A packet of crisps in a bar

Today was my second annual visit to the The British International Innovation & Technology Conference and Exhibition (of which more anon). As someone with a relatively limited imagination I have to confess I just can’t understand where inventors get their ideas from.

For instance I would never have thought up the idea for Crisp Bars. In fact everything about it just sounds wrong to me. But, as is so often the way with inventions (and this one is patented) the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Or in this case in the crunching. I approached the product with great cynicism but was proved wrong once again. The ‘bars’ not only taste like standard crisps but somehow manage to maintain the crispiness of a crisp.
As with almost all inventors I come across, the idea sprang from seeking a solution to a problem. In this case, how to continue to consume crisps when you have a babe in arms, and so only have one hand to spare for eating purposes.

Their website doesn’t seem to be working at the moment but you can watch a video where Richard Hammond of Top Gear fame tests them out on the 5 o’clock show.

Watch this space to where this product goes…

Spam lovely spam

Actually, I find the original edible version of spam as indigestible as the electronic kind, although I do love the Monty Python song that the term is derived from.

However, I am still surprised how many people still complain about how their lives are blighted by this curse of the Internet age, when there are solutions so readily to hand.

Although there are many products to choose from, I have been using Cloudmark Spamnet (now Desktop) for a couple of years now and consider myself a satisfied customer. I get about 50 spam messages a day on my home email account and with this software I have seen very few false negatives – or false positives for that matter.

What I like best about the product is that in addition to some very clever analytics it also relies on good old human brain power shared via the Internet. On the rare occasions a piece of shiny new rogue spam makes it through to your inbox, you tag it and the information goes back to a central database. Once an email gets enough tags it will be marked as spam for everyone else. The same works in reverse for non-spam such as e-mail newsletters which are often mistakenly identified as unwanted.

Even better all contributors are rated on how reliable their tagging is. This is a very effective way of stopping the spammers from hi-jacking the system by tagging their spam as clean.

If you don’t believe me, have a read of respected IT journalist Jon Honeyball’s article. “Since installing Cloudmark for Exchange Server a few months ago, my inbox has received 15,619 emails, of which 11,512 were killed off as spam. I can’t remember a good email being incorrectly marked as spam, and it has probably let a few dozen spams through into my inbox by mistake.”

Needles to say these services come with a cost, but for me it at around £20 a year at current exchange rates it is money well spent.

I apologise if this sounds like an advert, but I don’t think enough people are aware how easily they can remove this unpleasantness from their lives.

Technology has come a long way… or has it?

Watching a recent Scoble Show podcast it struck me just how far technology has developed over the years. The picture below shows an early hard disk drive which could store 48 megabytes of data. Nowadays you can buy a 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) hard drive for your PC for under £200.

hard-disk21.JPG

hard-disk1.JPG

However when it comes to software and computer interaction how far have we progressed. The most common interaction with my computer consists of ctrl c, v, s and p. All commands that I learnt 30 years ago in an early version of WordStar.

I also remember when Windows 1995 first came out and a news story on the BBC where they asked the public what they thought of the shiny new interface. The most common question was ‘how do you turn it off?’ Everyone could see the start button in the bottom left handside of the screen, but there was no equivalent stop button. This unintuitive arrangement has lasted right the way through to today with Vista.

A thumb drive by any other name would…

Since introducing selected downloading from selected databases from the Business & IP Centre we have been faced with the dilema of what to call those those little portable storage gizmo’s.

Below are just some of the names I have heard bandied about:
USB flash drive
USB drive
Keychain drive
Memory key
Memory stick
Jump drive
Key drive
Flash drive
Pen drive

One way to solve this problem would be to adopt the term widely used in the U.S.A…. thumb drive. As you can see below, by using this name it is possible to generate a strong visual reminder which might reduce the amount of confusion.

thumbdrive.jpg

The importance of having 99 straights and 1 weirdo

I have just been watching one of the Inspiring Entrepreneurs videos we have recently posted onto YouTube.

