predictions that 70 percent of today’s revenue generating products will be obsolete by 2012, the advent of 2008 brings some unwelcome challenges to business. While many companies are hunkering down to weather the storm, global leaders understand that in economically challenging times it is critical to drive the market, instead of being driven down by it. Understanding the coming change is stimulating renewed discussion among executives on how to establish a culture that drives sustainable innovation to build value in lean times. Yet, executive commitment to an innovation culture does not necessarily translate into high performance execution of the innovation agenda. Surveys from leading consultancies and analyst firms also confirm that most companies are lacking in leadership or tools to innovate successfully and consistently.
From smooth grooving robots to revolutionary desktop fabricators, from prosthetic flippers to liquids with a life of their own, 2007 has thrown up more eye-popping tech videos than ever before. And so, to give you a flavour of the clips that have drawn in the most visitors during the year, here’s a list of the 10 most popular, in reverse order.
The World Bank Group’s Year in Review 2007 is available on its web site. The review covers the work of the Bank in 2007 in areas such as development assistance, climate change, agriculture, finance, governance, health, gender and education.
Nielsen released their top 10 social networks in the U.S. There is one notable company missing from the list: Bebo, usually referred to as the “number three social network” and “really big in the UK,” Bebo apparently didn’t register the 3.3 million unique visitors in the US necessary to beat out Flixster for 10th place on Nielsen’s list.
From “The Naked City” to “In a Lonely Place” and “Oklahoma!” the Library of Congress is adding 25 more classic American films to its national registry. There are “12 Angry Men” to be heard, “The Strong Man” to be viewed and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to be dealt with. Even as Americans fill the movie theaters to see the latest releases, few are aware that up to half the films produced in this country before 1950 — and as much as 90 percent of those made before 1920 — are lost forever,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in announcing the selections.
Todd Harvey spins Louisiana’s historical records. The Library of Congress reference librarian serves as the caretaker of what he simply calls “Louisiana’s treasures,” recordings of the state’s blues, folk and jazz pioneers in the 1930s and 1940s. The samples, now on compact disc, are part of a broader collection known as the Archives of American Song, part of the library’s American Folklife Center Archive.
See the specialized Christmas logos for the top search engines. Altavista, Netscape and MSN seem to have stayed away from the holiday revelry this year.
… or: everything you always wanted to know about the Google homepage but were afraid to ask (or didn’t know was worth asking). Questions include -”Is the Google homepage HTML standards compliant?” Answer: No. According to the official World Wide Web Consortium validator, the Google homepage fails validation with 30 errors.….
Looks like Google is out to dominate the search engine battle this year. It has consistently topped search engine rankings from various web analytics reports for the past couple of months, and in what seems to be the final ranking for this year, it once again shown the search engine industry its supremacy in terms of search usage. Based on the latest comScore report, Google again lead the pack with 58.6% (up by 0.2%) of all the core searches for November. Following Google is Yahoo with 22.4% (down by 0.4%) and Microsoft which is steady at 9.8%. Ask Network and Time Warner’s AOL got 4.6% and 4.5% respectively. Time Warner is the biggest gainer of all the search engines with a 0.3% increased in search ranking as compare to October.
Japan’s top mobile phone carrier will join with Internet search engine Google to provide Internet search and e-mail services on the company’s handsets, news reports recently. Starting as early as the spring, users will be able to access Google search, e-mail, scheduling and photo-saving features through NTT DoCoMo’s i-Mode Internet network, Japan’s main business daily The Nikkei said, without identifying its sources. The paper said the two firms plan to integrate the search feature with handset software, enabling the development of new services.
Anita Ornelas concentrated on the image before her, chin resting in her palm as she considered a single letter on the computer screen: B. “This word has a ‘bah’ sound,” a computerized voice chimed. Although she was born in the United States and speaks fluent English, Ornelas never learned to read or write, for decades relying on her husband to convey directions and instructions. The longtime Escondido resident dropped out of high school in her junior year to raise her first child. When her husband died three years ago, routine tasks became exceedingly difficult.
The 2007 federal election has repeatedly been referred to as the ‘YouTube election’, with a larger emphasis on the video sharing website than previous elections. Indeed, we at the Greens utilised this very medium to its full capacity with our Australian Greens channel operating alongside Rachel, Christine, Kerry and Bob’s personal channels. We saw huge amounts of effort being funnelled into Web 2.0 developments, such as the 20,000+ Facebook ‘fans’ of Kevin Rudd & Labor, or the rather less successful 22 members of the Facebook group ‘Peter Costello for PM.’ We also branched out into the world of animation, with our nuclear energy related Noocular Future and Senate Balance of Power cartoons filtering out into the big wide world of the web. Now that the election buzz has calmed down, but we are still several months away from sitting in Parliament, my thoughts turn to the education use of animation, web-based developments and online games. There is great potential from a social, ethical, political, environmental (and even psychological) perspective, for the internet to serve as an important tool in the education of future generations.
