Hamilton and INSEAD recently released a report of their study about innovation and R&D practices. They surveyed R&D leaders in 186 companies in 19 nations in 2005. According to Strategy Business: The survey results, and our own experience, suggest one central truth: Organizations benefit when they ...
IBM to become a R&D consultancy
According to this article, it seems that IBM is changing its business model from being world's biggest computer services provider to selling its experience running research programs to other companies. The business will help companies run their research units but won't provide the research itself,...
New sort of places: googleplexes
It's always curious to read about new sort of places created by networked technologies. The NYT has a good piece about the next to be Googleplex (a portmanteau of Google and complex — in the architectural sense) that will be located surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border (a big...
Berlusconi and neuropsychology
How Berlusconi keeps his face: a neuropsychological study in a case of a semantic dementia by Sara Mondini and Carlo Semenza, Cortex, 3, pp. 332-335, 2006. Abstract: A patient (V.Z.) is described as being affected by progressive bilateral atrophy of the mesial temporal lobes resulting in semantic d...
Spectators for video games?
NS about the notion of spectator in gaming: he US professional computer gaming league has just signed a TV rights deal with cable company USA Network. Maybe it could be on the way to becoming as popular a specator sport as football and basketball in the US. Why do I blog this? this is connected to...
RFID TAG reader
Seen at the EPFL today, this RFID tag reader which has been recently installed (maybe to recently): Why do I blog this? this is a nice example of a transition from the previous "ubiquitous" platform: from a barcode reader to a RFID tag reader. The tangibility of the reader makes the architecture m...
Awareness and Accountability in MMORPG
A very good read yesterday in the train: Moore, Robert J., Nicolas Ducheneaut, and Eric Nickell. (2006): "Doing Virtually Nothing: Awareness and Accountability in Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds." Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 1573-7551 The paper acknowledge the fact that "despite th...
Video game controller reconfigurability
In The VoodooIO Gaming Kit: A real-time adaptable gaming controller by Nicolas Villar, Kiel Mark Gilleade, Devina Ramduny-Ellis, Hans Gellersen (Proceedings of ACE 2006), the authors propose an interesting idea for innovating about game controllers: Existing gaming controllers are limited in their ...
Technosocial Revolution?
Re-reading Is it OK to be a luddite by Thomas Pynchon (The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41) made me wonder about technosocial revolution: But the Industrial Revolution was not, like the American and French Revolutions of about the same period, a violent struggle with a beg...
HCI research about awareness of others in nightclubs
"DJs' Perspectives on Interaction and Awareness in Nightclubs" is a paper by Carrie Gates (University of Saskatchewan), Sriram Subramanian (University of Saskatchewan), Carl Gutwin (University of Saskatchewan) at DIS2006. This is the account of their project which aims at investigating DJ-Audience ...