November 2006 Archives

The Washington Post publishes a good compilation of articles on climate change.  The most recent article I noticed today indicatess that the large energy firm's are bigging to accept the evidence of global warming and may be ready to act.

Energy Firms Come to Terms With Climate Change

While the political debate over global warming continues, top executives at many of the nation's largest energy companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable.

This is a good review of web sites where you can publish videos.  I have been looking for a good site where i can upload mpeg-2 videos and share them with my family.  MPEG-2 formated videos are harder to share because it is a format primarily used in DVDs and create large files.  Anyway, I am still searching.

Where can you publish your video clips online? This mini-guide of online video sharing sites should give you a good reference to find your preferred online video publishing outlet. Photo credit: Stephen Coburn Online video sharing sites allow anyone connected to the web to easily upload digital video recordings so that these clips can be viewed by other people. Online video sharing sites have become a high in-demand online type of service because they allow small independent publishers the ability to publish video files of almost any size without problems. Normally, bloggers and other small independent publishers have only a limited amount of space on their web service provider server to upload additional files to be published on their web...
[Robin Good's Latest News]

Don Tapscott published a number of books about web commerce in the early 2000s.  HIs new book is a solidly researched piece on how computer aided collaboration is changing business.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is due to be published within the next month or so. The copy on the website is a little hype-y, but the research behind the book is very solid, and their thinking about intellectual property, collaboration, innovation is deeper than their promotional copy indicates.

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. A brilliant primer on one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand the key forces driving competitiveness in the twenty-first century. This groundbreaking work is inspired by a nine million dollar research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott and sponsored by some of the world’s largest companies. Wikinomics builds on this research elucidating a new age where thanks to the Web 2.0 masses of people can participate in the economy like never before—creating a TV news story, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing a school text, inventing a new cosmetic, or even building a motorcycle. You’ll read about:

• Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO, former investment banker, and gold mining newbie, who used open source tactics and an online competition to breathe new life into a struggling business cobbled by the rules of an old-fashioned industry.

• Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production that will revolutionize markets and firms.

• Smart, multibillion dollar companies like Procter & Gamble that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems that create value more effectively than hierarchically organized businesses.

[Smart Mobs]

FYI from the Innovation Weblog;  the objective is to fail fast: do it, test it, fix it.

One way in which a number of companies have successfully innovated is to take a fast, iterative approach to designing and rethinking their products and services. This article from User Interface Engineering describes how it is standard operating practice at Netflix and Google to constantly improve their websites and to launch new services, then quickly learn from user feedback.  By analogy, there are innovation lessons here that most companies can learn from.