Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Thought for the day

"If you know it from media, you are aware.
If you hear it from experts, you are informed.
If you work alongwith the experts, even then you know only the best known by mankind.
However, you are as close to truth as one can be for your time."

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Innovation

Me and another colleague of mine had this interesting conversation yesterday afternoon over lunch. We were basically taking a snapshot of the kind of exisiting Services & the Products which are being developed and available in the marketplace. If I could choose a word to summarize the entire debate we had then I would choose the term 'Innovation'. Here is my effort to summarize some of the best articles I discovered over last 6 months, which depicts Innovation in various walks of life and not just limited to Software development.

So what exactly do we understand by the term 'Innovation'?

According to my favorite source for information Wiki, here is an excerpt," Innovation is the introduction of new ideas, goods, services, and practices which are intended to be useful (though a number of unsuccessful innovations can be found throughout history). The main driver for innovation is often the courage and energy to better the world. An essential element for innovation is its application in a commercially successful way. Innovation has punctuated and changed human history (consider the development of electricity, steam engines, motor vehicles, et al)."

But, I actually like this one from Business.gov,"Introduction of a new idea into the marketplace in the form of a new product or service or an improvement in organization or process."

Why I like this one, because Innovation is not always about introducing NEW ideas, products or services into marketplace, rather improvization of the EXISTING ideas, products or services. Just to back myself on the last sentence I made, I brought the examples of Gmail and Adsense from Google. Both the technologies are quite old and there are lot of companies who are providing Email services for free for over a decade now, starting of with Microsoft's Hotmail. Same with the case of Advertisements or Ads; Ads have been the key source of income for many of the DOT companies for quite some time. As you see there are many companies who are providing both these services, but once Google started offering them the whole world talks about or atleast it gets noticed from the existing players who start working on their products/services to offer the same. Not to forget the 'Google Maps' & 'Google Earth', which is really cool & fast. Tristan Louis has done a great job in summarizing as well as comparing all the stuff Google has been working with the existing players in a very simple way, read here 'Reading the Google Tea Leaves'.

This is what I have to say, no matter what we are building [products/services] today, irrespective of how many players exist in the marketplace, we need to build it in such a way that it has more value to the end user.

I have admired few companies for many years for the kind of products or services they have come up with over the years, some of them I remember as of now are 3M, Du Pont, Apple, Maya, Sony, Nokia, Honda, Toyota, ThoughtWorks and my favorite Google;). I just did a search on Google to find out if there is anyone who enlists Innovative companies in the world, guess what BusinessWeek does list some of the companies I have mentioned, click here to see the list.

Here more food for thought on Innovation: Du Pont Innovation | Not All Innovations Are Equal | Why Smart Companies Do Dumb Things | Ideas and Inspiration For Brand Planners and Creative Thinkers | Designing for Experience [PDF:In-depth case study of a library redesign]

Source: Du Pont | HBS Working Knowledge | Business Week | Fast Company | Tristan Louis | Marc Rettig | Business.gov

Engadget

Engadget a site which keeps track of all the upcoming gadgets all round the globe. Found some of the reviews really helpful, their coverage of CES 2006 which concluded last week is really good. I really enjoyed their featured contents 'Live coverage of Google's keynote' it keeps you informed about the entire keynote from Larry Page & Robin Williams in a unique way. They have lot of sections covering all types of Gadgets from Cellphones - Digital Cameras - u name it they have it. If U R a Gadget Freak then its definitely worth visiting.

Sunday, January 08, 2006

WEIRD! Instant Messengers


Today I was browsing through Anthroponym's blog and found this post on Google Talk. Just to Xperiment I tried the same myself, I changed the year to 2007 and tried logging into Google Talk, unfortunately I got the same MSG as Anthro. Then tried the same with MSN Messenger, its the same here, never let me login. The only IM which did allow me to login without any problem was Yahoo!.

Thursday, January 05, 2006

SOA @ Work

Joe McKendrick in his recent post on ZDNet has complied an interesting set of use-cases/examples of SOA. It is really interesting to know how SOA has played a role in so many different Scenarios like Streamlining access to data, Managing HealthCare Insurance, Improving Customer Services, To cut down integration costs and Providing loose coupling & at the same time being efficient. I bet you don't wanna miss this post.

Source:ZDNet.