Archive for the '2.0' Category

07
May

(r)Evolution

By Don Ardonio 0 Comments
Categories: 2.0, personal and strategy

I came across this post and immediately felt a very familiar sense. It’s something I had been wondering about for a while.

I started noticing on events and various ad-hoc meets that a lot of the crowd I know is also on twitter, has a (couple of) weblog(s), is all hyped up about latest developments in the e-world, … and all in all are probably a bunch of early adopters.

If I compare that to the business reality I live in, I often find myself far away from those people on the technological front (I don’t work in a internet related business, for those who might wonder). In general, my colleagues represent the ‘average user’. What strikes me most about them (besides the fact they rely on internet exploder) is that they still consider the internet as this ‘out there’ thing that by definition has to be accessed through a browser, either on their desktop or on their mobile. Which to me indicates 2 points that need to change before the masses will be ready for things like twitter.

1. The internet is not a set of web pages. It’s a medium to transport digital content of any kind, that can be stored somewhere in that cloud.

2. Out of realizing point 1 follows that you don’t need (just) a browser to access that content. Which opens a lot of opportunities to work with this concept in innovative ways.

Given that people imho will eventually adopt these 2 things, there are interesting times ahead of us…

25
Feb

Tripit, it just works

By Don Ardonio 1 Comment
Categories: 2.0, software and travel

Albert Einstein once said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." That’s exactly what TripIt does.

All TripIt does is aggregate all data that you get from confirmation emails when booking flights, hotels, rental cars, … . Adds in bits of information scraped from the likes of wikipedia, the weather channel, google maps, … . It doesn’t require a genius to come up with this, parsing some standard generated emails is a piece of cake. Adding in extra info may require a bit more effort, but still isn’t rocket science. Nothing all that brilliant at first sight, but here’s the catch.

It’s dead easy to use, it’s fantastically thought through and cleverly crafted to minimize your effort. The lazy web at it’s best.

Really, all you do is forward those nasty gibberish confirmation emails. Tripit will figure it out for you. It doesn’t require a lengthy, time consuming, sign up procedure. Since you sent them an email, they know your name and your email address. That’s enough personal information for one day isn’t it?
Once you forwarded your first mail you get a nice return mail (caught by my company spamfilter, but they are aware this happens often, unfortunately). That return email contains a link so you can quickly go check out your travel plan, at that point you’ll be prompted by a "real" sign up, which has a nice skip button. So you can easily use it without having to register. Ever!
Further in that return mail is also a username (your email address) and a password, for future log-on purposes.

Finally, to add in some 2.0-ness, you can share and discuss your travel plans with friends (or colleagues) and figure out who out of your network is close to you. I still need to get some friends hooked up on this, so I can start checking this thing out :)

Conclusion. Awesome, it simply does what it needs to do, without making it complicated, time consuming. And since 90% of the population uses the same top airlines, travel agents, car rentals and hotel chains, it’s able to parse everything most people will ever need (you can still manually add/change if you really have to). I know the year is still long, but this is already a huge contestant for my personal "tool of the year" award!

Also check out the demo videos. It really is that simple.

12
Nov

2.0 in the Enterprise vs Enterprise 2.0

By Don Ardonio 0 Comments
Categories: 2.0 and communication

2.0 is everywhere these days. It’s not a thing reserved for early adopters anymore.  It’s found its way into politics, the media, marketing and (no surprise) the enterprise. The enterprise, Did it really? Let’s take a sidestep first and explore some basics about communication.

How we communicate

Communication as found on wikipedia:
"Communication is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. Communication requires that all parties understand a common language that is exchanged with each other. Exchange requires feedback. The word communication is also used in the context where little or no feedback is expected such as broadcasting, or where the feedback may be delayed as the sender or receiver use different methods, technologies, timing and means for feedback."

Let’s just focus on the key ideas I conveniently underlined.

Exchange requires feedback
I’d like to rephrase this for the sake of this post to: Thinking requires feedback. Strictly speaking, exchange is not necessary as one-way traffic exists. We all know the typical all-hands meetings where our beloved CEO, CIO, CTO, CFO and whatever CxO we could find comes to tell us how we are doing. It’s a form of communication where there is very little feedback generally. You are informed of certain events and general status. It does not require a lot of activity from your side and certainly not a lot of thinking. Now when it comes to thinking, even when doing it all alone, your inner self will use language to help your other inner self (or inner selves) understand the problem and you’ll try to describe it. Writing it down, talking it through with others (in or outside your head), … they all require a common platform…a common language.

Language
Probably the single most important thing I know. Language is your gate to the world and is probably worth an entire weblog discussing it.  The thing is, if you can name something there is a link formed in your brain that allows you to think about it. Arguably the single most important thing about language: Language facilitates thinking.  

Information
If Language is your gate to the world, than information is what is behind the gate. There’s literally thousands of information units generated this very moment. And they are all out there, for you to grab, as long as you know what gate to go through.

Let’s now have a look at communication in a 2.0 environment.

Communication 2.0

We’ve spent ages defining language, getting new words and getting our brain to link up everything so we can think about stuff. With great results, no doubt. But exactly what have we been investing in?

As stated above we invested in a lot of words, forming a language. And that language facilitates thinking and we have a lot of information out there. So seems like we did a good thing, we invested in the 3 key concepts. Great job! Go humans!

And yet, there’s something missing. Communication amongst peers does not stop because of language, nor does it stop because of information. It’s hampered by the feedback part.

Just keep your attention span a bit longer on this article and follow me: you and your colleagues sitting in a meeting room, facing the same problem. There may be 4 of you using language and giving each other feedback on bits of information that could add up to a solution to your problem. Great. There’s 4, no doubt brilliant, minds in that room trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Now imagine you would do that with every engineer in your company (assuming you don’t have a 4 engineers company). And even better, let’s take if full scale 2.0. Imagine solving this problem with every mind on the planet that knows this language. Wouldn’t that be something worth investing in? Welcome to 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0?

So there are some tools out there that facilitate communication 2.0. Think about wikis, sharepoint, blogs, … . Which is easy to set up in your enterprise. So here we are than. We all see the benefit of communication 2.0, we have a central wiki page to capture and discuss our issues and to keep others in the loop and allow them to give an opinion. Enterprise 2.0? I, for one, disagree. You introduced 2.0 in your enterprise, but you’re not at Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 is not having the tools in place. Enterprise 2.0 requires an upgrade from Employee 1.x to Employee 2.0. It requires every last one of them (or at least "the critical mass") to actively participate in your company. It requires them to invest time in a philosophy, to maybe pick up the pace on some language from another department. And above all…it requires them to think!

Transparency, open communication, information sharing, collaborative thinking, … to me they’re more than buzzword compliancy for the execs in their speech. They are the next evolution for communication, for better thinking.