Thoughts

Worth sharing: Smule iPhone apps

This is really cool! The iPhone has in many ways triggered innovative applications, but the smule apps are really something special. Smule makes the iPhone a music instrument (!) - check it out below

and here is what you can do with this: 

finally the lighter app, also by Smule  and how it spreads around the world. Amazing!

Zooming and multitouch technology - some recent examples

Computers have boosted productivity in an unprecedented way, yet we currently lack one of the most critical functionalities in computers: Zooming!

Web3D is inevitable and we are on our way to Web3.D (with a dot)

Told you so! For a while I had the impression that I was among the last few of those who kept on dreaming about this stuff. Now Forrester claims that "During The Next Five To Seven Years, Web3D Will Evolve Quickly". Well, we have been told by James Wagner Au before why virtual worlds like Secondlife matter for businesses and we have heard the head of the Internet Paul Twomey say that the arrival of the 3D web is not a question about if but about when it will arrive.

A digital revenue model that makes sense - Getty & Flickr, iStockPhoto

I always listen up when I hear about revenue models that are built on digital products. And I always listen up when I hear about harnessing productivity of users by letting them participate in the success of their contribution. The business model of iStockPhoto has been impressive to me since the first time I saw the site - because it is a platform for digital products that presents users an option to make money online. Good money, serious money.

Your product is great but fails to attract the masses? Here is how to attract the late adopters!

Got a web2.0 service or a small project going but fail to reach the masses? Or you have a mass market product but fail to grow into the market occupied by traditionalist clients? No wonder, your small project is probably a geek thing and your mass market product is likely so stuffed with options that simple work tasks are hardly explicitly supported. Don't be offended - that's just brilliant - but just not enough. You will need to get to the late adopters if you want to grow! in this post I will tell you how.

Late adopters, late adopters - an example...

In one of my last posts I have talked about the importance of attracting late adopters to an online service. Late adopters are usually very loyal customers and show a high reluctance of switching to other services once a product allows them to get simple tasks done effectively. In the post, I highlighted how important it is that this audience is presented a clear use case that is ideally related to "real world" routines or activities. The best case thereof is email: Email can be very well related to traditional mail - there are inboxes, outboxes, messages, each message has a recipient and a sender. That's it.

I've just ran by a study by hitwise intelligence, a company that offers web analytics. The post looks at the question whether Yahoo! would be worth more in parts than as a single entity. This is not a new discussion but right now becomes another boost the the Microhoo negotiations. Instead of picking up the same question I'd rather highlight that this chart quite interestingly shows the late adopters service consumption behavior.

Zooming: Critical for an efficient digital workplace

I have been interested in how people aggregate information for quite some time now. In particular, it has always fascinated me how people connect information-units to other units or broad topics, how they structure and how they display information. The display of information is most critical to learning - not surprisingly, mind mapping and other techniques have become very popular. A visual display of signs, signals, semantically enriched connectors or shapes of any kind seem to have a great impact on the efficiency of learning. The use of visual elements allows shaping a representation of a mental model.

Critical tasks along the knowledge worker's value chain

In my last post I have identified the tasks at which software solutions can support information work. In this post I will move on to identifying critical tasks along the value chain of information and knowledge work. As described in the last posts, information work consists of receiving information, processing it into output that is delivered to a certain audience. I have described the value chain of knowledge and information work and have highlighted that value is essentially the insight gained from cognitive knowledge processes. Knowledge workers give advice, answer questions and help reduce uncertainty. The premise of the framework I describe is that a thorough analysis of the value creating activities of a knowledge worker can help identify strategies for individuals and organizations, to deliver more qualified insight in less time.

In my previous posts I have described a frame for analysis; in this post I will add a description of the value adding process behind knowledge work. In order to create insight (i.e. just to relate to the lingo used in the frame before: apply knowledge to deliver output), knowledge workers must:

Five types of software that support information and knowledge work

When looking at the frame for information and knowledge work, it becomes evident that there are the following five information and knowledge activities which can be supported by software tools:

1. Information inflow

2. Information processing

3. Information distribution/communication

4. Information storage, management & display

5. Administration & (time) management

Information enters our perception as input, is processed by knowledge workers and is then again communicated as output to a particular audience. All along, information can be stored in each state, i.e. as incoming, preprocessed or processed information. While our brain is the most straight-forward medium for storing information, there are numerous ways to store information digitally as well.

 

 

 

So the above identified five areas where software tools can support knowledge workers will be subject to more investigation here on the DKW blog. In particular, I find it interesting to look at how internet tools are at their current status able to support these types of processes. My fascination for the internet is based on the internet’s role as the ultimate information medium with seemingly unlimited supply of information from all around the globe. What’s more, the internet has moved from being a read-web to becoming a read-write web, an infrastructure for software to run on and to be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365days a year. It has become evident that we are moving towards using the internet as the ultimate information machine, a machine which covers all necessary functions of information work and which can be used to boost productivity of individuals.

Opinion: It all starts with personal knowledge repositories and integrated learning management

Michele Martin from the workliteracy blog has put forward some interesting thoughts in her post "Changing Knowledge Worker Attitudes" which I would like to briefly comment on. She observes the increasingly important role of personal learning in an organizational environment:

In a knowledge economy, knowledge and information is power. The more you know, the more you can do with it, the more marketable you are. You can’t AFFORD to let an organization tell you what you should be learning–too many organizations, businesses and nonprofits alike, are so busy struggling for survival that they aren’t even sure what needs to be learned anyway. All of a sudden they look up one day and say “Oh no–we need people who can do X or Y.” Waiting for someone else to tell you what you should learn is a sure ticket to the unemployment line.

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