The charismatic James Brown (founder of Loaded Magazine) talks about how he created a team of weirdos who would have been unemployable elsewhere to create a completely new kind of magazine.  He describes a talk by business guru Tom Peters where he pronounced on the importance of employing weirdos to introduce change to a business. Brown reversed the process and had one straight guy for every 99 weirdos.

james_brown

 

On yer bike (Freecycle)!

I have been a fan of charity shop giving (in particular Oxfam) for many years. However they understandably can’t take many items. So what do you do?

You join the Freecycle Network which currently consists of 4,134 groups with 3,927,000 members across the globe. It is a grassroots and entirely non-profit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. Due to the local nature of the exchange it also helps reduce your carbon footprint.

Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer to keep out spammers, and I have found a group for my local town. In the last two years I have ‘Freecycled’ three bicycles, two dead computer printers and a sofa-bed. Plus I acquired two boxes of unwanted candles.

If you want your bicycles to go to a really good home I suggest using Re-cycle.

Grey entrepreneurs are the ‘new black’

Entrepreneurship includes all classes, creeds and ages but one of the biggest growth areas are what have been dubbed ‘Grey entrepreneurs‘.

One might naively assume that these would consist of retired business professionals. But a group of Swiss grannies would prove you wrong according to the latest issue of Springwise.

Netgranny is a collective of 15 grannies who knit socks on demand and sell them online. Customers can choose their favourite granny from a gallery of ‘Grosis’, which includes information on why the women knit (‘not for money, just to pass the time’) or about their professional credentials (‘at age 6, I taught my 4 year-old sister to knit’).

Customers can pick the colour of their socks, or opt for a surprise design. After placing an order, their personal sock-knitting granny will take approximately two weeks to knit the pair of socks.

As you can see below, the grannies vary from the funky, to the cuddly, to the slightly scary.

Netgranny 1Netgranny 2Netgranny 3

Finally a consumer rating site with real information

I can’t understand why this has taken so long because it is such an obvious use of the interactive power of the Internet.

For years we have had shopping comparison sites such as Kelkoo and PriceRunner, but the consumer rating sites such as Ciao! and reviewcentre have been blighted by a lack of opinions. But now there is a new kid on the block in the shape of Wize.com. It is still in beta and is rather U.S. biased but the sheer number of opinions puts it head and shoulders above the competition.

For instance the Toshiba Satellite A135 PC Notebook has 39 reviews, and the Apple Nano has over 3,000 reviews.

Toshiba laptop Apple Nano

Social marketing ratings from Hey! Neilsen

Hey! Nielsen is a new free service from the well known market and audience measurement provider Neilson Company.

They are asking registered users to give their opinions on TV, movies, music, personalities and the Internet.

Assuming the site is successful and once it has been running for a while it could be a good source of what’s hot and what’s not in terms of entertainment. It is a classic case of a win win, with Neilsen acquiring useful market research for free, but also making the results available for free.

For instance you can already chart the rapid demise of Britney Spears standing amongst her fanbase by looking at chart of her rating over time.

Britney – who’s popularity is now in free-fall.

It is interesting they haven’t included blogs which are already well covered by Technorati.

slideshare and my presentation

Last Thursday I gave a presentation during the Aerospace & Defence Librarians Group seminar organised by Ben Chan at the Cilip HQ

The title of the day was the Library Information Survival Guide and there were some interesting sessions.

I was starting to panic the day before as half of my PowerPoint slides seem to have got damaged between home and work. So as well as using multiple memory sticks I also posted a copy of the presentation onto slideshare. This free service is like YouTube for presentations and includes my least favourite word of the Web 2.0 era ‘favorited’. The currently most favorited presentation on the site has had over 800,000 views which is impressive by any standards.

However what I liked about the service is that you can not only download presentations from the site as well as view them in medium size on the web, you can also run them in full screen mode. So all you need is a decent internet connection to provide a backup to the presenters worst nightmare of their memory stick failing.

Here is the link to my presentation about the Business & IP Centre.