Identity in the Palm of Your Hand (Photo from the article quoted)
Hospital scans palms to track patients | SmartPlanet.
Quote from the article: “A New York City hospital is using patients’ palms, not insurance cards, to pull records, according to a new report.
“The New York University Langone Medical Center started scanning palms last month to reduce paperwork and prevent identity theft, the New York Daily News reports, using a device that images the veins in a patient’s hand.”
Ethority created a rather beautiful graphic called “Social Media Prisma“– now available in its version 3.0. It unfolds the different categories of social media and shows some of the actual products in the different sections.
I think a classification like they provide will be helpful when discussing Social Media–especially in the German speaking part of this planet where people need to define a new paradigm before they will discuss it or embark on it.
Since the field of Social Media is expanding into new areas it is difficult or impossible to come up with a clear definition. If one provides such a definition one will have to revise it in regular intervals. An operational definition like the one provided in the infograph below is useful to introduce the field to industry.
Social Media Prism by ethority.de (click to magnify--and then click again to magnify further)
Tools für Facebook, Twitter, Google+: Social Media messbar machen – computerwoche.de.
Source: SocialAmerican.com
Many companies have begun to use Social Media. They serve not only as an internal communication platform, but also as marketing, advertising and sales tools. According to the U.S. consulting and market research group Altimeter Group in 2014, about 90 percent of all businesses in North America and Western Europe will use tools or software suites for managing social media activities and success control (monitoring).
Read the original article in German or the Google Translation into (a sort of) English
Interesting and inspiring slide set by Prof. Steven Van Belleghem of InSights Consulting: Social media around the world 2011.
From the transcript:
Will the time of "No Gaming Ay Work" be over soon? (Image via Wikipedia)
RT from Tia Carr Williams:
Companies Adopt Gaming Techniques to Motivate Employees – WSJ.com.
From the article:
“Striving to make everyday business tasks more engaging, a growing number of firms, including International Business Machines Corp. and consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd., are incorporating elements of videogames into the workplace.
“They’re deploying reward and competitive tactics commonly found in the gaming world to make tasks such as management training, data entry and brainstorming seem less like work. Employees receive points or badges for completing jobs or meeting time limits for assignments, for example. Companies also may use leaderboards, which let players view one another’s scores, to encourage friendly competition and motivate performance, experts say.
“This “gamification” of the workplace, or “enterprise gamification” in tech-industry parlance, is a fast-growing business. Companies have used digital games for a number of years to help market products to consumers and build brand loyalty. What’s emerging is using games to motivate their own employees.”
Astrid Næsgård is 79 years and is familiar with the Internet as a communication channel. To the left SINTEF researcher Kristine Holbø. (Photo: Thor Nielsen). From: http://www.forskning.no/artikler/2011/september/297432
Quoted from: “Facebook Light” For Elderly, Dementia Patients in Works (emaxhealth.com)
“Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg probably never had this in mind when he came up with the phenomenally popular social network, but researchers are developing a type of “Facebook Light” for the elderly and people who have dementia. This approach will provide these individuals with a new way to maintain social contact and a better quality of life.
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Steve Jobs: "Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." --- Modified Apple Logo by Jonathan Mak (source: socialbarrel.com)
Apple I computer kit (1976)
35 Years later: iPad 2 (apple.com, 2011)
Saddened by the death of one of the great visionaries of our time, I want to reflect on how much he and his work has influenced my work and personal life.
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The History and Evolution of Social Media | Webdesigner Depot.
The Maze of Social Media (picture from the article)
“Social media has become an integral part of modern society.
In this article, Cameron Chapman reviews the history and evolution of social media from its humble beginnings to the present day.
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Very interesting article by David Kirkpatrick: Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution.
Taking things in your own hands. (Source: Forbes.com)
The social might of the uprising in the Middle East is now moving towards your company. Empowered individuals can make themselves heard. Our institutions are not prepared for this new social power.
Is your CEO the next Mubarak?
