It is always a pleasure to see meaningful, useful applications of any technology. Some of these are just surfacing for Twitter. Here is one mentioned in the article India Inc is All Twitter.
Of what use can 140 characters be to a very large private bank in India? If those characters make a “tweet”, you will be surprised with the results. With the help of Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO of search engine marketing firm Pinstorm, and his team, this private bank monitors around 1,600 tweets or conversations a day.
Murthy and his team respond to 200 to 300 tweets daily to either thank the twitter for a complimentary remark concerning the bank or “correct a perception” as Murthy puts it.
“Even simple things like not having enough cash in an ATM get reported in tweets. It is extremely important to react at the earliest to such problems and the tweets give the bank ample opportunity to take quick action, remedy the situation, and preserve their brand image in the bargain,” explains Murthy. The other tweets are ignored but nevertheless stored for future reference by the bank.
Ideas trigger ideas. I hope Mahesh and his team get the due recognition for taking Twitter to Banks. I hope they continue innovating and inspire many of us to do so as well.
Source: A friendly Tweet from @nramaiah
DbPedia is a public database built using RDF and is a great example of LinkedData. When you see DbPedia and Freebase, you can see the slow emergence of data web. From their web page
Source: Reddit Semantic Web thanks to @mhermans
Turn Your Head…Towards Your Mobile Phone The American and Australian scientists at STAR have received a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation to develop the cough-analyzing software for developing countries where access to health care is more limited than in first world nations. from Read Write Web http://bit.ly/32YC8U
It is amazing how innovative the world is. This blog is an attempt to share some of them with all of you.
A bit of a background. I spend time talking about Innovations in Learning. I am also exploring setting up innovation cells in Engineering institutions in Chennai, India, where I spend a lot of time nowadays. It is amazing to see how much creativity exists among students. Hopefully the icell effort will help foster more innovation. We plan to conduct workshops on innovation and share knowledge with students. Will chronicle how this turns out on this blog. Meanwhile, I may just do a couple of posts a day about stories on innovation and tools we find.Google Alert – multicore OR multi-core OR “parallel computing” or “parallel programming” OR “concurrency” OR “manycore”
| Google hopes to remake programming with Go CNET News – San Francisco,CA,USA Go also is designed to tackle one of today's big challenges, multicore processors. … Go's libraries supply resources for handling concurrency, … |
| Intel Software Network Blogs » Videochat with Microsoft's Steve … By Michael J Huelskoetter This means two things: first, "multi-threading and parallel programming" is a hot topic and second, that software developers are really looking for decent information regarding parallel computing. Seems as if the time has come that … Intel Software Network Blogs – http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs |
| Message Passing Concurrency in Erlang By Sujana Message Passing Concurrency in Erlang. November 10th, 2009 · No Comments. ØREDEV, Developer conference was held from Nov 2nd to 6th in Malmö, Sweden. The conference was founded in 2005 by Jayway and Dotway, two companies comprised of … MulticoreInfo.com – http://www.multicoreinfo.com/ |
| TechEd: Four top tips for parallel-enabling your software from … By softtalkblog SoftTalk – multicore and parallel programming. For software developers interested in the issues around multicore processors, multithreaded applications and the optimisation of programs for multi- and many-core processors. Expert articles and opinion, case studies, … It struck me as interesting that three of these strategies related to the user experience, so perhaps manycore processors will enable us to be much more innovative with the experience we deliver to users. … SoftTalk – multicore and parallel… – http://softtalkblog.wordpress.com/ |
| TechEd Parallel Computing for Managed Developers « SoftTalk … SoftTalk – multicore and parallel programming … Im in Berlin this week reporting from Microsoft TechEdsee the parallel computing highlights listed here … |
In addition to teaching core engineering subjects, I think we need to add three (may be optional) courses.
1. Entrepreneurship
2. Learning and Thinking
3. Innovation
The idea is to give students an appreciation of what entrepreneurship is all about. Students joining smaller start-ups learn every thing faster in the first few years (though may not make as much money).
We take both learning and thinking for granted. The best training we can give students is the ability to understand how they learn and think. We can include several aspects of thinking including critical thinking, later thinking, thinking about thinking etc. Learning to learn is taught implicitly (by just forcing them to learn a lot). Increasing awareness of learning styles, multiple intelligence will help students realize several ways to accelerate their learning.
Innovation is taking ideas and realizing an implementation (the joy of doing). Most of the labs I see repeat some standard set of problems. Why not let the students do a bit of exploration and research in problems they are interested in solving and innovate in identifying and solving problems?
Discovering relevant sources of information is a recursive process. Let me explain.
Let us say that you want to track clean tech. The easiest way to find a list of sources is to type "cleantech" in your favorite search engine and look at top 20 distinctly different sources. You can also search Twitter using related tags. But that is just the first step. When you look at these you will find several interesting patterns. You may find portals about cleantech. You may find a directory of resources. You may find some popular bloggers or authors. The list goes on. The next step is to take each one of these sources and validate them. That is a bit more difficult. How current are they? How frequently do they update information? Are they aggregators? Do they support ads? Are they industry associations or industry publications? In the end, you come up with a list of valuable sources. This provides a starting point. You can continuously monitor these sources and find what their sources are and start tracking them as well. You may want your own relevance ranking system. The search engines ranking may not really work for you. For example, if you are tracking an industry for early signals, highest page rank of the site may be completely irrelevant to your needs. Discovery is recursive and a continuous process. If the information is that important (some thing you may need to act upon) this additional investment in validation and customization may be worth the effort. Let me know what you think and how you do it.Here are a few I can think of:
1. More Research In Colleges2. Increased Awareness of Entrepreneurship among both faculty and students
3. Tolerance for Failure (teaching how to fail quickly and cheaply)
4. A good network of angels, mentors, investors
5. A good knowledge of Trends in the industry
6. Knowledge of Markets and Customers
7. Idea and product incubators (that not only provide infrastructure but help in business development too) There may be many more. Feel free to add your item here.
Once in a while I am lucky to stumble upon an interesting Tweeter. I always looks at the way they describe themselves. It tells you quite a bit of what you can expect.
Retooling Early Stage Development – Steve Blank (Serial Entrepreneur)
Ninety-percent of Silicon Valley's start-ups fail not because of faulty product, but because they don't tap the right market and they don't know their customer. Well-seasoned serial entrepreneur Steve Blank drafts a new model for plotting the path between good idea and market success. Some nuggets Unless you have some domain experience, the odds are that what you are thinking about customers and markets is nothing more than a guess. May be an educated guess, but still a guess
