Is it just me, or is tech reading/writing become increasingly tied to current affairs? Here are some interesting links:
techPresident – Obama's CTO: Never Mind Who; What Should S/he Do?
The US CTO discussion is interesting. Some people/organizations are advocating that the CTO should focus "internally" -- cleaning up the Government's use of technology. Others, feel that the CTO should focus on the technology required for the US to regain competitiveness and be energy independent. While there is plenty of work to do in the former, I tend to lean towards the latter. How can we harness technology and encourage technology-based innovation to move the nation forward? For more views, click thru on the link.
Telcos: Don't mess up the Internet with regulation | Politics and Law - CNET News
With Administration change, Net Neutrality to be 2009 topic "The next Congress is sure to introduce Net neutrality legislation, a Democratic congressional staffer said Thursday. "With the Obama administration being extremely supportive of Net neutrality, we're quite excited we can actually get things done," said Frannie Wellings, telecom counsel for Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D)... Representatives from the telecommunications industry insisted they have a common interest in maintaining open networks since their revenues come from carrying bits--but say that they're OK with the current state of the law. New legislation, they say, is not the way to achieve open access--and could even have adverse results. The Federal Communications Commission's ruling against Comcast proved the commission's approach of reviewing possible Net neutrality violations on a case-by-case basis is effective, said James Cicconi, senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs for AT&T."
elemental links: Net Neutrality – An Important Topic for National Conversation
My Net Neutrality piece from Feb 2006. An attempt to frame the issue – how we got here and the positions of each side. I do offer my own opinion at the end, but my goal in writing the piece was to present the issue neutrally. With the intent to engage more people in the national conversation.
SAP and Microsoft, Watch Your Back - BusinessWeek
tech consumption shifts: "As the U.S. enters what appears likely to be a painful recession, a major shift is taking place in how businesses assess technology products. They're under terrific pressure to cut costs. According to a newly revised forecast from market researcher IDC, growth in U.S. tech spending will decline to 0.9% in 2009, down from a previous forecast of 4.9% growth. But rather than just slice budgets across the board, many companies are switching to a handful of new technologies that save them money...the downturn seems likely to hasten their adoption. Chief among them are software delivered over the Internet, known as cloud computing, such as Google Apps; so-called virtualization software, which allows companies to run multiple applications on a single server computer; and open-source software, which is created collaboratively by multiple companies and is typically less expensive than the traditional kind..."
This part reads like good news to me. The business should own business process and information definition. "The Forrester study also revealed that business leaders want their own staff to become more knowledge about certain technologies and become capable of playing a bigger role in facilitating technology for themselves. For instance, 59 percent viewed it as a top priority for staff to garner business process analysis skills, 53 percent said the same about project management and 47 percent indicated a similar interest in information modeling. In addition, 43 percent wanted to know more about collaboration tool configuration and customization, which Forrester attributes to business use of wikis, blogs, conferencing and instant messaging. Essentially if the technology directly impacts a business unit, leaders want to be involved."
Mindjet Player Offers Portable Visual Collaboration Maps
This looks interesting... "The crown jewel in Mindjet's new release is easily the Mindjet Player, which allows users to take the interactive mind maps they created with MindManager 8, turn them into Adobe PDFs or Flash .SWF files. These files can be shared with anyone with a computer. Or, if you don't want to share the mind maps, you can publish them in blogs or embed them in Web pages. "The idea is that I could send a PDF to somebody, they could open it up and what they would see instead of just a picture of a map, a fully functioning MindManager map with all of the content and links to external information," Rasking said."
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