Nerd Center - This is a test. Name the school. This institute is 140 years old. Some of the folks that have walked its halls include nearly 60 Nobel laureates, 30 astronauts, Dr. Dolittle author Hugh Lofting, architect I. M. Pei, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, inventor Raymond Kurzweil, Ford Motor Company CEO Bill Ford, the Car Talk guys from National Public Radio and our own Bob Simms, a Partner, here at Menlo. So, where are you? Give up? MIT of course. Welcome to Nerd Central, where innovation and genius rule. Think about it. The World Wide Web was born at MIT in 1994. That same year, firms founded by MIT graduates generated $232 billion and employed a million people worldwide.

Future Shock   - Your favorite pictures will be instantly projected onto the walls of your office as soon as you open the door. You'll communicate with your computer primarily by voice since speech recognition software will exceed that of a human and there will be sensors in your chair to let the boss know that you're sitting in your seat and not goofing off by the water cooler. Welcome to the office of the future! These and other technologies are being researched right now by IBM and the furniture company Steelcase. So what might be one of the unintended results of how and where people will work in the future? A great leveling in real estate values for one predicts Jakob Nielsen.

If Search Engines Could Read Your Mind  - Google does a pretty good job of finding relevant information, but how could it be better, especially when you aren't too specific on what we are looking for? For instance, if you type in "jaguar" you could mean the automobile, the big cat or the software for the Mac, but what if a search engine could actually learn from your habits? Here's a compelling look at how it would work. Play 20 questions with this neat little software application and prepare to be amazed.

The Cost of Usability   - "Jay Leventhal, who is blind, still fumbles with the tiny controls on his iPod but has given up on the kiosk in his New York office building that lists all the tenants. For Leventhal, even laundry has become a task requiring the help of a sighted person. The washers he uses now take smart cards instead of quarters, issuing instructions on a digital screen that he can't read." This is an example from the Associated Press as it takes a look at how difficult many of today's high-tech gadgets are to use for the visually impaired. Why can't one of the companies who make MP3 players make a unit that's accessible to the blind? "Money," they say. The market is just too small. But, we at Menlo know that this is just a poor excuse.

The Recipe for Cool 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 June 16!

Quick! Stop Them Before They Invent Something Else   - Gersh Kuntzman from Newsweek takes a look at some of the weird and wacky inventions that have come out lately. For instance, "Are you such a multi-tasker that the single-minded job of driving to work has gotten boring? Don't worry, there are now DVD players for the front seat of the car! Are you so disorganized in the kitchen that you can never find the right recipe? Don't worry, there's now a microwave oven that can download recipes from the Internet. Are you so alienated from nature that you can't tell when a piece of fruit is ripe? Don't worry, there's a new line of packaging that changes color when the fruit has reached palatability."

Future Shock II   - Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at British Telecom, speculates that we will have a conscious computer with superhuman levels of intelligence before 2020. For what purpose? Well, if it is flying a plane, it might be helpful if the computer is terrified of crashing "so it does everything to stay in the air until it's supposed to be on the ground." 

Brain Candy - Malcolm Gladwell takes a look at the new book, "Everything Bad Is Good for You" by Stephen Johnson. Written in an entertaining style, Johnson tackles the seemingly strange phenomenon that has been going on in America for some time which is: Why have IQ scores been rising so significantly over the last century? For instance "a person whose I.Q. placed him in the top ten per cent of the American population in 1920 would today fall in the bottom third." Johnson proposes that what is making us smarter is precisely what we thought was making us dumber: popular culture and high-tech video games.

Developers Everywhere - End user developers are everywhere. We are all building spreadsheets, tweaking database queries or even creating filters to keep out unwanted email and have been doing it for years. But as more and more end users are required to do more work that was once the domain of hardcore computer programmers, there is a greater risk of creating errors. Megan Santosus, of CIO magazine, reports that 30% or more of all spreadsheets contain errors. So what are we to do? The answer is what Menlo has been preaching for years now. Build tools for end users that are intuitive and easy to use.

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 weve spoken about in the past.