The World, Filtered*

The Mad Dash Toward Touch Technology - Bill Buxton
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/oct2009/id20091021_629186.htm?campaign_id=rss_innovate

“Buried within the current mad scramble towards touch and multitouch technologies lies an important lesson in innovation: "God is in the details" (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe).

So while executives and marketers all seem to be saying, "It has to have touch," I am more inclined to say that anyone who describes a product as having a "touch interface" is likely unqualified to comment on the topic. The granularity of the description is just too coarse. Everything—including touch—is best for something and worst for something else. True innovators needs to know as much about when, why, and how not to use an otherwise trendy technology, as they do about when to use it. Let me explain....”

--------

5 Creative Ways to Improve Health Care in the Developing World
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ariel-schwartz/sustainability/5-creative-ways-improve-health-care-developing-world

 “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced that it has bestowed 76 grants of $100,000 each to scientists who have come up with unconventional ways to destroy infectious diseases in the developing world. Below are some of our favorites.”

--------

OfficeMedium: Intranet for the Small Business User
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/officemedium-intranet-for-the-1.php


“We write a lot about the battles for the enterprise, the merits of Sharepoint and Google's pitches into the corporate world.
But it's always good to watch the new players who use existing open-source software to build something pretty quickly that people can use. OfficeMedium is a service that is a fit for the small business user with just enough social features to give it a decent chance of winning over companies looking to establish a community platform for their users.

OfficeMedium is a web-based, intranet and collaboration software. It's developed on the Drupal platform so you know it has every possible module available to it for adding on if needed.”

--------

Do You Learn More from Working for a Bad Boss than a Good Boss?
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/do-you-learn-more-from-working-for-a-bad-boss-than-a-good-boss.html

“Bad bosses suck, as I often document here.  Of course, you knew that anyway -- many of you know it all too well from first hand experience.  But perhaps they do more good than I have given them credit for in the past. Carol Bartz, the feisty, tough, unusually plain-speaking CEO of Yahoo! (see this earlier post or this story), makes an intriguing point about bad bosses in today's New York Times that is weirdly related to my recent post On Noticing That You Don't Notice. Here is the link to the interview, and the argument I found especially intriguing:

I also think people should understand that they will learn more from a bad manager than a good manager. They tend to get into a cycle where they’re so frustrated that they aren’t paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going well because it just feels fine.

When you have a bad manager you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: “Would I do that? Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do this?””

Loading mentions Retweet