The author tour, with its accompanying readings and signings, has come to be the quintessential tool for promoting books. It is a chance for writers to charm their readers and for readers to glimpse the person behind the words. At its best, the meeting can be electric. (At worst, nobody shows up.) But in the past five years or so, observers say the traditional author tour has been in decline: Fewer writers are being sent out, and those who do tour make fewer stops. Among the many reasons for this shift are marketing tools that have made it possible to orchestrate a virtual encounter, without the hassle or expense of travel. Publishers and authors are now touting books through podcasts, film tours, blog tours, book videos, and book trailers.
Parents: It’s almost 2008. Do you know where your kids are playing with their toys? Increasingly, it’ll be online. A growing number of online tie-ins to toys like Barbie, collectible trading card games and even stuffed animals are joining established kids-geared online communities to create what will soon become hundreds of social networks and virtual worlds for children.
Dear Scrabble Word Finder: We have to break up. It’s not you, it’s me. Well, FWIW (sorry, I know you hate it when I use abbreviations), it’s the way we are together. Back when I first added Scrabulous — Scrabble plus fabulous, get it? — to my Facebook page, I didn’t even know you existed. It was one of the most popular applications on Facebook, and I was just one of hundreds of thousands of people playing social-network Scrabble.
Yahoo Inc. has announced that three world-renowned scientists from Yahoo! Research have been recognized for their achievements in fields key to developing the next-generation of Internet experiences, including computer science, artificial intelligence, data mining, and algorithm engineering.
Congress has finally adopted legislation that promises to cut through much of the red tape and outright obstructionism that often hampers requests for public information under the federal Freedom of Information Act. Among other things, the bill sets up a tracking system for FOIA requests that take longer than 10 days to process. It also penalizes agencies for sluggish responses to requests for information (which have been known to drag on for 20 years).
My daughter has finally discovered the joys of the Web. Not surprisingly, her interests have nothing to do with checking email, catching up with the news, blogging, or surfing to other text-based sites — the stuff that I like to do. Rather, what’s caught her fancy in the past few weeks are sites with visual appeal and entertainment. She plays Curious George games on PBSKids.org and has really latched onto Webkinz World, the kids-oriented virtual world that involves real-world stuffed animals, contact with friends, and the purchase of virtual goods. She also likes watching videos on YouTube, but her younger brother is even more active, locating scores of videos related to roller coasters, model trains, and Lightning McQueen.
How hard is it to find a chair or something to sit on in the library? Usually they are taken up by people who spend all day reading the papers and stuff. The Dutch designer Jelte van Geest found an amazing solution for it. You get your own seat the moment you enter the library. And it stays with you the entire time. Sounds weird? Click the video below to see it in action!
It’s a small world after all. Private and public lives are merging on the Internet, corporate giants are embracing environmental initiatives, industry competitors are collaborating, and the transfer of wealth from the developed world to emerging economies is picking up speed at a mind-boggling pace. Our identities and our businesses are as fluid and amorphous as they are, well, practical. To find focus within the shifting boundaries, we identified, in no particular order, the top 10 trends of 2007. While many did not originate this year, they certainly became more prominent, which of course means that, for good or for bad, they’ll also help shape the future.
Last week, the author set out to deflate the hype about Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader and to tell you why it will fail. But while researching this column, the author became convinced of the opposite: Kindle is revolutionary and will succeed in the market. Some percentage of book lovers, including the author, will buy one to replace their beloved paper books, magazines and newspapers.
These days, Mathe and Lesand meet almost daily at the library, Mathe is now the librarian. Lesand is, quite possibly, the township’s most enthusiastic card-carrying toy-library member. “Today, I would like to borrow …” The little girl clasps her hands behind her tattered red wool sweater, squints as she assesses her choices and leans in, conspiratorial-like, toward Mathe, “a puzzle!” An excellent choice, replies the librarian.
Definitions of “more 20,000 terms and more than 6,000 stunning illustrations of a wide variety of objects from all aspects of life.” Also includes audio clips of pronunciations. Searchable, or browsable by topics: astronomy, earth, plants, animals, humans, food, housing, clothing, arts and architecture, communications, transportation and machinery, energy, science, society, and sports and games. From Merriam-Webster. Note: may not work properly in all browsers.
