IM Roadmap

HOW TO: Be a Better Coworker Mashable | The Social Media Guide.  A nice little article reminding us how to collaborate and cohabitate peacefully in “meatspace”.  IE, the real world.

Wikipedia, the poster child for collaboration. Nice little piece over at Wired.com.  This quote from Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Exec Director, sums it up well:

“It’s a promise that people are going to work together, it’s a demonstration of people working together in good faith and the democratization of information and freedom of access to information and all of that is continually under threat.”

Happy B-Day guys, and thanks.

Cheers,
Eric

Check this out:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/awesome_diy_data_tool_needlebase_now_available_to.php

Cheers,
Eric

An old friend posted a month or so ago a valid lament – where are all the great new web innovations?  Facebook, Twitter and others are solidly in monetization mode now, and as Nick points out this is probably a pretty good indicator of maturity.  In other words:  kinda boring.

I don’t know what the next new new web thing is going to be, but I can hazard a couple of guesses for things that are coming, given trends social and technological.

1. Highly immersive and natural interfaces. I think we are the on threshold of some very interesting hardware mashups.  Take 3D displays, gesture-based devices, natural user interfaces, and pervasively embedded sensors.  Imagine a Microsoft Kinect-type device, with 3D CAVE-like projections on your walls, seamlessly integrated with high-fidelity video conferencing software.  Example:  Across from you would be your colleagues in a distant office, and to your right a projection of your Shanghai factory floor, and floating in front of all of you a giant, 3D, exploded CAD diagram of a faulty machine in that factory.
2. The Enterprise IT Village. In part, this is the pervasive diffusion of tools and solution development amongst employees of an enterprise.  We’ll all be building apps without even realizing it – dropping gadgets onto Jive pages and embedding training videos inside corporate employee wikis.  But also a fundamental change in the relationship of IT employees to corporate management, to each other, and to the profit center.  We need to move away from thinking that “official” enterprise IT has a monopoly on application development.  Those of us in IT should be helping our fellow IT’ers the way Google, Amazon, Facebook and others vend APIs to their users.
3. Sensors on … everything. I need to dig out the article, but I think it was Communications of the ACM had some statistics a few months ago.  There are going to be billions upon billions of sensor- and telemetry-linked devices and artifacts out in the world.  RFID, Bluetooth, mobile phones, etc etc.   Throw stuff like the Microsoft Tag in there too.   How will the physical and digital blur and interact?  Microsoft Surface only barely scratches the, er, surface.
4. Pervasive, low-cost 3D printing. Think of what this will do for collaborative prototyping, and trinket delivery.  Any other parents out there with Silly Bandz all over the house?.  ‘nuf said.
5. Augmented Reality.  If you haven’t seen it before, check out how McDonalds created an augmented reality game based on the film Avatar.   I played with it – it was a little rough, but decidedly promising.   Standardized tools and protocols could enable a rash of development.  Use it for training, product assembly instructions, remote troubleshooting, ….

OK – I guess I broke somewhat with Nick’s original thesis.  These aren’t purely new web things.  But, there are two themes from these.

• First, our digital lives will interact more fluidly (and invasively) with our physical lives, and vice versa.  Start imagining how some of the above technologies could be integrated….
• Second, the next step change in enterprise innovation will come when we are developing, sharing and trading tools, widgets and data for our peers in an ad-hoc, collaborative fashion for the good of the employee community.

Cheers,
Eric

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Video Conferencing, twitter, facebook

OK – this article is classic.  Ever get that strange feeling someone’s watching you?  Well – this is the oppose.  That strange feeling you’re being ignored.  And that you deserve it.

On a serious note, however, they have a point.  Given the roles gossip, social grooming, and emotional intelligence play in the workplace, this is actually pretty relevant.

Cheers,
Eric
Technorati Tags: collaboration, chat, IM, EIM, facebook

(Picking up on a previously started thread, about collaboration in fiction and the movies …)

The ideas proposed in this 1999 Cronenberg film are still decades ahead of our time.  eXistenZ was an inventive made-for-TV movie, produced for the Science Fiction Channel (now “SyFy”).   The main storyline has the characters embarking on a virtual-reality type open-ended game.  It some very interesting twists however (remember this was 1999, too).  The gameplay occured entirely in the mind of the players.  A game console was connected to each player via a spinal link.  That game console was a new biological life-form, genetically engineered.  And the game consoles were networked, allowing collaborative game play. The closest analogy is that of virtual reality, but the game play happened entirely in the minds and imaginations of the players, while they sat, trance-like, patched in to their individual game consoles, and the game consoles networked to each other.

The movie stars Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and was directed by David Cronenberg.  My intent here isn’t for a full review – you can find those at Amazon, IMDb, or NetFlix.  However, it raises thought-provoking ideas for the (distant?) future of collaboration.

Cheers,
Eric

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Virtual Reality

A good friend recently posited that face-to-face meetings are 1000x more effective than email, and 500x more effective than telephone calls, and wondered aloud if others agreed.  It is a great question – and illustrates both reality and perception.  It’s true – we do usually perceive that face to face meetings are more effective than mediated meetings.  (Mediated = via email, chat, telephone, video conference, etc etc).   In practice, however, we also know that we can’t always do that.  The economy is increasingly global – we all have colleagues, clients, and other stakeholders in far away places, and the work still must get done.  So, how do we reconcile these two realities?  I think we have to ask ourselves several questions:

1. What does “effective” communications mean, and does it mean the same thing in every situation?
2. Why do we feel that way?
3. Is that feeling a true reflection of collaboration efficacy, or just that, only a feeling?
4. As enterprises responsible for delivering value to customers and shareholders, how do we balance the benefit of that “feeling” with the bottom line?

