Mashing up Docs and Spreadsheets

In CWorld: I thought this was being done generally, but this is a better way it seems.

" ... Instead of building a suite of separate productivity apps, a la Microsoft Office, Quip plans to have a single "canvas" where it will incorporate different features and functionality, including presentation software capabilities later.

Thus, the Quip product, which is designed for workplace collaboration, now lets users include spreadsheets within a word processing document, and if changes are made to cell values and formulas, those numbers are automatically updated where they are referenced in the text portions. ... " 

Reinventing the Hospital, The Game

From my long time favorite collaborative future consulting group:   Insititute for the Future (IFTF).  A favorite topic, reinventing health care.  I know of a number of related trials underway, lets do more.

It's Official: Over 4,500 Ideas for Reinventing the Hospital
On January 8—9, IFTF ran the 24-hour Future of the Hospital game on Foresight Engine, our collaborative forecasting platform, to help reinvent the community hospital. .... "

Leaders Make the Future

Bob Johansen
IFTF Distinguished Fellow
Institute for the Future
124 University Avenue, 2nd Floor
Palo Alto, CA 94301

Author of Leaders Make the Future, Second Edition  Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World.

At Procter & Gamble we worked with Institute for the Future starting shortly after its founding.  They often came in to give talks to our executives, and we used their training and brainstorming methods to understand new ideas.  They were also instrumental in introducing to key Silicon Valley companies and entrepreneurs.  Bob Johansen was their CEO during many of the years we used them.  A great experience.   I just reconnected with him, and I note the second edition of his book.. More information and pointers to it above.  I will follow with more on his book.

Where is Artificial General Intelligence?

We expected Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to follow quickly when we formed an artificial intelligence team and lab in the late 1980's.  Surely once we started to build incremental intelligence into the expert systems of the day they would soon be interconnected into 'general' intelligence that would guide the enterprise forward.  Yet that did not happen. Five years later our AI team was disbanded.  Despite some successes, they were all in focused, limited domains.   We invested in companies  that looked like they would become giants of AI, like Teknowledge.  But these companies also soon sank into limited domains.   Even successes like IBM's Watson are mashups of the ideas we used then.  What happened?  Why have there been no advances for AGI  in decades?

Discussed in Kurzweil AI.   Good thoughts.  One answer:  The hardware has not caught up yet.  Despite all the suggestion that the brain's neural methods would soon be replicable, it has not happened yet.

Brands American Women and Men Desire Most

In Forbes:   From a study by Buyology Inc, a former collaboration of mine:
" ... According to the second-annual study just released by Buyology, a strategic neuromarketing firm, and uSamp, a provider of technology and survey respondents used to obtain consumer and business insights, women and men have the strongest affinity for the low-cost airline among all major brands.

“The brands at the top of the Most Desired report have the strongest ties with the consumers we measured, and therefore, they have the ability to be more effective and efficient than their competitors,” says Gary Singer, Buyology’s chief executive and founding partner.... " 

The Second Economy: a Neural Model

Aspen Root Systems and a neural system for a second economy.   By W Brian Arthur, who we worked with at the Santa Fe Institute and applied in the enterprise.   It is all about better understanding complexity.   Many real world systems are very complex and in the early days we started with industrial simulations as models to find patterns. Many new techniques, by Arthur and others, are helping us to simplify these sim  models enough to make them usable.  Thanks to colleague Delaine Hampton for pointing me to this.

-  W Brian Arthur is a visiting researcher with the Intelligent System Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is an economist and technology thinker and a pioneer in the science of complexity. His 1994 book, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (University of Michigan Press, December 1994), contains several of his seminal papers. More recently, Arthur was the author of The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves (Free Press, August 2009).

IFTF Releases their 2020 Future Map

I blogged for the Institute for the Future for several years.  They consulted with our C-suite and we were often asked to follow up.   They are always saying some interesting things.  We followed their future map each time it was published.  Here is the latest: Public Release: The Future of Science, Technology, and Well-being 2020 Forecast Map

Google Maps Changing the Look of Data

in GigaOm. Good example of using Google maps based mashups to visualize data. I have seen a number of good examples of this. Simple representations, using the well known Google map UI. Of course many things are not possible to do easily this way.

Business Impact of Web 2.0 Technologies

In the CACM:  Excellent overview article.  Lot of good information to make the case in the enterprise.

