The more employees your company has, the less productive each of these employees are. It is a generalization, of course, but a useful one and one that is confirmed by most people who have worked for growing organizations. As the company grows, so does the internal processes and the layers of bureaucracy, and the time spent on communications grows rapidly.
InfoNGEN
About a year ago we did some work with a London-based private equity fund. The problem was information overload and the idea was to bring together multiple data sources, both public and private, to one data store that could add tags and other meta-data and build synthetic RSS feeds based on search criteria (and even adaptive learning).
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Thinking about success
Tom Peters made me think about how we define success. If you had a list of companies like Netscape, Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Oracle, which ones would you consider the the winners and which one(s) is the loser(s)?
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55 Ways to Have Fun With Google
I created an A4 version of the 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google book. If you are in a country where that is a usual paper size and you want to print the book, then this may be useful to you. The original book is released under a Creative Commons licence.
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Telling the truth: technique for unbiased survey answers
The truth. It is not always easy to get to it. If you are doing surveys or questionnaires you will know that people do not always reply honestly but are biased towards social norms. Ask for which sexually transmitted diseases a person is currently suffering from, and you will get lower responses than the frequency of the diseases in the population.
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XSLT + AJAX Data Grid
The XSLT + AJAX data grid described over on XML.com looks very interesting and solves a real and very common problem. Be sure to try the examples: there are lots of features there.
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John Kay on intuition
The second part of John Kay’s article that we wrote about recently is now available online called The maths may be simple but intuition is more use (from the FT or from John Kay’s site).
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A data driven business? But you can't be sure your mathematical model is correct….
“Data driven business” is one of the new buzzwords, and we are completely behind an approach to doing business that is fouded on real, observed data and rational decision. John Kay’s recent column Don’t box yourself in when making decisions (from the FT or from John Kay’s site) is a timely reminder of some of the hard limitations of modeling.
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RFID and privacy
We have written about RFID in the past, and the press has contained much debate about the privacy implications in a world where increasingly everything is tagged with a unique identifier. With RFID tags being implemented for national identity cards, privacy continues to be in focus.
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