-
You Are Not a Large Corporation — I don’t know a thing. — Medium
Totally. Well, not the llamas.
“You can define “success” without it being tied to quarterly shareholder reports or even income. It can be tied to the amount of days you can afford not to work. Or by how much you can donate to your favourite animal charity that rescues llamas. Or by how often you can work from the road.”
-
“So she posted her solution online, and then…” | johnstepper
Good post by John Stepper. I’ve highlighted the issue I encounter most in enterprises: the quest for credit, as mandated by current performance practices:
“People who are aspiring to make a difference will share their work online so others can use it and improve on it. Yet it’s a phrase you might never hear at work. Why not? And what can we do about it?”
“I won’t get credit.” A more insidious barrier is when people feel their contributions won’t be recognized. Particularly in a management system of competitive ratings and bonuses, there is a heightened sense of internal competition. Feeling like you’re fighting for your share of a finite pie will grossly inhibit your willingness to contribute and collaborate.
…
“And credit? This comes in several forms. Social recognition from relevant peers is often powerful enough to drive continued contribution. Beyond that, though, it’s the role-based community that knows about all the good jobs within the firm. When individuals contribute, they do so for their own reputation and their access to opportunities in addition to the good of the community.” -
15. Ivan Poupyrev | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
“Ivan Poupyrev had a theory: What if he sent a broad spectrum of AC current through everyday objects? Would those objects be able to sense touch? The answer is yes, and Touche is the sensor system developed by Poupyrev and his team at Disney to do it.
Connect Touche to a living orchid and the plant’s entire skin becomes touch-sensitive just like a smartphone screen; attach it to a computer-music program and you can play the flower like a violin. Touche is compatible with almost any object you can grab–wooden tables, metal sculptures, water tanks, even breathing humans. Touche could make every square inch of Disney World responsive to touch–and open up a world of possibility for connecting objects to the Internet. “My long-term vision,” Poupyrev says, “is making the entire world interactive.””
-
The audacious plan to end hunger with 3-D printed food – Quartz
“[Anjan Contractor] sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.”
-
How to Run IT at the Speed of Silicon Valley – The CIO Report – WSJ
“a combination of technologies, management practices and cultural features that enable Valley technologists to work fast. These practices are used by their engineering and IT organizations.”
“…Before companies become fast, they have to learn how to accelerate. There are new skills to learn. But perhaps more challenging is the need to unlearn old ways. For example, traditional development practices, such as change control boards to oversee code changes, are inconsistent with rapid, iterative and agile practices. Companies that use both agile and traditional techniques must figure out how they will co-exist. While CEOs may not completely agree with LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman’s maxim, “if you are not embarrassed by your first release, you’ve launched too late!”, they need to support CIOs who, in their quest to create faster, more agile IT organizations, attempt to follow its spirit.” -
In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
“In this future, the intelligence once locked in our devices now flows into the universe of physical objects. Technologists have struggled to name this emerging phenomenon. Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols. Other observers, paying homage to the stripped-down tech embedded in so many smart devices, are calling it the Sensor Revolution.
But here’s a better way to think about what we’re building: It’s the Programmable World. After all, what’s remarkable about this future isn’t the sensors, nor is it that all our sensors and objects and devices are linked together. It’s the fact that once we get enough of these objects onto our networks, they’re no longer one-off novelties or data sources but instead become a coherent system, a vast ensemble that can be choreographed, a body that can dance. Really, it’s the opposite of an “Internet,” a term that even today—in the era of the cloud and the app and the walled garden—connotes a peer-to-peer system in which each node is equally empowered. By contrast, these connected objects will act more like a swarm of drones, a distributed legion of bots, far-flung and sometimes even hidden from view but nevertheless coordinated as if they were a single giant machine.”
