Change
Today on my commute in, the train engineer announced that the conductor was retiring after 40 years. I would miss this guy - after all, I chatted with him almost every morning and he rides a motorcycle, which makes us kin in some circles. More importantly (and potentially relevant to you), his 40 years of service made me reflect on career spans and industry changes. This man spent 40 years working for a transit organization. Certainly, transportation has made some significant changes in 40 years, but nothing compared to Technology, I thought. Perhaps that is why so many of us love this field. I did a quick search on the history of Technology over the last 40 years, and below is what I found. The History of Computers at About.com, highlights:1969 - ArpaNet came online
1970 - First Dynamic RAM
1971 - The first microprocessor and Floppy Disks
1973 - Introduction of Ethernet
1974/75 - The first consumer computers (Altair & IBM 5100)
1978 - First Spreadsheet Software (Visicalc)
1979 - Introduction of Word Processors
1981 - The IBM PC - Home Computer
1981 - Microsoft MS-DOS Computer Operating System
1983 - First home computer with a GUI (Apple's "Lisa")
1985 - Introduction of Microsoft Windows and so the war with Apple begins
For the full article, check out About.com's article.
I chatted with my fellow commuters in the IT field and we tried to uncover other industries exposed to such dramatic changes in 40 years time. We thought of several fields, but all were driven by Technology evolution first. In the end, perhaps it is change that makes all of us Techno-geeks and IT Business leaders so enthralled with our profession.
Labels: Deep Thoughts, Management
Mashups - Not Just Maps
It seems like the topic of Mashups is getting a lot of press again lately. Conceptually, it's nothing all that new and mashups have been around for several years. Wikipedia defines mashups as:... a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source."With IBM's announcement of the release of Lotus Mashups at Lotusphere in January, we have another example of how Web 2.0 and web-as-a-platform solutions are presenting solutions for the early adopting enterprises. Still, the majority of mashups today seem to focus on map overlays. This is where I liked IBM's positioning at Lotusphere - while they covered the mandatory examples of map overlays, they also really emphasized data-to-data and other non-(geographic)map mashups.
I took a quick look around for some of the more innovative and popular non-map mashups and here some that stood out:
- Love-o-Graph: Don't trust yourself, match.com or any other dating algorithms? Why not entrust the future of your love life to a mashup driven entirely off of your name and your prospective partner? I found the future for my wife and I is "open to interpretation".
- LivePlasma: A cool visual representation of connections between musicians, actors, films, books and so on from the Amazon API.
- Secret Prices: A really cool site that combines data including online coupons and rebates with sales sites and opinion data.
- Similarity Web: This site takes Amazon.com's "Customers Also Bought" logic and provides an impressive visualization of similar products.
- Google vs. Yahoo: With this mashup, you can compare the results of a search as reported by Google and Yahoo.
For more examples of mashups, check out Programmable Web. In particular, they have a somewhat dated article on increasing non-map mashups.
Labels: IBM, Social Networking, Web 2.0