Will the corporate spring follow the Arab spring?
HEARING THOUGHTS: University of Toronto graduate student Sarah Power models ultrasound headgear that could see the difference between two brain tasks. (Photo: Pierre Duez)
“Ultrasound is good for more than monitoring fetuses and identifying heart defects. According to engineers in Canada, it can help tell what people are thinking as well.
“Their research suggests that ultrasound-based devices could lead to a new kind of brain-computer interface.” (Quote from: Ultrasound for Mind Reading – IEEE Spectrum).
This is an interesting new route to get closer to the information processing that is happening in our brain.
So far most experiments focused on electrical brain activity measurements. And the results have been promising. But this new approach opens many more possibilities (and involves fewer cables).
Who knows how long we will still be using keyboards and mice. We might be able to page through an article on the iPad with the mere touch of a thought.
Listen carefully to the high-pitch noise from the person next to you. Maybe he is ordering a pizza online by just imagining the crunchy crust and the succulent toppings.
I have to admit my weakness for robots. Especially when they are flying. I find this really fascinating.
Read the full article here: Quadrotors Can Now Play Catch, All-Robot Baseball Team Closer to Reality – IEEE Spectrum.
Source: static.arstechnica.net
Recently a good friend and business colleague of mine passed away following a heart attack. Help came for him too late.
He was only in his 40’s. We were all very saddened by his sudden death having lost a close friend and colleague.
To my big dismay his profile is still on LinkedIn.com. I had written several times to the company but his profile is still alive.
This made me think that we have no accepted procedures to deal with social media profiles, email accounts etc. when someone dies. It should become a simple, secure and (for relatives and friends) easy to follow chain of steps to either delete accounts or mark them as memorialized.
Since I was sure that I would not be the first to stumble upon this issue I spent a few hours on researching the subject. There are quite a number of memorial sites (virtual cemeteries) where people can post obituaries but this does not solve the issue described above. I found some articles discussing the issue. I am enclosing some quotes from these articles.
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Unlike the USA many countries in Europe have no regulations that forbid discrimination based on age.
Some 25 years ago people tended to work a lifetime for a company. Still today many companies here in Switzerland have extended retirees’ programs with meetings, outings and other celebrations — not to mention the retirees’ round birthdays published in the company employee paper. But since several years the market has been moving to a more “hire and fire as needed” model.
Source: inkcinct.com.au
Not that there is anything wrong with this — but from an age on, which is more and more becoming the middle of work life, job applicants are considered to be too old for any job.
I recently wanted to find out more about an interesting position where considerable experience was called for. It was about judging job applicants in the IT field and evaluating their business acumen and IT knowledge.
Detail from the (large) infograph. Click to see the entire graph.
SearchEngineJournal published a nice infographic on the current growth of Social Media that I would like to share with you.
“Say what you will about the tidal wave that is social media: it’s over-hyped, a fad halfway through its 15 minutes, that <insert social network, platform, app> surely won’t be around in a few years’ time.
“But take a look below at the steep curve of the user growth rate in all age ranges and demographics, and the continuing pervasiveness of social networking into every facet of work, play and life in general. It’s hard to argue that social media hasn’t changed forever how we interact and connect online. See for yourself: (click image to enlarge)” (Quote from SearchEngineJournal)
You can find some other nice examples of infographics further down in this blog. Which is your favorite infographic out there?
e-Jalopy Greenwheel by MTB Cycletech with technology from MIT (Source: MTB Cycletech Website)
Usually I don’t write about products. But today I’ll make an exception: In today’s Spiegel Online was an article on an interesting US-Swiss Cooperation. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) worked with the Swiss company MTB Cycletech. The result of the cooperation is a e-Bicycle called e-Jalopy Greenwheel.
There are several interesting features on that bicycle:
The electro-bicycle will ship in 2012 and the price quoted in the article is EUR 3050.-
Make sure to wear a helmet when accepting friendship requests from nearby riders.
