New Chip Technology Could Help Computers Think on Their Own

BY Kit Eaton @ Fast Company

While there’s a lot of work to push nanotechnology as the future of computer chips, good old-fashioned semiconductors still have a lot of life in them yet: and they’ve recently been given a boost with a radical new type of circuit element that incorporates both semiconductor and nanotechnology.

Its called the memristor, and if you haven’t heard of it that’s not much of surprise–they were only manufactured for the first time last year. Memristors are tiny electronic devices that change their electrical resistance proportionally to the current running through them–in contrast transistors “turn on” current when a small input voltage is applied. Unlike transistors, memristors don’t forget their state when they’re turned off, making them useful as non-volatile memory for example.

Now a team from Hewlett-Packard labs in Palo-Alto has demonstrated a hybrid transistor-memristor circuit for the first time, using a nanowire grid and titanium dioxide as a semiconductor. The resulting device had memristors at the nanowire junctions and was surrounded by transistors.

Why should you get excited about this? For one reason–a transistor/memristor paired assembly can be programmed to either behave like a traditional logic circuit, route signals across it or behave as a memory storage unit. And these are all tasks that require specially-engineered circuitry in existing chips. In other words, a memristor-chip could pack in much more processing power in the same area–and that’s the trend that our increasingly-powerful chips have been following for decades.

Yet more interestingly, since the memristor “remembers” what state its in, by doing a calculation with a group of the circuits and feeding back the output of a calculation to the same memristors, the device could effectively “self-program.” As HP spokesman Tim Williams puts it: “self-programming is a form of learning. Thus, circuits with memristors may have the capacity to learn how to perform a task, rather than have to be programmed to do it.”

And that’s one long-predicted goal of computing technology that may even enable synaptic-like responses. Your computer in ten years time may do some of your thinking for you.

 

Social E-Mail Analyzes Your Friend Network, Organizes Your Inbox

BY Noah Robischon @ FastCompany

Of all the demos at TechFest 2009, the one I’d pick to include in a future Microsoft product is the Social Views of E-Mail application. It looks like a basic e-mail tool, but it organizes and clusters messages based on social groupings instead of just time and importance. This video with Andrzej Turski gives you a quick overview of all the features.

Say you’re part of a jogging club with a colleague at work, the social inbox would group different messages into your jogging club folder and your work folder based on the other names cc’d on the e-mail. That’s just one simple example of how this app uses your friend network to organize information.

The creators of this social inbox have also re-worked the basic display and user interface for mail. Along with showing profile photos, when you open and read a message it gets displayed in columns similar to a newspaper or magazine layout. And you can reply to a message from directly underneath the original message, much like you do in Web-based comments or forums.

There are already a few tools that enhance other devices or software, like Fonebook, which syncs your Facebook contacts with Outlook. But most of your social information is still hidden from the other aspects of your daily routine. The next stage of social media’s evolution will come when it scales the walled garden of existing social network destinations and becomes integrated with the rest of the devices and applications in your daily life.

 

Leveraging Social Networking (Focus – LinkedIn)

By request, I have posted the direct Google Docs link to this presentation I did for everyone’s viewing and printing pleasure. If you are to use this file for your own personal or business use I ask that you please do not change the content or format. Please “CLICK HERE” to view the presentation in full. Please note, this is the first in my series, and has a strong focus on how to leverage social sites (primarily LinkedIn) to work for you in the your job search. The next in my series will focus on Twitter, so stay tuned….

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Good Luck!

Aaron Friedman

 

Microsoft TechFest 2009 Preview

BY Noah Robischon @ Fast Company

Windows Azure and “Red Dog” Cloud Computing Project One over-arching theme that will underly many of the projects on display today is the upcoming Windows Azure cloud-computing push. This is Microsoft’s attempt to move its operating off the desktop and into the cloud. Although it was officially unveiled several months ago, Microsoft is only now getting specific about the kinds of tools it will deliver in Azure.

SecondLight Surface Computing UI Based on the description I’m reading, it sounds like Microsoft is ready to move its touch-screen UI off of the tabletop and into the “mid-air above the display” where it will recognize Minority Report-style gestural navigation.

Color-Structured Image Search color pattern image search has been around since at least 2005. Microsoft seems to have made some advances here, allowing for more consistency, speed and a semantic structure that could be applied to other search types.

