March 2007
4 posts
3 tags
User driven innovation - is it egalitarian?
Todays NYT has an article about user driven innovation. Heavily quoting Erich von Hippel’s work, the article describes physicians coming up with their own medical innovations, snowboarders refining their snow boards, and new tools for the hobby woodworker developed by the hobby woodworker. It seems that Denmark, well known as the creator country of user driven Lego, wants to go the farthest,...
3 tags
Look in a virtual mirror to get the wisdom of...
…while you shop. For avid clothing shoppers, todays New York Times describes the latest virtual/real mirror at Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan. A shopper stands in front of the mirror situated in the store, which doubles up as a large computer monitor. While the person looks in the mirror, other people make suggestions from an online dress inventory over the internet. The live shopper at...
5 tags
Can you represent things “how they are”?
I stumbled into this NYT article about Danny Hillis – of Thinking Machines fame – latest startup, Metaweb Technologies. His goal is to create Freebase, a database that will describe things “how they are”. He wants, for example, to describe Arnold Schwarzenegger with different views as a bodybuilder, a movie actor, and a politician. I am wondering if the approach of having a centralized system to...
3 tags
It's not a good idea to abuse virtual trust
There is some turmoil right now among Wikipedia contributors about the fake identity of “essjay”. As the NYT reported a very active Wikipedian with the screen writer name of “essjay” had edited thousands of articles, pretending to be a tenured professor of religion at a private university, while in fact he was a 24 year old attending a number of colleges (as the NYT put it politely). The revolt...