List of 13 common New Year’s resolutions with links to related government websites. Topics include losing weight, paying off debt, getting a better job, getting fit, quitting smoking, reducing stress, taking a trip, and volunteering to help others. From the official Web portal for the U.S. government.
Caitlin Magnusson’s laptop was on the top shelf of her closet, sealed in flowery wrapping paper, covered in duct tape and caged in a box. But every morning she would wake up in her dorm room and still turn to her desk to reach for it. It had become muscular memory. Capturing the experience of going without a computer — for Magnusson it was five weeks — is part of a documentary-making course at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. She and two other students who went on the “computer fast” are the documentary subjects; eight others took turns filming. When the documentary is finished, they plan to screen it on campus and submit it to film festivals.
The National Library of Australia has an annual Christmas party in its public foyer where the unexpected talents of librarians, archivists, stacks staff, communication experts, digital specialists, and IT boffins are displayed. Enjoy the video (2:19) of the “Surfing NLA” team, which won first prize at the December 14 party after they waxed down their bookcarts.
Search engine giant Google this week launched an iPhone interface for the company’s Picasa photo service. IPhone and iPod Touch users who go to the Picasa Web site via the Apple gadgets’ Safari Web browser are automatically switched to the new interface. After logging in, they can see their photo albums, and drill down to get a full view of pictures, Google said. Picasa’s slideshow feature has also been optimized for the devices.
Some segments of the search engine world, such as Ask and Powerset, are gambling on the idea that the future of search is in natural language search, which essentially allows people to conduct searches using actual, useful sentences instead of possibly vague keywords. So what does one of the world’s most popular search engines think about natural language search, and do they believe that it is also the future of searching? In a recent interview with MIT’s Technology Review, Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, shot down the idea of implementing natural language search capabilities at Google.
Google may come up with Indian version of its cross-language information retrieval facility, which searches queries in English pages and gives result in native language. “We introduced this facility in 15 international languages in May and it has been extremely popular. Looking at its success, there is a possibility that Google may introduce the same in any of the Indian languages, depending upon its usage,” P Nayak, Member, Technical Staff, Google, told PTI in Mumbai . Though he declined to confirm the language, he said it could possibly be Hindi or Tamil since they were two widely used languages in India.
Vertical search engine, Exalead, has developed the first semantic search service that allows locating, organizing, sharing and enhancing content online. The new BAAGZ service represents the first live network of shared interests. BAAGZ fosters a collaborative environment where users can connect with others on the Web who have similar interests - whether hobbies, travel, music or news - to share and enhance this content with new ideas, in effect contributing to the expansion of the Semantic Web. At the foundation of BAAGZ is a web search engine based on Exalead’s patented Semantic Web search technology, Search By Serendipity.
A new study shows businesses continue to have headaches in reducing risks. The KPMG study of 544 global executives shows that many companies want to be able to be able to manage their performance, but only 20 percent are able to make reliable forecasts. Yes, it’s increasingly difficult to stay on top of marketplace challenges and to invest in trends to get the most return on your investments. That’s why the Competitive Intelligence (CI) process is sweeping the planet. CI enables a company to reduce risks and accelerate profits.
Over the past decade or so, business intelligence (BI) has been adopted by major corporations and government entities around the world, delivering essential business information, advanced tools for analyzing complex business situations, and structured decision support techniques that have allowed enterprises to improve performance of their core business processes and create value for their stakeholders. Business intelligence is used in a wide range of industries for a variety of key business processes. With this as context, when the authors work with their clients to develop a BI strategy and business case, they are often asked to weigh in on their business intelligence budget and provide guidance based on what other companies are doing. Some of the factors they consider are detailed in this article.
The use of Web 2.0 techniques and technologies in enterprise systems (usually referred to simply as Enterprise 2.0) is changing the way organizations create, integrate, explore, analyze, and deliver information. Used wisely, Enterprise 2.0 can significantly improve the productivity and effectiveness of business users. Inappropriate use of Enterprise 2.0, however, leads to stagnant technology-driven projects, rather than dynamic business solutions that help organizations work smarter and become more competitive. This series of articles examines the use of Enterprise 2.0 in business intelligence (BI). It looks at Enterprise 2.0 from seven distinct perspectives: information collaboration, information exploration and analysis, information integration, information syndication and delivery, user interface, Web-oriented architecture (WOA), and open source solutions. This first article presents the business case for using Enterprise 2.0 in BI, and also provides a brief overview of each of the seven dimensions.
