Commercializing new inventions

Could be another useful Webinar from Caltech: Assessing the Commercialization Potential of New Inventions, covering key topics on recognizing and capitalizing on opportunities:

• Nine key questions to better assess the commercial potential of new inventions
• Critical skills your company should possess to move inventions to the marketplace
• How to involve your customers in the commercialization process
• Taking technological leadership through acquisition of external inventions

A simple word cloud generator

Here’s a simple and fun new tool from IBM alphaWorks: Word Cloud Generator. Building on the Wordle technology, also created by Jonathan Feinberg, an engineer at the IBM Research Collaborative User Experience lab in Cambridge, MA, this tool lets you generate interesting (and pretty) word clouds based on a set of words. The lab is also responsible for previous visualization technologies on alphaWorks including Many Eyes and History Flow Visualization Application.

Emerging markets ripe for product innovation

Here’s an approach to innovation that’s becoming popular — first design and develop products for emerging markets where necessity demands lower barriers to access and adoption. In the article Innovation Trickles in a New Direction, BusinessWeek takes a look at how large corporations like GE are selecting products traditionally created in rich nations but choosing to develop and test them in emerging markets first before mass marketing them in established markets. This is an R&D strategy (and a potentially cost effective one) that many companies may start paying more attention to in virtually every sector, especially in tough economic times.

Remembering not to forget…or something like that

At the end of the movie When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal quips about the song Auld Lang Syne: “What does this song mean?  My whole life I don’t know what this song means.  I mean, ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot’.  Does that mean we should forget old acquaintances or does it mean if we happen to forget them we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them!?”

Well, I don’t know about the song either, but it reminds me that there are many people and experiences I’d like to remember from 2008. It’s certainly been an interesting year, with far reaching political, economic and social implications. Personally, at work, this has been another year of meeting brilliant and interesting people, learning from them, and sharing some of their technologies and ideas here. And as 2008 closes with another balmy, blue-sky day here in Los Angeles, I’m also reminded why I like living in California and that my family and I are fortunate to be here.

So, no New Year’s resolutions as such — I don’t do that anymore, but some things I’ll work toward in 2009 include becoming even more of a minimalist than I already am, traveling, making it to the ocean more often, reading more books, and right here in this blog, I’d like to:

• Write more – more often, and about more topics
• Stay away from talk of social media and Web 2.0 (unless market forces make it impossible not to)
• Look out for more emerging companies, technologies and ideas
• Talk more about emerging markets, especially the places I’ve lived in and traveled to in Africa and Asia
• Follow more smart people out there (please let me know if you’re one of them)

… Just a few things for me to ponder on December 31st, reflecting on old acquaintances and more, and looking forward to a great new year.

Happy New Year!

Exploring virtual worlds for the blind

Like me, you probably cringe at the mention of anything related to virtual worlds–Second Life or otherwise. But there’s a new technology we’ve just published on alphaWorks called Virtual Worlds User Interface for the Blind and it’s undeniably interesting.

As the name suggests, this technology allows blind users to navigate SL. But more importantly, it explores accessibility issues that visually impaired users encounter while navigating the Web, including communication and accessing various forms of content. It’s a niche technology, but the goals of this research project are far reaching.

Automatic indexing of multimedia content

Tackling the problem of dealing with large amounts of image and video data, this new technology on alphaWorks called Feature Extraction Service annotates multimedia content. It applies machine learning techniques across multiple visual features to automatically index visual content. These semantic annotations can then be used by applications for search, filtering, classification and other content management.

Created at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, this service builds on the capabilities of the IBM Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval System, also available on alphaWorks–an automated desktop indexing and multimodal search system for digital image and video collections.

A distributed federated database: GaianDB

I’m glad to see alphaWorks end the year with the launch of a technology I learned about in January at IBM’s Hursley Software Lab. Gaian Database is a dynamic distributed federated database. It was developed to provide a robust self-organizing distributed database on mobile ad-hoc networks, borrowing concepts from autonomic and grid computing, and adding many complex features. Developed as part of the USA-UK international technology alliance (ITA), this ambitious research project is worth checking out.

New visualization tool: QueryScope

I think the ability to visualize a problem can really enhance our understanding of any subject, and it’s especially helpful in digesting highly technical information. Some of our most popular technologies on alphaWorks are visualization tools, which is why we selected this project from the T.J. Watson Research Center called QueryScope — it lets you transforms multi-page SQL statements into colorful bubble diagrams. Just launched today, this tool is really geared toward helping database architects and administrators in the thick of things.

The creators of cool visualization techs

After every presidential debate, I’ve been pleased to see people using Many Eyes for visual analysis of the speeches and the occurrence of specific words. Many Eyes is an info visualization tool that also allows collaborative visualization by groups of users. It’s one of our most popular services on alphaWorks.

While I frequently talk about new technologies that we launch, you don’t always get to know about the great people that create these innovations. The Many Eyes team, for example, is part of the Visual Communications Lab at IBM Research, where they’re working on numerous innovative projects that will hopefully see the light of day soon. The team includes researchers Fernanda Viegas, Matt McKeon, Frank van Ham and Jesse Kris, as well as Martin Wattenberg, the creator of the Visual Communications Lab.

Today, I’m highlighting Martin in particular, because he’s the common thread behind other visualization technologies on alphaWorks, including History Flow — a tool launched several years ago for “visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors.”

Martin is also responsible for co-developing, with his wife Laura, the Baby Name Wizard, a very cool tool that lets you track the historical popularity of names. ‘Cynthia,’ for example, was pretty popular in the 40s, but not so much now. ‘Cynthya’, as my parents spelled it, has never been used! I even checked the Baby Name Wizard before my son Ellis was born to find something that’s not widely used anymore. Try it out on your own name.

I’m really looking forward to the next visualization techs to come from Martin and the rest of the team.

In search of early adopters

I talk a lot about early adopters but it’s a term that’s hard to define in some ways. To a great extent, it’s a self-defining group that changes for any particular technological innovation. But the most interesting thing about early adopters is that, in reality, there are very few of them. Fewer than we might like to admit.

A well-known diffusion theory by Everett Rogers places early adopters on the adoption curve between innovators and mass adoption (early majority, late majority and laggards). We frequently refer to this curve to define the majority of alphaWorks users who:

• Explore and experiment with the latest innovations
• Tolerate bugs and alpha releases to test out early implementations
• Impact the design and development of technology through feedback
• Impact mainstream adoption of ideas and products

While I’m continually reviewing business cases for unproven technologies to be offered to early-adopter communities on alphaWorks, this knowledge doesn’t always make me an early adopter. It’s true that I frequently know about new artists and songs before my friends. But in other things, perhaps like many of us, I fall into the early majority.

I’ve known colleagues who thought up ideas long ago that today are being implemented by someone else. And friends addicted to new technology, who constantly accumulate a plethora of tools and gadgets… willing to give things at least one shot for the sake of innovation or novelty. They are the Early Adopters. Technoholics. Technologically promiscuous. The labels go on… but these are the kind of people that we rely on at alphaWorks for our business model to succeed.

So, where do you sit on the adoption curve?