email communication in a big organization like adidas is always a bit complex; because many people have to be involved to make decisions. you start a communication by sending an email adding a receiver and CC your boss. the receiver ‘replies to all’ and CC his boss plus two more people plus… you know the game. what happens is that a lot of people get involved and start writing in unstructured ways, sometimes simultaneously.
the message A. gets unstructured and unclear and B. it is hard to keep track of the initial goal of the email since its appearance and structure is totally messed up.
the interface of google wave
now google had a great idea to solve this problem and developed a tool called WAVE. and what I have seen so far it seems to fix the everyoneinvolved-email-problem.
wave combines todays communication tools such as twitter and blogs with the ‘traditional’ and most used communication tool; the email. One can respond with a short message or tweet inside of a ‘static’ email. a mashup of an official document email (compared to a tweet it is pretty much an official document) and a modern, short message or comment (such as tweets). for more information please check out the video presentation attached – its pretty long but explains wave very detailed.
ican see wave coming as a big thing in organization and companies. there is a huge need on the one site and the willingness to implement web 2.0 technology on the other site (see former articles ‘adidas new corporate intranet‘ and ‘article gründerszene ‘). wave is a great solution at the right time. lets wait for it being launched officially!
just recently linguee.com went online, a online translator that was founded by Gereon Frahling (research scientist at Google Inc) and Leonard Fink. at the first glance linguee looks like a ‘traditional’ translator like leo or beolingus. but looking at the technology on the backend it is one of the most powerful translator tools on the market.
linguee uses statistical machine translation. it compares websites of different languages to each other and predicts the translation of a word by the context and way it was used before. by that it improves itself by aggregating and analyzing texts ongoing. this means that all information available on the web might one day be analyzed and used to improve the translator.
the big advantage compared to other online translators: it is A. not depending on peoples/communities than just on a machine and B. can be used for any language out there.
google uses old traffic information and construction information to predict future traffic
linguee is a good example of how powerful computers can be nowadays and what they will be able of tomorrow. do you remember the ‘translator glass wall’ from the microsoft video? theoretically no problem anymore – if you put the right hard and software tools together.
but many sectors outside the translation area profit from this technology. lets take a look at google’s traffic prediction. google uses old traffic information and construction information in order to predict future traffic. this is pretty easy because traffic is often very static, still it provides very useful information. using this prediction in combination with the amount of cars plus the average co2 emission of a car will show you the produced polution.
by comparing maps, geological data, articles about climate worming, development data of the past 100 years, mineral resources, natural resources (and so on) with each other you get a pretty good picture where it would make sense where and how to build future streets. ’show me how to expand NYC by 1 million people during the next 10 years by being as eco-friendly as possible’ could be the question for the computer. and the answer would be a three dimensional map showing different locations describing a scenario and prediction to every location based on the predictions.
future applications will be based on statistical prediction and information aggregation. the result will be the reduction of complexity on the one hand and a better quality of results on the other hand.
recently i was mentioning wolfram alpha, the new search engine developed by stephen wolfram. now it is finally online and pretty impressive. it aggregates information from different sources and does not give you a reference to another source that could be able to answer the question (like google) than gives you the answer right away. it is very helpful when gathering general information about weather conditions, stock level etc.
check it out!
wolfram alpha information aggregation about new york
such a great story: as you might have heard have the pirate bay founders been convicted to pay 30 million SEK (swedish crowns) for illegal file sharing etc (read here). well, since they do not agree to the adjudgement they came up with a new way to pay the 30 million; by asking the former users to spend one crown each. what is the idea behind it?
well, the idea is to harm the law firm: their account excepts only 1000 free transactions, all other transactions cost 2 crowns for the account holder. but to pay 30 million crowns with single transactions of each 1 crown will take 30 million transactions – 29.999.000 for each two crowns (one crown win, two crowns lost = -29.999.000 crowns).
pirate bay calls it DDo$ attack, even it might not crash the bank servers it might damage the law firm pretty much. it would be even better to ask all “contributors” to transact the money in the same moment. that would probably lead to a DDo$S attack…
read well the pirate bay blog
we all want to know how computing will look like in future. i thought it would be interesting to post some videos about how researchers and organizations see the future of computing. enjoy video 4 of 4, Mozilla Labs Aurora about “The Future of The Web”.
Mozilla Labs developed a video about the future way of browsing the internet. “Aurora is a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series. Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.” the video is split in four parts.
a lot of the aurora-ideas are very likely to become true, since they are, to some extend, available today (shopping recommendation based on personal profiles, personal stream about actions etc). sometimes the scenarios are a bit over the top, such as sending someone else’s personal data to shopping pages in order to get a birthday-present recommendation (part four). but i do not preclude that this might be possible some day.
i like the idea of pushing and pulling elements onto each other to automatically create new perspectives and views. and by live-sharing this information with colleagues and friends a totally new way of collaboration is realized. nice ideas for a future way of work.
wolframAlpha is supposed to go online this month; a search engine that aims to be better than google. well, there have been many search engines that stated to be better than google, why should this one be? because its founder is stephen wolfram, well known physicist, mathematician and founder of the software Mathematica.
stephen wolfram published an article on particle physics at age 16, entered Oxford University at age 17 and wrote a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 17. he received his ph.d. in particle physics from caltech at age 20 (wikipedia)… now you know, why we computer geeks are waiting for wolframAlpha to go online.
nova spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks, already had the chance to take a look at WolframAlpha. he stated the following: “It’s not a Google killer — it does something different. It answers questions. It’s an answer engine rather than a search engine. [...] The Wolfram|Alpha engine differs from traditional search engines in that it does not simply return a list of results based on a query, but instead computes an answer. (more)”
such a great story: as you might have heard have 