Simply put, it depends on the relationships and the type of collaboration. Collaboration is function of knowledge transfer, division of duties (delegation), and trust. For example, if you already have high-level of trust between people, then things like face-to-face meetings are less important, and the collaboration is more about the other two things. Etc.   I discussed one particularly good example in an earlier post about Apollo 13.

When you think about your organization’s collaboration requirements, think about the situations and use cases the participants will be in.  Survey them, do time-and-motion studies, etc.  Roll these up into a smaller number of general use cases.  Then, assess each of those general use cases on the Knowledge/Delegation/Trust axes.  You’ll find that some technologies and methods will better facilitate trust and rapport than others (ie, video conferencing).  In other cases, trust is either already established by virtue of a long-standing relationship, or moot because laws/regulations establish outside consequences for breaches of trust.  In such cases, you can deploy less expensive technology solutions (email, chat, etc.).

Cheers,
Eric

PS, thanks to Mariana for the insightful observation prompting this post.

I want you to check out this video (and below), but before you hop away and view the video follow me on some extrapolation.  The video shows the XOS2 robotic enhancement suit being developed by Raytheon for the military.  It straps on to a soldier, and has high-power robot joints and motors that the user “wears” to give them superhuman power and strength.  Amazingly, they think they could have this out in the field as quickly as five years.  Basically, this is targeted currently as a way to help infantry carry heavy loads, and in logistics roles.  Remember Ripley in Aliens 2 using the big loader to fight off that evil alien queen?  Like that, only without the alien.

So, really, what is the role of the human in this case?  Basically, the human provides a framework onto which the suit attaches, of course, and the human provides the intelligence to control it.  You swing your arm, it detects that and amplifies the power.  So, it’s no stretch to imagine totally changing the application of this technology.  First, alter the construction so it’s self-standing – no human needed.  The tricky part here is balance, and that’s being solved on other robot projects.  So – then the robot is not just powerful, but also physically independent.

Next, deal with the control.  No – don’t make it fully autonomous like in Terminator. :-)  Give it high-quality video and other sensors, long-range wireless communications, and load it up with high-end telepresence software.  Basically, high-fidelity remote control.  Someone in a room is looking at monitors of what the XOS is seeing, and can control it remotely.  Possibly with a scaled-down XOS suit themselves, just wired up with the sensors but not the motors (this is not too dissimilar to how they do motion capture in movie making now).

If you want to take it a step further – add a high-quality fully immersive virtual reality system like the CAVE* developed originally at UIC, and you’ve got a pretty amazing way to (almost) fully experience a remote environment and interact with it.    Imagine yourself in your office or family room, with some remote place projected on the walls around you, and you controlling a robot thousands of miles away.

There are both terrifying and thrilling prospects from this.   Let’s cover the terrifying one first, and get that over with.

1. You think drones flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan are impressive/scary/amazing/inhumane/whatever-your-view – we could now create drone/remote control “soldiers”.  No doubt the military already is way ahead of us here – so don’t be surprised when it happens.  Did you know that the drone pilots are often working at military bases here in the US?  Imagine the ability to wage war thousands of miles away without the political cost of risking your own soldier’s lives?  Will that make war more or less palatable to governments?
2. On a more positive note, and in keeping with our blog’s topic, you could use it for ….. yes, you’ve got it, remote collaboration.   Let’s say you have a series of plant inspections you have to make of some potential new suppliers in Europe.  They’re in London, Frankfort, Barcelona and somewhere in Macedonia you still haven’t found on the map yet.  You could book a couple of weeks, fly over there, get train or airfare between the cities, get hotels, … spend a ton of money, be jet-lagged and out a pile of money.  Or, rent remote controlled light-duty XOS-style robots in each of your locations, plugged in to them in the VR and telepresence-enabled comfort of your home or office.  You could physically inspect and interact with people and objects in four geographically dispersed sites, all in an afternoon, switching between them with no more difficulty than making a phone call!

Think I’m crazy?  Think again.  Pretty much everything we do and use every day, everybody thought was crazy at some point in the past.   It’ll happen.

Cheers,
Eric

PS, thx to friend Bala for the original article.

* As an intern many moons ago I had a tiny, but fun, part in the release of the original CAVE at the 1992 SIGGRAPH convention.  It’s still amazing, even by today’s standards.  I’ll do a follow-up post on it.  See if you can find it on Google though …

Read a great post today over at CollaborationIdeas.com, encouraging freelance workers, work-from-homers, and the self-employed to leverage the power of collaboration.   Lorie shared several good ideas, including communicating, groupware, maintaining your workspace, and others.  One of them was to maintain good notes in writing – to help you, your customers (and your partners) to stay on the same page.  This weekend I was reminded of a simple, but really great tool for written collaboration.  No, not chat (this time), but Microsoft OneNote.  OneNote has been around for a few years, but some folks still haven’t used it.  Here are some quick advantages to using OneNote for collaboration:

• Easily create ad-hoc pages and subpages for different topics and sub-topics.
• Ability to easily combine text, graphics and other media in the same page via drag and drop
• In older versions create a private, ad-hoc point-to-point connection with another person.   In new versions, create a group and collaborate online.

Long story short – OneNote is a great way to create a media-rich, shared scratch pad of sorts for that messy (and fun) ideation phase of collaboration.

Cheers,
Eric

Later this week, on October 5th, the International Association of Software Architects, is offering an eSummit on collaboration, together with Cisco.   Unsurprisingly, the agenda is focused on the collaboration needs of software architects and developers.  From the Cisco website for the event:

Collaboration is the means by which both formal and informal workflows are achieved, and as a consequence are often very domain specific.  It’d be interesting to hear Cisco’s thoughts on how to shape collaboration tools for software architects in particular.

Cheers,
Eric