Social Desktop, Social E-Mail, and Location-Based Social Networking Never one to let another software company own a lucrative market (ahem, Facebook), Microsoft has several projects on tap that will utilize your social networks in novel ways. Among them: e-mail integrated social networking tools and GeoLife 2.0, which sounds a lot like Google Latitude.

Opinion Search Several companies are moving into search engine algorithms that incorporate opinion or emotion data into the results. Microsoft’s Opinion Search will also filter results based on positive or negative polarity–again, not entirely new, but fascinating nevertheless.

Image-Centric and User-Interactions Advertising Platform Perhaps the first project on this list that could lead to real revenue, these two projects aim to replace today’s keyword-driven ad model with ones based on the content of recently searched images and a more integrated presentation of the resulting ads.

Tool Kit for Visualizing Large-Scale Data Silverlight and Ajax controls to help navigate large volumes of structured data from multiple source may not sound sexy. But if done well, it’s groundbreaking.

Augmented Reality 2009 buzzword alert! I’m not sure why everyone is tossing this old concept around so much lately, but Microsoft has at least two projects here that blend reality with computer interfaces. One is centered on 3D portable and virtual sticky notes.

Do these projects represent true innovation, or just more me-too computing? I aim to find out. Drop a note into the comments here if you’d like me to focus on anything in particular from the list above, or that you’ve heard about elsewhere.

 

Leveraging Social Networking (Focus – LinkedIn)

Please click for PowerPoint Presentation on Leveraging Social Networking (Focus – LinkedIn)

 

Riffing on David Armano’s Listen, Learn, and Adapt: Need Your Organization’s Adaption Stories!