Business Impact of Web 2.0 Technologies

What do wikis, blogs, podcasts, social networks, virtual worlds, and the rest do for corporate productivity and management?   by Stephen J. Andriole

This article describes research designed to measure the impact of the business value of wikis, blogs, podcasts, folksonomies, mashups, social networks, virtual worlds, crowdsourcing, and RSS filters—all Web 2.0 technologies. Properly deployed, they may well permit companies to cost-effectively increase their productivity and, ultimately, their competitive advantage; the research reported here includes results of interview, observation, and survey data-collection from select companies and industries primarily in the U.S. across six performance areas: knowledge management, rapid application development, customer relationship management, collaboration/communication, innovation, and training. ..... "

Big Green Boxes

An interesting idea via IFTF: Take unused warehouse space in a city and use it to implement aquaponics ... a combination of soil-less growing of plants, and using fish to provide manure to fertilize the plants in a closed system. In particular they mention growing herbs at lower cost. Herbs are notoriously expensive and they make the economic case that this would be cheaper and more sustainable than traditional agriculture. Distribution of the product nearby would be emphasized.

Very interesting idea, though I am skeptical. The required infrastructure ... heat, light and plumbing would be considerable. Energy costs high. Hydroponics (soil-less growing) are done today with crops like tomatoes, but are done primarily with high end and high cost crops. It adds to distribution costs and managing a 'just local' sales approach loses any economy of scale. Although this sounds very 'green', it is much more complex than doing it the old way ... also done for thousands of years. Maybe if you can get a big government grant?

Google Celebrates Maps Mashups

Its only been five years since the launch of the Google Maps API. ReadWriteWeb celebrates with an article about it, and points to their map of mashups. Have now been involved with several applications that used Google maps, and the potential unleased for GIS applications is phenomenal. Take a look at some of the examples shown.

Upcoming Talk on Mashed-up Visualization

On mash-ups for visualization, plan to attend:

The Last Mile: Data Visualization in a Mashed-Up World (May 20, at 3PM ET, then archived) Requires minimal registration.

Dashboards and data visualization technologies provide invaluable tools for understanding data. Mashups represent the latest development in the search for compelling visual representations of information. What's more, mashups enable powerful views of disparate data sets. Some of the world's biggest companies now use data mashups to get a handle on very serious situations. One example would be major insurance companies trying to predict the impact of an impending hurricane. Tune into this episode of DM Radio to learn how you can use data mashups to better understand your business. We'll hear from consultant William Laurent, as well as Allan Wille, Klipfolio; Alexander Chiang of Dundas; and Byron Igoe, InetSoft.... '

The Arrow of Time

Ever wonder what the meaning of time is? A wonderful set of Ted lectures by Sean Carroll on the arrow of time. Mind-bending. Via Delaine Hampton.
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Agent-Based Consumer Market Modeling

A number of my former colleagues at Procter & Gamble have co-authored a paper with some smart people I met at Argonne National Labs. Abstract below. Fascinating application of agents to markets. With very interesting details. To appear in Complexity Magazine. Congrats for its publication to everyone.

Multiscale agent-based consumer market modeling
Michael J. North 1 , Charles M. Macal 1, James St. Aubin 2, Prakash Thimmapuram 3, Mark Bragen 2, June Hahn 4, James Karr 4, Nancy Brigham 4, Mark E. Lacy 4, Delaine Hampton 4
1Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation, Argonne, Illinois 60439
2Modeling, Simulation, and Visualization Group, Argonne, Illinois 60439
3Center for Energy, Environmental, and Economic Systems Analysis, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois 60439
4The Procter & Gamble Company, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202

Abstract
Consumer markets have been studied in great depth, and many techniques have been used to represent them. These have included regression-based models, logit models, and theoretical market-level models, such as the NBD-Dirichlet approach. Although many important contributions and insights have resulted from studies that relied on these models, there is still a need for a model that could more holistically represent the interdependencies of the decisions made by consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. When the need is for a model that could be used repeatedly over time to support decisions in an industrial setting, it is particularly critical. Although some existing methods can, in principle, represent such complex interdependencies, their capabilities might be outstripped if they had to be used for industrial applications, because of the details this type of modeling requires. However, a complementary method - agent-based modeling - shows promise for addressing these issues. Agent-based models use business-driven rules for individuals (e.g., individual consumer rules for buying items, individual retailer rules for stocking items, or individual firm rules for advertizing items) to determine holistic, system-level outcomes (e.g., to determine if brand X's market share is increasing). We applied agent-based modeling to develop a multi-scale consumer market model. We then conducted calibration, verification, and validation tests of this model. The model was successfully applied by Procter & Gamble to several challenging business problems. In these situations, it directly influenced managerial decision making and produced substantial cost savings.

Fun Theory from Volkswagen

Via IFTF: The Fun Theory Site. Some ongoing contests for innovations in this space.

' ... This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better ... '