April 2012
2 posts
2 tags
Google Glass and the problem of delineation...
Last week Google unveiled Project Glass, their augmented reality eyeglasses designed to help you “explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.” Here’s the demo video:
Now, there’s lots of things to say about this - for starters that it’s amazing technology; probably distracting; potentially dangerous; and that it’s likely to have the opposite...
3 tags
On SXSW and culture as therapy...
“Who could be against more communication and conversation, participation and collaboration, transparency and free speech? To question the spread of the web would be like being against dolphins, green space and trees and things that are self-evidently good. Yet many sensible and thoughtful people, not just Luddites and cultural conservatives, have grave reservations about the impact and...
March 2012
3 posts
2 tags
SXSW 2012, redux...
Well, it’s two weeks now since Saul and I were at South by South West Interactive (how can that possibly be?!!) and it’s about time I took stock…
I’m going to break this initial post down into a few sections: what the basic experience was like; whether my plans for the conference panned out or not; and what sessions I actually went to. Then I’ll follow up with some...
3 tags
Preparing myself for SXSW...
So, I’m off to South By South West Interactive, the biggest geek festival in the world. Seven days in Austin, Texas, by all accounts the hippest corner of the lone star state - I suspect Rick Santorum supporters will be thin on the ground at the ACC…
I’m currently sitting towards the rear of a Boeing 777 somewhere over West Virginia, roughly eight hours into a ten hour flight, and thinking...
February 2012
2 posts
January 2012
3 posts
WatchDragonBot: A platform for cloud-based social robotics (by Adam Setapen)
DragonBot is a new robot platform from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. Specifically designed to support long-term learning interactions between children and robots…(more)
WatchTo understand is to perceive patterns (by notthisbody)
I thought this was a nice attempt to get at something fundamental about perspectives and possibilities - I’ve often thought that human history has this oddly paradoxical feature whereby our view of our significance in the universe steadily diminishes, just as our power to manipulate it increases. This video made me think of that…
2 tags
What are going to be the big debates for 2012?
I just wrote a piece on the Technophobia blog about what I think some of the big themes of debate in digital business and innovation are going to be this year. Or perhaps better: what underlying issues will be driving them.
I’ve highlighted just five concepts, which are by no means intended to be comprehensive. They are:
Human augmentation and the capability gap.
Context and...
December 2011
5 posts
November 2011
4 posts
2 tags
On AI's tipping point...
Last night I watched my wife have a conversation with a computer. Not a particularly sophisticated conversation, as conversations go, but it felt like a conversation to her and that’s perhaps more important. She has just received a new phone upgrade - an iPhone4S, and, while she was playing around with it on the sofa next to me, I casually asked her whether she realised the phone was...
2 tags
One Plus One Equals Three...
Yesterday I spent a wonderfully stimulating evening at the Royal Institution in London, listening to the well-known broadcaster, teacher and journalist James Burke give a lecture entitled 1+1=3. His was the second in a series of three events on innovation that have been guest-curated for the Institute by Aleks Krotoski around the theme of ’Connections’, and Burke is perhaps most famous for his...
October 2011
4 posts
Watch“Origo: 3D Printing @ Home” by Artur Tchoukanov (by Umeå Institute of Design).
At Innovate 2011 on Tuesday, Will Hutten gave a very compelling speech about ‘General Purpose Technologies’ and the importance of being first to develop them. I think this was what he was talking about…
1 tag
World Policy Journal: Fall 2011 | World Policy... →
This autumn’s issue of the World Policy Journal is dedicated to the subject of Innovation and is full of very interesting articles from writers in various fields.
(The WPJ is the quarterly organ of the World Policy Institute which is a New York-based non-partizan think tank that “develops and champions innovative policies that require a progressive and global point of view.”)
...
WatchHolographic Interface - round interface - Ringo (by Ivan Tihienko)
Not new, but interesting…
September 2011
1 post
August 2011
5 posts
3 tags
On pizza cutters and Tim Harford's 'Adapt'...
Pizza cutters fill me with dread.
Not because they are sharp enough to slice through crispy thin-crust pizza even though they are usually just made of plastic, which, admittedly, I do find a bit weird. No, I’m fearful of them because it struck me a few years ago that they only have a single failure mode, and that failure mode is catastrophic.