MTB Cycletech Company Logo
Image via Wikipedia
Does the West now mimic the behavior of some Far East governments and some of the other dictatorship regimes? The same circles that a short while ago praised the role of social media in the uprising in the Middle East are now calling for mechanisms to locally block access to some of the communication channels like Blackberry.
Image by owenrichards via Flickr
We knew it all along: Walking is good for you. While walking we turn 20 Watts of power per foot into heat. But now researchers in Wisconsin have found a way to charge batteries with a firm stride.
Tom Krupenkin and J. Ashley Taylor are using an electrostatic capacitor but “with a conductive solid substrate, which they topped with droplets of an electrically conductive liquid. On top of it they placed a metal electrode coated with a 10- to 50-nanometer-thick film of an insulating material.
“That meant that the gap between the metal electrode and the conductive liquid electrode was a mere 10 to 50 nanometers. The bottom conductive substrate and the top electrode were then connected into a circuit. So when the solid electrode was pushed down, compressing the liquid droplets, or pushed laterally over the top of them, the device produced a very large capacitance and voltage. If scaled up to the size that would fit in a typical shoe, this would enable the Wisconsin researchers to harvest 2 watts of power, they report today in Nature Communications.
Image via Wikipedia
Soziale Medien im Unternehmen — Fluch oder Segen? – Netzwoche.
I wrote an article for Experton Group on Social Media in the enterprise. Above the link to the article in German (netzwoche.ch); the English translation of the article is below (as provided by the Experton Group).
As is often the case with the emergence of new technologies, the first thing you hear about are heated discussions about related concerns. It seems it runs in our blood to first see the risks and lose sight of related opportunities and positive developments. How do things stand with the Web 2.0-based social media that are about to enter the business arena?
Swarmanoid Robots cooperate to fulfill tasks (Source IEEE Spectrum)
Swarmanoid Robot Teams Up with Itself to Steal Your Books – IEEE Spectrum.
“The Swarmanoid swarm consists of three discrete types of robots, all of which we’ve been introduced to before: Foot-Bots can grab onto other robots and move horizontally. Hand-Bots have manipulators and a freakin’ sweet magnetic grappling hook that lets them move vertically. And Eye-Bots can fly, perch on ceilings, and direct the movements of the Hand-Bots and Foot-Bots with their cameras.
“While trying to manage so many robots all at once may seem needlessly complicated, a swarm of robots has all kinds of advantages: swarms are adaptable, scalable, resilient, cost-effective, and very efficient at any task that involves being in more than one place at once, like search and rescue (or search and steal). There are downsides, too, like having to recharge each and every one of these little guys, but with some epic amounts of cleverness by robotics researchers, robot swarms are getting to the point where they’re able to pretty much take care of themselves, and after that, the sky’s the limit.” — [Quote from IEEE Spectrum Automaton]
The video shows how the robots in the swarm interact and intelligently carry out the task to get a book from the shelf and transport it away.
The interesting applications for such swarms of robots might be around help in catastrophe scenarios, search and rescue missions and explorations of dangerous territory.
The next time you are missing a book and cannot find it in its place you will know who the culprit was . . .
Google on Motorola (source: IEEE Spectrum)
“How many patents does it take to stay afloat in the smartphone world? It seems Google has pegged it at around 20 000. Its proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility for US $12.5 billion, announced on August 15, would add 17 000 patents to its previously meager stockpile.”
Quote from a recent article in IEEE‘s Spectrum. Read more: Google’s New Patent Armor – IEEE Spectrum.
I am not sure that this is a healthy development in the industry; especially since many of the older patents are extremely broad and cover almost anything (example: a hand-held device powered by a microprocessor that can display data).
Are we going to let patents stifle innovation? Will young innovators still have the guts to create something new without having to hire patent lawyers? Or will the fear of possible legal costs and consequences when accidentally stepping on someones patent keep inventors from inventing?
What is your take on this?
With this site I want to contribute to bridging the gap between ICT, business and life while pondering on the interesting issues in between.
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