Listen Learn Adapt BY Beth Kanter @ Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media Listening Listening is knowing what is being said online about your organization and your field.  Listening is the first step, but you do it before, during, and after the project.  In other words, you never take your listening ears off.  It becomes part of your organization’s culture. It can be hard to retool an organization’s culture to do listening as a daily part of the work flow, particularly if it isn’t valued or there are concerns about negatives. The Red Cross has overcome these hurdles.   They use social media to achieve goals of increased transparency and increased donations of blood, time, and money.  In that order.   Listening is an important piece of the strategy.  This was over two years ago. As Wendy Harman, Red Cross Social Media Manager, observes, “When Katrina hit, we knew people are talking but we’re not listening to conversation. First, it felt like we were going to do battle.  But now, the process of listening has changed concerns into strong interest about what people have to say.” The first project was to listen to what was being said on blogs about the Red Cross.  As the chief listener for the organization, Wendy honed her listening literacy skills using free tools like google alerts, technorati, RSS reader, and delicious.  She would listen, aggregate, analyze, and distribute to key subject matter experts within the organization on a consistent basis. Listening leads to engagement.  Wendy documented many different stories and shared these internally. The examples would show how engaging with people changed them from complainers to fans.  Here’s but one example from a blogger: “I took an American Red Cross class I thought was less than satisfactory. […] Someone found my blog post and told the local chapter director. He called me to talk about it honestly. […] They care about me and they’re willing to go the extra mile. […] This gives the American Red Cross HUGE points. I am now significantly more likely to take another class than I was before.” They’ve had months and months to hone their work flow and the Red Cross Social Media Team has it down to a science.  They determine what comments need action, whether to say thank you and build a relationship, repair a customer service issue, or ignore.   They spend time reading other posts by the blogger to help make this decision.  They now use this approach with other channels, like Twitter, for example. Because of the volume and using free tools, Wendy had to do a lot of heavy cut and paste to analyze, summarize, and distribute the information. With a better understanding on the value that continuous listening provides the organization, they are now investing in professional tools, like Radian 6. Key points: Relationship building lays groundwork for future campaigns to raise time, money, and blood Identifies influencers Documentation creates internal value Listening skills and tools upgraded What works used for future campaigns Learning “If you don’t launch, you don’t learn.”   David Armano Learning is using experiments with metrics and the right questions at the right point to understand what works, what doesn’t.  This is where the pavement hits the road.  You won’t be able to reap the full potential of social media unless you begin and get past any social media stalemate. What does learning actually mean?  You have to think like a scientist, documenting your experiments at the beginning, middle, and end.  You also need to observe like a primatologist, like Jane Goodall. Perhaps that a bad analogy – certainly your donors aren’t primates.  Armano describes this as digital anthropologists sifting through qualitative data and metrics to reap insights. I’ll share my process and I understand that I’m probably a crazy person.  I also know there is some resistance to document while you’re doing, but I think it is essential to learning – especially at the practitioner level.    Here’s what I do: 1.  Document on the fly I don’t wait until the end of the project.  I grab a little something everyday.   It could be as simple as opening up a google document and dropping in a few bullet points or cutting and pasting a comment.  The point is – you need to steal five or ten minutes from the doing to reflect in action.  Since I’m a visual person, I also use flickr as a documentation tool – I do a lot of screen shots with snagit and annotate. I also bookmark posts that reference the project using a unique project tag.  If I’m working with a team versus solo, I’ll also share some summaries of the most important learnings.  I also tweaking as I go – mostly messaging and mostly clarifying. 2. Pick the right hard data points I know from experience what the most important metrics are to track for different types of projects.  They are different depending on the audience and goals.   Here is where more is less is really important. 3.  Harvest your insights At the end of the project, I do a wrap up with all the bites and pieces I’ve collected.  I do a “by the numbers” summary,  I look patterns and trends in the comments or visuals, and look at what other nonprofits are doing in the space.  The important piece is to ask questions, not just look at numbers. 4.  Hit the Pause Button I usually write something up that anwers the question – “If I were to do this again next step, what would I do differently?”   I don’t wait until the day before I’m going to do something similar again.   You best insights come right after you’ve completed the project and had a day or two of distance.   Then you have captured those thoughts and when you begin planning for the next iteration – you have not lost those valuable insights. A few points about social media metrics. While some of the measurement concepts for social media remain the same as traditional Web analytics, there are some new ideas to embrace.  Steve Rubel wrote about this in a post called “Page Views Are Officially Dead” two years ago.  Page views may not be dead, but you need to use engagement metrics. I’ve written about this as it relates to blogging quite a bit.  Again, it isn’t the numbers in isolation.  It is the time that you spend looking at metrics in the context of your strategy and asking questions. Yesterday, I interviewed Jake Brewer who is the Internet Manager at the Energy Action Coalition about how they use metrics to generate insights about their YouTube Channel. “We don’t really care about views as much as we care about comments.  If we get 1,000 video views that is good.   The comments are a focus group with our influencers.  If they like it, they’ll spread it and that helps get to our objectives.” Rachel Happe has a great list of social media metrics and it is a good starting point.   If you’re a metrics geek and want to go deeper, visit my personal learning space for Social Media Metrics.  But do me a favor, please.  Please don’t get so obsessed with metrics that you loose site of how you’re going to use them!  And remember, Objective, audience, strategy and link to your metric Pick the right ones! Numbers alone are meaningless Combine with other measures and qualitative data Harvest insights Adapt The definition of adapt is using insights to make corrections to improve results the next time around.  You have to be nimble and that can be hard. I’ve watched the Carrie Lewis at the Humane Society do a fantastic job of adapting the organization’s social media projects.   In 2007, the Human Society implemented its first photo petition campaign to protest Wendy’s treatment of animals . They tracked the number of photo submissions they got, but they also listened carefully to the responses they got from participants. As Carrie Lewis mentions in the comments in the blog post , “Since this was our first run at a photo petition, it was difficult to get across exactly what we wanted people to do without writing a book. So every person that wrote in and needed help was answered personally. This gave us a good idea of how to more clearly explain ourselves next time.” This particular photo campaign had many technical glitches and ultimately the number of submissions was less than impressive. Did HSUS proclaim that photo competitions were a waste of time? No. The next iteration of a photo contest, LOL Seals , made it as easy as possible for people to participate. That’s what they had learned from the first campaign. The first contest, they asked people to upload their photos and tag it themselves, which meant they had to create a Flickr account and know what “tagging” was. The second contest, they used the Flickr API which made everything automatic — from tagging and uploading without the user having to even touch Flickr. They had about 3,000 submissions and captured about 2,000 new email addresses. They’ve recently implemented an online photo contest that combines wisdom of the crowds with person to person fundraising.  There is a web and Facebook version.   It looks, from the outside, like a great success so far and this would not have happened with out these earlier versions. It’s much easier to adapt your social media project than to change other things in your organization that social media might shine a light on – customer service, programs, and services.   And to make changes on those areas, it may require thinking staffing, work flow, and of course, involving leadership and others in your organization. Armano has a some excellent organizational culture questions: Are you launching initiatives that can be easily updated? Are you enabling a “culture of rapid response?” Are you building a culture in which “failure” is acceptable? Are you allowing your teams to create “pilots” prior to scrutinizing them through traditional ROI exercises? Are you planning initiatives that will help your organization learn prior to backing major marketing campaigns? Conclusion Don’t take off your listening ears Think like a scientist, observe like primatologist Evolution is a good thing Listening Literacy Skills by Beth Kanter How Listening Returns Value for Nonprofits by Beth Kanter Nonprofits Need Different I and R Words by Beth Kanter How o harvest insights by Beth Kanter Now, it’s your turn.  What are some of your organization’s social media adaption stories?