The weakest point of a pizza cutter is the...
1 tag
Home alone with apophenia
My wife has taken our kids to visit the grandparents this week, while I, having to work, am left here on my own. It’s the first time I’ve spent so much time alone in the house in a very long time, certainly since our eldest was born nearly four years ago. And, although it’s gloriously quiet and my consciousness is able to settle over the whole house, I have been noticing that...
“Control is not an issue any more. When you do this, you manage on trust. You...”
– Erik Veldhoen on Chanel 4’s The Secret Life of Buildings
June 2011
6 posts
“Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over. The...”
– Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), journalist and political philosopher
1 tag
Trying to understand Thinking Digital 2011...
In an attempt to understand all the amazing talks I experienced at the Thinking Digital conference the other week, I’ve created a (tentative) network diagram in Popplet showing all the presentations and the major themes I picked out. As I said it’s a first stab - so if anyone thinks it’s useful and would like to add a theme or additional connections, please let me know!
(Just...
Thriving too: Social Spaces: The Sharrow Pie... →
Innovation in the neighbourhood - well done Sheffield! :-)
5 tags
Innovation Environments and Andrew Marr's...
I was watching the first episode of Andrew Marr’s Megacities on BBC the other night and as I watched it it struck me that there are some interesting parallels to be drawn between the development of cities and the relationship between institutional, physical and cultural environments within a company. In the last fifteen minutes or so of the programme, Marr compares Tokyo, Mexico City and...
1 tag
Some links that have caught my eye recently...
Web 3.0 and meaningful real-world innovation: http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/
Command & Control hierarchies inhibit innovation - a theatre company is a useful analogy for the alternative: http://www.bqf.org.uk/innovation/2011/05/23/does-your-structure-help-or-hinder-innovation/
Innovation is not problem-solving, it is “…about providing products and...
May 2011
4 posts
1 tag
The Next Men..?
A long time ago I read a 1960s science fiction short story by Howard Fast called “The First Men”, in which a government project, under pressure of war, assembles gifted children from around the world and creates a radical learning environment isolated from their parents and native culture, in which they gradually develop super-human abilities and ultimately transcend our...
2 tags
Is cloud computing like mass transit..?
I’ve been thinking today that - leaving all rational, legitimate objections to cloud computing aside for a minute and just speaking about how it’s perceived ‘psychologically’ - cloud computing, (or at least SaaS) is a lot like choosing to travel by train or air rather than drive: You know consciously that letting someone else take you there is far safer than you driving...
April 2011
1 post
“It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without...”
– Robert Kegan in Immunity to Change
March 2011
3 posts
“…the most important and significant insight I have learned: Do not mention...”
– Yigal Chamish, (Knowledge Management in Organizations – What do we know today?)
1 tag
1 tag
January 2011
9 posts
The Maker Generation in the Enterprise – confused... →
In this post JP Rangaswami brilliantly, I think, captures many of the essences of the institutional and inter-personal culture of creative knowledge work that is emerging - from empowering people with control over their own tools; to the relationship between strong shared values and free choice of work tasks (loosely coupled, strongly aligned!); to the true implications of cross-functional...
2 tags
Rounding up Predictions Season 2011
To celebrate the end of techy prediction season (and hopefully, the end of ‘post-Christmas back to work shock’!), here’s a list of some of the best articles and reports I’ve seen:
Gartner: Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011
IDC predictions for 2011: Welcome to the New Mainstream
Trends in the Living Network: Map of the Decade, ExaTrends of the Decade, and the...
“Our abilities are not set in genetic stone. They are soft and sculptable, far...”
– David Shenk, author of The Genius in All of Us, in an article for the BBC.
3 tags
Of herds and hosting...
About a month ago, Kevin Kelly wrote a short post called “Prepare for flash crowds” in which he talked about the herding behaviour of people online and the poor readiness of the spaces they herd to. I’ve been thinking about this for a while as well, ever since a couple of years ago Steven Fry turned into whatever the opposite of King Midas is, by inadvertently overloading...
Building Open Innovation Capabilities in Small... →
Whether or not it’s really feasible (or necessarily desirable) to encourage staff to engage with open innovation intermediaries, this post does highlight some critical competencies that are hard to engender, especially, I would say, in medium sized company’s where diktat is not an effective means of creating behaviours.