- Organisational Warfare (Simon Wardley) — notes on the commoditisation of software, with interesting analyses of the positions of some large players. On closer inspection, Salesforce seems to be doing more than just commoditisation with an ILC pattern, as can be clearly seen from Radian’s 6 acquisition. They also seem to be operating a tower and moat strategy, i.e. creating a tower of revenue (the service) around which is built a moat devoid of differential value with high barriers to entry. When their competitors finally wake up and realise that the future world of CRM is in this service space, they’ll discover a new player dominating this space who has not only removed many of the opportunities to differentiate (e.g. social CRM, mobile CRM) but built a large ecosystem that creates high rates of new innovation. This should be a fairly fatal combination.
- Learning to Win by Reading Manuals in a Monte-Carlo Framework (MIT) — starting with no prior knowledge of the game or its UI, the system learns how to play and to win by experimenting, and from parsed manual text. They used FreeCiv, and assessed the influence of parsing the manual shallowly and deeply. Trust MIT to turn RTFM into a paper. For human-readable explanation, see the press release.
- A Shapefile of the TZ Timezones of the World — I have nothing but sympathy for the poor gentleman who compiled this. Political boundaries are notoriously arbitrary, and timezones are even worse because they don’t need a war to change. (via Matt Biddulph)
- Microsoft Adventure — 1979 Microsoft game for the TRS-80 has fascinating threads into the past and into what would become Microsoft’s future.
ENTRIES TAGGED "geo data"
Four key trends changing digital journalism and society
Commonalities between the Knight Foundation's News Challenge winners hint at journalism's networked future.
It’s not just a focus on data that connects the most recent class of Knight News Challenge winners. They all are part of a distributed civic media community that works on open source code, collects and improves data, and collaborates…
The Transportation Security Administration's QR code flub
Prank or mistake? A QR code on a TSA poster links to a non-TSA site.
Fred Trotter discovers that a QR code embedded in a TSA poster at the Orlando airport links to justinsomnia.org, which is about as far as you can get from a government website.
Strata Week: IBM puts Hadoop in the cloud
IBM taps the cloud to make Hadoop easier, Factual cleans geo data, Google gets transparent with gov data requests.
IBM targets businesses with a cloud-based Hadoop product, Factual tackles incomplete geo records, and Google embraces transparency by publishing and explaining the data requests it gets from governments.
Top Stories: October 17-21, 2011
The joys of animated geo data, Angry Birds and the future of mobile testing, and a look inside The Guardian's creative process.
This week on O'Reilly: Andy Kirk explained why data, maps and animation work so well together, we discovered the connection between a game-playing robot and the future of mobile app testing, and we learned how The Guardian develops its data journalism.
Visualization deconstructed: Why animated geospatial data works
Inside animated geo visualizations.
When you plot geographic data onto the scenery of a map and then create a shifting window into that scene through the sequence of time, you create a deep, data-driven story.
Why indoor navigation is so hard
Your phone can get you to the museum, but it can't guide you to the T-Rex.
The mapping applications built into smartphones are fantastic … until you arrive at your destination. Here, Nick Farina explains how indoor navigation apps can and should work.
ePayments Week: Financial Times bets on its web app
Financial Times goes all-in on its web app, Flickr puts up fences, and daily deal fatigue sets in.
The Financial Times says subscriber data trumps Apple's reach, Flickr introduces geofencing to keep things private, and the cracks in the daily deal world start to show.
ePayments Week: The rise of location-triggered offers
Very local deals, iPhone users ready to spend, and Androids attract crapware
Placecast offers merchants a geofence to corral customers. Also, UK researcher YouGov says iPhone users are more willing to buy with their phones, and telecoms bury Androids with crapware.
Four short links: 18 July 2011
Organisational Warfare, RTFM, Timezone Shapefile, Microsoft Adventure
3 big challenges in location development
Darian Shirazi on location's trickiest issues and how an open places database could work.
With the goal of indexing the entire web by location, Fwix founder Darian Shirazi has had to dig in deep to location-based development issues. In this interview, Shirazi discusses challenges he sees in location and how Fwix is addressing them.
Radar 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 