View article…

Enclosures:

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Crowdstrappers: Entrepreneurs or consultants who harness new approaches in social media to reposition or invigorate businesses.

One Detroit-area apartment owner is connecting online with current and prospective tenants. Interested in a place? Send a text for a floor plan

Eric Brown: Landlord Adds Social Media to His Toolbox –> http://bit.ly/s1cz2

 

Google Latitude keeps tabs on friends’ locations

Maybe it’s me, but I think this new app is crossing the privacy laws… Google may require sign-up of service, but what’s to keep government from obtaining access to the information??? Big Brother is watching you! http://bit.ly/WBaag

Story Highlights

• New Google software, Latitude, lets cell phone users share their location with others
• Google hopes it will help people find each other and keep track of loved ones
• To protect privacy, Google specifically requires people to sign up for the service
• People can share their precise location, the city they’re in, or nothing at all

 

Twitter 101 for “Business”

Twitter: How to Get Started Guide for Business People

– C.G. Lynch, CIO

February 03, 2009

Twitter remains a very nascent social network, so if you don’t know how it works or what it does (or you haven’t even heard of it), don’t feel bad. In fact, you’re still in the majority. But we’re here to help you reap the benefits of Twitter with this quick get-started guide.

More about Twitter on CIO.com

Twitter’s Potential for Business Users

Best (Free) Mobile Twitter Apps for BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile

Five Things Twitter’s CEO Has Learned About What You Are Doing

Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), a senior Forrester analyst who researches social media and who pens a blog on Web Strategy, says that while Twitter doesn’t release exact numbers, he estimates that three to six million people use Twitter, compared to 150 million for Facebook.

Here is an (appropriately) short explanation of Twitter: Twitter is a free service that allows users to publish short messages of 140 characters or less. These messages are read by “followers” — people who make a conscious decision to subscribe to your messages and have them delivered to their own Twitter home pages.

Each message you post is known as a “Tweet.” In the social media and social networking industry, Twitter facilitates a process known as microblogging or microsharing. Every user is identified by putting an “@” sign in front of their name (for instance: @cglynch).

Joining Twitter has value for many people, but it can also be a waste of time if you don’t understand how the medium works and how best to utilize it. We take a look at suggestions from social networking gurus to help you determine if adding Twitter to your daily tech diet is in your best interest.

Do You Belong on Twitter?

The Wild West view of social networks proposes that you should just try them out and see whether or not you like them. But in a world where most people already belong to existing social networks (such as Facebook or LinkedIn), on top of using long-established technology like e-mail and text messaging, allocating time for another outlet should be considered carefully.

“Think about why do you want to do it,” Owyang says. “Do you want to join because there’s buzz about it [in the media] or because President Obama is on it? Especially now, you need to spend your resources and your time well.”

Twitter should be place where you want to share common interests and ask insightful questions, and, ideally, read the interesting answers you get back, says Laura Fitton (@pistachio), who runs Pistachio Consulting, which advices people and companies on how best to utilize Twitter.

Though some people use Twitter to keep people in their personal life updated, Twitter has developed a business following. People in a particular industry (say engineering, software development, or public relations) often use Twitter to keep up with news, opinion and happenings in their field, for example. Once you get going with Twitter, this information will come to you. More on that in a minute.

