Technology

Ken Robinson gave a very interesting talk at TED 2006 about the role of education in innovation.

Ken is also adding a good dose of humor in his talk. Highly recommended video.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger is IBM’s VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation. He said in a recent interview with AlwaysOn about the Software as a Service (SaaS) share of total Software sold :

Wladawsky-Berger: In 10 years I would be surprised if it’s much higher than 20%. I can easily see it going higher, but all the things we talked about have to come into play, which is increasingly good Internet infrastructure. Let’s agree that’s happening. Increasing standardization of software components and web services – that’s happening also. Increasing agreement on standard business components and software- I believe that’s starting to happen. The reason it’s hard to predict the percentage is that it’s a series of things that have to happen.

It is possible that the share will not increase much more than 20%, but if it does, this could definitely be an issue for IBM, relying heavily on their Global Services revenue.

In a posting to AlwaysOn, Guy Kawasaki from Garage Technology Ventures talk about innovation, and startups. In part 3 Guy advise the reader about being willing to “kill your cash cow” :

The second thing you need to do to get to that next curve is be willing, able, and indeed eager to kill your cash cow. This is one of the most difficult things we had to do at Apple in trying to figure how to deal with both Apple II and the Macintosh. Apple II was making all the money; it was a cash cow with beautiful, large, milk-gorged udders. And we were milking that cow. Yet we knew that if Macintosh were to succeed, it would kill Apple II. And eventually it did kill Apple II.

This is really true, and maybe a reason why established companies seem to have difficulties to innovate. The cash cows are too powerful, and often, engineers tend to identify themselves with a product and are very reluctant to jump on the next curve. There is a lot of convincing to be done, and buy in from every level of the hierarchy.

Garmin announced last March that they will release a new mobile phone based GPS, the Garmin Mobile 20.

The web page about this product is here Garmin Mobile 20:

Garmin Mobile 20 supports Nokia, Windows Mobile and Treo smartphones, and its integrated phone mount, the GPS 20SM, with a built-in, highly sensitive GPS receiver and Bluetooth-enabled speaker and microphone, accommodates nearly any size. Wherever you’re going, Garmin Mobile 20 with included mapping software provides wireless mapping and navigation to deliver you directly to the front door. And for on-the-go convenience, the wireless interface, powerful speaker and noise-canceling dual microphones let you drive and talk hands-free without using a headset.

There is no price published yet, but it seems that this unit is comparable, feature wise, with the nuvi units.

Product will be available in July 06. Time for a new gadget ?

In a recent blog entry, Bill Burke is talking about the features of the new JBoss microkernel. Incidentally, Bill mentions that the architecture will not use the “older” JMX based kernel :

We will continue to support JBoss 4 and earlier JMX service beans. What you won’t see is that the new JBoss microcontainer will be under the covers instead of the older JMX-based kernel.

I’m sure that this change of architecture will not prevent the instrumentation of deployed JEE applications through JMX and will not impact JBoss support for JSR77, as shown on page 20 of the JBoss roadmap.

In the press announcement for the 2006 JBoss world at Las Vegas, JBoss announced the open souring of the agent used in the JBoss Operations Network.

Open source strategy for management platform: JBoss will open source the core systems

management agent in JBoss Operations Network (ON) to create and drive broadened adoption and

collaboration around its open management platform. With this announcement, backed by a massive

JBoss developer and ISV community, software vendors and customers now have a foundation for

building their own management agents, which will enable interoperability across heterogeneous IT

environments. A special management and operations track at the conference will provide further

details on the JBoss ON roadmap and integration with Red Hat Network

Yesterday, Google announced in their blog that they are creating a tool to exchange, or synchronize, multiple Firefox browser through an online service.

That is looking a lot like Apple’s .mac value proposition, if we couple that with the availability of Google Calendar,

and Google Page Creator (in Labs at this time).

Following some links I went from unconferences to the Mashup Camp to one of the discussions hosted last year on microformats .

Microformats are basically data formats built on top of XML/XHTML. They are used to represent contacts, calendar, resume, … designed for humans, and machine second. See some more information here.