Newsletter


	The Trend Spotter - Tim O'Reilly likes to walk in the dark. Sometimes after dinner he'll head down the long dirt pathway outside his rambling farmhouse in Sebastopol, California, a post-hippie enclave between wine country and the Pacific Ocean. No flashlight. And on this particular overcast night, with rain dropping from a mossy sky, it's tough to see a thing. But O'Reilly's pace is brisk and optimistic, his feet crunching the dirt as the wiry 51-year-old hurtles himself forward. O'Reilly's dead-on inner compass led him to anticipate the current stage of the Internet. Powered by the bottom-up nature of sharing and collective action, it's exemplified by such developments as the barn-raising methodology of Wikipedia; group efforts like tagging; open source systems; Wi-Fi; open API's in ecommerce sites like Amazon, eBay, and Google; RSS; the spontaneous connectivity of Apple's Rendezvous; and dozens of other dots that are being connected to fulfill the original promise of the Net. He calls it the architecture of participation.

	The Big Dreamers - Their work is a road map to what's hot in emerging technology--and their achievements will shape the world we live in for decades to come. They are inventors and discoverers and entrepreneurs. They are chemists and biologists and software engineers and chip designers. They create their wonders in universities, startups, and large corporations. They gravitate to the most interesting and difficult scientific and engineering problems at hand, and arrive at solutions no one had imagined. They take on big issues. They are the TR35-- MIT's Technology Review 's selection of the top technology innovators under age 35.

	The Computerized Academy - Matthew B. Crawford of the New Atlantis examines how information technology (IT) alters our manner of thinking. "In the natural sciences, entire research programs are predicated on the “mining” and analysis of data made possible by IT, allowing investigators to unearth patterns beneath the noise of ordinary experience and beyond the limits of a scholar's own narrow experiments or discipline. In the social sciences, economists have adopted similar techniques to generate highly counter-intuitive hypotheses about mass behavior. In cognitive psychology, unique among the social sciences in that it relies on the controlled experiment, computers have made manipulation of stimuli, randomization of subjects, and statistical analysis so cheap and easy that students can perform real experiments of their own. This gives them a taste of science as an intellectual process, rather than a set of doctrines distilled in textbooks."

	The Art of Project Management - N. Dean Meyer, of CIO magazine, discusses the role of the PMO—Project Management Office. Why does everybody think they need one, and what should a PMO really do? If not properly implemented, the PMO can do more harm than good. According to Meyer, "The proper role of a PMO is to help everybody become a good project manager—not to be a project manager for a few big projects. It's not to disempower others, but rather to empower others with advice, training, methods, tools and services that make everyone successful at delivering their projects."

	Concepts in Software - Find out how you can ensure that your software project will be a success by studying the concept of Anthropology, yes, Anthropology. Come to our next free 90 minute "Taste of Success" seminar focused on High-Tech Anthropology. Our approach will show you techniques for creating the right software for the right application. We encourage you to share your software development war stories so we can all learn from them. See you on October 20!

	The Art of the Keyboard - At first glance it looks like an ordinary "QWERTY" keyboard. But look a little closer and you will see an organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) on each key. Now that each key is essentially a mini screen, the days of keys having characters painted on them will soon be over. What will this mean for the consumer? No more buying a separate gaming keyboard for one. Different characters will be displayed for the specific need instantly. Chinese, Arabic, hieroglyphics, Cyrillic, Ancient Greek, Georgian— and so on to infinity: notes, numerals, special symbols, HTML codes even mathematical functions.

	The Art of Selling - So Larry Ellison has signaled that he intends to spend almost 6 billion to purchase Sieble for its CRM technology. Is this a good idea? According to Paul McDougall, probably not. Traditional CRM basically goes like this: "OK, we see that we've just sold Paul McDougall a trip to Las Vegas, and our marketing database tells us that he recently bought a new set of Pings. Hmmm, what should we do next? That's it! Let's try to sell him on one of our golf-resort time-shares in Nevada! Not only will we get more of his paycheck, he'll develop a warm fuzzy feeling about MegaResorts International. We'll have achieved BRAND LOYALTY!" Forget it says, McDougall, now with the advent of eBay and Google, he doesn't shop that way anymore.

	The Art of Acoustic Snooping - It seems hard to believe that the light clicking of the computer keyboards can be a real security risk. Would you believe that it's possible to decipher the individual sounds of a typical keyboard to about 80% accuracy? Researchers at IBM were even able to filter out other background noise like cell phones and recover most of the text typed in a controlled test. While most businesses may not be too concerned about this type of spying, it is important to realize what is possible and take the necessary precautions if it's warranted.

	A History of Ideas - Merle Rubin takes a look at Peter Watson's new book "Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud", and calls it "a bold attempt to summarize the history of ideas from prehistoric times to the early years of the 20th century. ... Rather than merely chronicle the history of ideas, Watson also describes various theories of contemporary scholars as to their origin and significance. By bringing us up-to-date on the thinking and research of such specialists, his book challenges what may be some of the general (nonspecialist) reader's long-held assumptions."

	Smart ways to Spend a few Days this Fall - The Menlo Fall 2005 class schedule is out. Football season is here. So now is the time to sign up for a Menlo class. We'll provide the coffee and donuts. Now you have no excuse to learn the real secrets of software success.

	Need a Speaker for an Upcoming Event? - We love public speaking (Rich Sheridan is the best) and are happy to deliver inspiring messages focused on business success with information technology. Call us at (734) 665-1847 to schedule your next event. Look here for a list of some of the topics that we’ve spoken about in the past.