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What can the Mythbusters teach us about prototyping

andrea.mariotti — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:51:43 +0000

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On May 18th I attended the VLAB event at Stanford University titled The Business of the Brain. During the reception prior to the event I had a chance to talk with Jamie Hyneman, host of Mythbusters and a serial entrepreneur. We did not have a chance to speak long but I did engage him on the topic of how to design a system (prototype) to validate an hypothesis, or in his case, a myth. Obviously we are operating in parallel universes in that I build software prototypes and not physical devices. Still I wanted to hear his approach and compare methodologies.

If you think I am mixing apples and oranges you will be surprised to know that this is not the first time that someone pokes around in other industries for a better methodology.

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admin — Thu, 06 May 2010 11:10:05 +0000

Whiteboard sharing apps for iPhone, a comparison

andrea.mariotti — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 20:36:03 +0000

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Introduction and Why

I reviewed few business card scanner apps, a scan app (for scan benchmarking) and a LBS based digital business card exchanger called Bump ©. The goal of this comparison is to quickly asses the state of the art for this class of products for this device and to identify common pitfall and shortcomings.

The How

I kept this simple, take a couple of rather ordinary business cards and try to scan them both in office light and in day light (outdoors that is). If the outcome was something I could use, than it was a success. Anything else was a failure, for example, partial read, incomplete names etc.

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Why this post

I wanted to perform a quick comparison of iPhone apps that take photos of a white board, clean up the image and then share it. We recently released one such app and we wanted to see how we perform against the best of breed.

Methodology

Business Card readers for iPhone, a pragmatic comparison

andrea.mariotti — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:36:03 +0000

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Introduction and Why

The How

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Introduction and Why

The How

The Power Behind The Coming "Internet of Things"

Daja Phillips — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:36:03 +0000

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The predictable pathways of information are changing: the physical world itself is becoming a type of information system. In what's called the Internet of Things, sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects--from roadways to pacemakers--are linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet. These networks churn out huge volumes of data that flow to computers for analysis. When objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding complexity and responding to it swiftly. What's revolutionary in all this is that these physical information systems are now beginning to be deployed.

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Ricoh Innovations iPhone App Becomes the #1 Business App in the Japan App Store

Berna Erol — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:36:03 +0000

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by Berna Erol, Director of Web Business Research, RII

Title says it all, our Whiteboard Share iPhone app has exceeded 10,000 users in just 3 weeks after it was released and became the #1 iPhone Business app in the Japan App Store! What's the story, why did we put together this app in the first place, where are we going with this? Please read on.

How many times did you have a whiteboard discussion and think “How are we going to get this off the whiteboard?” Of course there are options: You can take a picture of it with a camera, connect it to your computer, email it to your co-workers.

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by Berna Erol, Director of Web Business Research, RII

Computing Has Left the Building and Other Sound Bytes from Cloud Connect 2010

Michael Gormish — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:36:03 +0000

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When I started as an intern at Ricoh I was provided with a Sun/350 computer and color monitor which cost more than my annual salary. Now Amazon rents far more powerful computers on the cloud for pennies an hour. Many companies have already moved their computing needs from the desktop into the 'server room' but now the computation is being migrated completely offsite. Today students believe that a desktop computer is for playing games, while work gets done on laptops and mobile devices. Setting up a data center is more expensive than renting services. Not only are the computers leaving the offices, computing itself has left the building.

There were three main things people attending this conference were interested in doing: moving applications out of the server room and onto virtual machines in the cloud, doing large amounts of computation on data sets, and providing webservices without managing infrastructure.

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Partially cloudy with a chance of revenue

andrea.mariotti — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:36:03 +0000

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This past Monday I attended the 2010 Cloud Connect Business Summit. This was my first attendance at Cloud Connect and I purposefully choose to attend only the business summit. This is held on the first of four days. My goal was to learn the point of view of other players in this field and to evaluate and identify important trends that may very well have nothing to do with technology (i.e. barrier to adoption, business model issues etc.)

Where we were few years ago

Some panelists spent time recalling where we were a few years ago to show the progress that has been made in Cloud Computing.

Where we were few years ago

The iPad, why you will want one in 12 to 18 months.

andrea.mariotti — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:36:03 +0000

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There has been a lot of buzz before and after the formal introduction of the iPad. I am not going to repeat any of it here, I am just going to share my educated opinion as to why this device matters to you, me and everybody with a pulse. You simply may not know it yet.

The flop

The iPad is misunderestimated. It is misunderstood because the expectations were set too high by years of anticipation and when we realized this device does not walk on water, the bubble burst. It is underestimated for the same reason. Most of us missed the forest for the tree.

The flop

App2Me - Free to Fee - The Importance of Free Software to Large Enterprises -CIO Study

Daja Phillips — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:36:03 +0000

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With the recent launch of App2Me, there are many debates about whether or not Ricoh should charge for software widgets that run on the users PCs or mobile devices. According to new research* commissioned by Global Graphics, just over half of large organizations (51 per cent) will deploy more enterprise-wide free software in 2010. Even more astounding is that 76 percent of the large organizations surveyed state that they already use free software across the enterprise. Indeed, over half (54 per cent) of large organizations use more than 10 different free software products. The findings are based on interviews with 400 CIOs from organizations with over 1000 employees across the US (300 CIOs) and the UK (100 CIOs).

Free to Fee -Alive and Well in Large Enterprises

"Free software is a critical part of large organizations' IT strategies," says Gary Fry, Chief Executive Officer, Global Graphics.

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By Daja Phillips