Category: The innovation blog

The beauty of scale

Gilbert and George, David Hockney and Andy Warhol are just some of the geniuses who have found artistic inspiration in printing technology. French street artist JR has kept that grand tradition flourishing with the aid of a £63,000 grant from the TED conference and an HP Designjet Z6200 large-format printer.

What’s in a name?

You may be enthralled by the prospect of stealing a march on your rivals by changing your internet domain name when applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs, to give them their official acronym) open in January. Certainly the opportunity to have a URL which ends in .polo rather than the prosaic .co.uk sounds intriguing. The bad news is that it will cost you around £116,000 to apply, £16,000 to register and around £6,000 a week to maintain the domain name. Clashes – where a number of companies all bid for the right to use, for example, .print – will be resolved through specific procedures set up by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN).

The next internet revolution

Companies that have barely adjusted to Web 2.0 – the user-generated content revolution which made it possible for anyone to become a publisher – may not want to here this but the digerati are already talking about Web 3.0. In essence, Web 3.0 is the customisation of the internet. Using services like Facebook, millions of internet users will use people they know or trust to help them navigate the billions of pages on the web.
Travis Katz, one of the founders of MySpace, says: “In the future, every page will be personalised. If I’m planning a trip to Paris, you shouldn’t see 900 hotels. You should see six, based on where you’ve been before, the places you’ve checked on Facebook and Foursquare and places where your friends are stayed”.

Computer says “What?”

The collision of two powerful forces could stifle business innovation in the 21st century: new fangled computers and old fashioned bosses. That is the fear expressed by Andrew McAfee, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://andrewmcafee.org/ ). While new technology gives companies the potential to create a collaborative, networked business – a model that some have labelled Enterprise 2.0 – most bosses, McAfee insists, aren’t interested: “They say let’s not have a networked enterprise, let’s have a row-and-column enterprise, let’s have a grid enterprise, where people are sitting at their work stations everyday, with their heads down, getting work done every day, all day, not really forming communities and having voices, but just cranking out work.”

Innovation in their DNAMcAfee’s point is underlined by an interview once given by James Watson who, with Francis Crick, discovered the double helix structure of DNA. Asked how they had succeeded where others had failed, Watson...