What You Can Gain and Share With Twitter

If many Twitter evangelists looking to broaden the service’s demographic had it their way, they might want to change the site’s official branding a bit. When you go to Twitter to sign up, it says, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

“The best way to make the most use of it is not just answer what are you doing now,” says Owyang. “Instead, answer: ‘What’s important to me?’ That changes the conversation and makes value. It takes away some of the minutia and shows you want to talk about something that’s more useful and interesting.”

In other words, the “I’m running to the store” messages might not be as compelling amidst the noise of Twitter messages as “I just read a book on [insert some topic that's interest to you].” If you have room in the 140 characters, state an opinion or analysis of it.

It’s about “what has my attention right now?” Fitton says. “The point of Twitter is what do we have in common or having some kind of shared experience.”

How to Sign Up for Twitter

1. Twitter.com Click on the “Join the Conversation” button in middle of the page.

2. Fill out basic information. This will include your full name, preferred user name, password and e-mail address. Remember that the user name is what people will see with an “@” symbol in front of it.

3. See if your friends are on Twitter. After you fill out basic info, you’ll be prompted to look for friends in your Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail or AOL accounts so you can begin following them if they’re already on the service.

4. Twitter’s suggestions. Twitter will suggest some people for you to follow as well. Check to see if anyone of them are relevant.

5. Setting up your profile. Click on “settings” in the upper right hand corner of your Twitter home page. You’ll be brought to a tab-based menu that helps you build your profile and adjust settings.

6. Fill in the fields. Of particular importance is the “one line bio” under the “Account” tab. You have 160 characters to present yourself to the Twitter community. Many people choose to state their profession, and then maybe something outside of work that interests them as well. CIO’s C.G. Lynch (@cglynch), for instance, has the following: “Staff Writer at CIO, New England Sports Fan.”

7. Start looking for followers Regardless of how many people you found through e-mail search and Twitter’s suggestions, start looking around for people you might find interesting. Use search.twitter.com.

Who to Follow on Twitter?

The early users of Twitter have turned the issue of followers into a bit of popularity contest, and the PR and marketing professionals follow thousands of people in some cases to help tout their brands over the service.

But following a lot of people can create unnecessary noise that will render the service useless to you.

“The people you choose to follow should bring something compelling to your life,” says Fitton. “I feel sad people think that’s important to follow a ton of random people or have people with a lot of followers to be important or get value from Twitter.”

Owyang suggests starting with people you know. When you sign up for Twitter, you will be promoted to search for friends from your Gmail or Yahoo Mail accounts and show if you are on the service. Also, he says, you can use Twitter’s search tool to look for people that might be twittering in your field.

You don’t need to know people personally, but they should relate to your interests. You also might want to look for luminaries in your industry who often publish links to things they’re reading with short comments on it. If you’re into biking, you might follow Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong). If you’re into politics, maybe you follow party operatives like democrat Joe Trippi (@JoeTrippi) or republican Karl Rove (@KarlRove).

Not long after you join, people will begin following you. Before you follow back, make sure you’re going to get something substantive out of their tweets, Owyang says.

Other experts advise you think more broadly, at least to start. Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd), a social media consultant who writes the /message blog, suggests following at least 100 people right away. He agrees with Owyang and Fitton that you should look for quality people, but believes it’s important to throw yourself into the Twitter environment and see how information moves differently.

With Twitter, information flows to you, in contrast to more traditional mediums such as a news website, where you must click around and seek out information on your own. On Twitter, after you select followers, the information just comes to you.

“The point is getting in the flow, and having it wash over you,” Boyd says.

Remember, You’re Publishing: Google Will Find Your Tweets

It’s important to remember that Twitter is a publishing medium. In many cases, Tweets can be picked up by Google. So remember what you say, especially if you tend to talk business over Twitter (as many people do).

An executive from a PR agency that works with FedEx published a tweet where he spoke ill of the shipping company’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee..

The tweet went: “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say ‘I would die if I had to live here!’”

FedEx responded to him with an e-mail expressing its disappointment in the post.

“What you say can affect your blog or business. Your boss, competitors, wife or future wife,” Owyang says. “You need to remember, it’s publishing.”

Another caution: because a Tweet is so short, it’s even harder than with say e-mail for people to pick up context or tell when you’re being sarcastic versus serious, Fitton says.

“You need to think carefully about how you put it and how it sounds,” she says. “Think about not only your immediate followers but your potential audience, which is the whole Web. Tweets get Googled pretty prominently.”

© 2008 CXO Media Inc.

 

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