Innovation Zen

Innovation at the search major Yahoo continues with recent unveiling of a mashup for news on a 3D map of earth as it happens around the globe. Dubbed NewsGlobe, the new feature that allows users to watch news on a three dimensional model of earth.
An excerpt from the PC Advisor on NewsGlobe
“For each story location, […]

Ever heard about Kozmo.com or Flooz.com? Probably not, but that is because they emerged and disappeared from the Internet scene within a small time frame. Sure, there are many success stories out there like Facebook. What about failure stories though? We should talk about them more often!
That is exactly what an article that I came […]

The guys from PC Magazine recently published a list with their 100 favorite blogs. There are many similar lists around the Internet, but this one is not carrying the usual suspects. I came across some blogs that I had never seen, and they all look pretty interesting.
The list is somewhat biased towards the technology […]

I am not sure if we are already leaving the information age, but there is an interesting reflection on this matter over the GigaOM blog. On the article “From the Information Age to the Connected Age” they argue that changed on the Web will enable us to make that switch.
“The Information Age is the age […]

French Philosopher Descartes once said “Cogito, ergo sum,” which means “I think, therefore I am.” If this statement will ever mutate it will be something along the lines of “Google, ergo sum.”
The Internet is changing the way we communicate, work and live. It would be hard to find a business that will not be […]

Last week a famous Brazilian journalist received in his email box a study, supposedly supported by the NASA, claiming that the planet Mars was about to come very close to Earth, and that this represented a phenomenon that occurred only once every 70,000 years or so.
Considering the study to be a scoop, the journalist announced […]

The car sharing (or carpooling) idea is not new. About 100 million people drive back and forth to work every day on the United States alone. The energy that is used to transport one person could easily be used to transport four or more, creating huge environmental and economical gains.
In the past most car sharing […]

“It all started with the media revolution… with the Internet at the end of last century. Everything related to the old media vanished: Gutenberg, copyright, radio, television, advertisement.”

*RSS readers will need to visit the site to be able to watch the video.

The Times Online released a list titled “The 50 Best Business Blogs.” There are many interesting blogs there that I had never heard of. Below you will find some of my favotires that made it to the list:

Freakonomics
Consumerist
Fastlane (GM)
Maverick (Mark Cuban)
Seth Godin
TechCrunch

Guy Kawasaki recently started a new site called Truemors. Web 2.0 sites like this one are popping like bugs those days, but it is always interesting to watch the back stage of such a venture.
Guy, in fact, recently wrote a post titled “By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, […]

It looks like the Internet is turning the table for the Pornographic industry. For some years it appeared that the World Wide Web would make adult content much more accessible. It did to a certain extent, but people are not willing to pay for it anymore. Quoting a recent article over the NY Times:

“The online […]

Universities around the United States are starting to adopt blogs in order to attract potential applicants. The Boston Globe published an article describing the trend:
“Liu writes about her college experiences in as much excruciating detail as she wishes — for $10 an hour, courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s admissions office. Uncensored blogs by […]

Last Friday Google announced that it was acquiring Double-Click, an Internet advertising network. The price? $3.1 billion (remember that YouTube sold for $1,65 billion). Check the description of the company on Forbes:
“Founded way back in the heyday of the first Web boom, DoubleClick is an 11-year-old company whose fortunes have risen and fallen along with […]

The Internet is democratizing the access to information, and people will not give up that right so easily. A recent survey by Accenture with executives from media and entertainment companies identified social media and user generated content as the main threat for those mainstream players.

You probably have already heard about the semantic web. It basically refers to software and online platforms that will be able to learn how the user search, collect and organize information. As a result the semantic web will be able to interact with the users and provide content in a much more intelligent way.

Michael Wesch, professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Kansas State University created an outstanding video to explain how the whole phonomenon started and where it is heading, check it out.

Many people predict that blogs will invade the corporate world over the next years, and Forrester Research seems to embrace the idea. They recently released, in fact, a market research titled “The ROI of Blogging” where they outline the benefits, costs and risks of corporate blogs.

There are many people claiming that the current wave of venture capital funding and investments into Internet-based companies, most of them tagged with the term Web 2.0, could inflate too fast and explode just like the dot-com bubble back in 2000.

After the Google-YouTube deal it looks like old-school players are waking up to the wonders of online video. Dow Jones Online and CNN Money recently launched their online video channels.

Already in January of 2006 there were rumors that Microsoft was considering to buy Yahoo. Guess what, people are starting to talk about it again. Some time ago an analyst from Merrill Lynch declared that “the possible acquisition of Yahoo would be a strategic positive in our view.”

When Google announced that it was acquiring YouTube people immediately started commenting the deal. Some, like Mark Cuban, argued that it was a really bad move from Google’s part. Others celebrated as if it was the victory of online video over traditional media.

The deal is finally closed. Google announced that it will buy YouTube for $ 1,65 billion. In my opinion this acquisition will have some large repercussions on the Internet.

Most of the people agree that knowledge and information are two distinct concepts. But do they also agree upon the differences that separate the two concepts? Not really.

Internet is undoubtedly one of the biggest innovations of the last decades. It has changed the way we gather information, communicate, work and ultimately the way we live.

Over the last years we have witnessed an invasion of blogs, wikis, podcasts and other communication innovations. Those are very powerful tools. They create interaction, stimulate discussion and promote the flow of information.

According to GigaOM Yahoo is developing an in-house incubator to address innovations internally and retain talented people. The project will be led by Flickr founder Caterina Fake.

There is a lot of buzz going on around “crowdsourcing” lately, a term coined by the Wired journalist Jeff Howe is his article “The Rise of the Crowdsourcing”. The first time I googled (lower case g because it is already recognized as a verb by the Webster dictionary) “crowdsourcing” it generated around 200.000 results, and that was only a couple of weeks after Howe’s article!

Remember that a bit (binary digit) is the single piece of information in digital systems, it is either a 0 or a 1. A byte, instead, is a group of 8 bits. When we talk about computer memories or data storage 1 kilobit refers to 1024 (2^10) bits, 1 megabit refers to 1024 kilobits (or 1024 x 1024 bits), 1 kilobyte refers to 1024 bytes and so on. In telecommunications, however, transmission rates have traditionally been declared in bits per second (bps) and 1 kilobit refers to 1000 bits and not 1024 as in data storage.

There is an interesting discussion going on lately regarding the importance of blogs against that of traditional information sources like newspapers. Some time ago Malcom Gladwell (by the way if you have not had the chance to read his books I suggest you do so, they are short yet insightful) speaking on a panel about the future of journalism said:

“Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They’d have nothing to blog about.”

Internet is something amazing. One day (early 2005) you are trying to figure out how to share videos with your friends, the other (mid 2006) you own a service that delivers 100 million videos per day.

Most people sooner or later come across an idea or a product and say: “Damn, I was thinking about something just like it!”. For quite some time now I have been thinking how web surfing could become more “visual” and “user friendly”, and when I came across the Swarm site I said: “OK looks like I am not alone”. (If you click the link wait some time on the site to see the dynamics going on).