InfoCompanions » Internet http://www.infocompanions.com Brain spasms of an enthusiast who loves to live at the intersection of business, innovation, process and technology Sun, 26 Sep 2010 16:37:28 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Stefana Broadbent: How the Internet enables intimacy http://www.infocompanions.com/stefana-broadbent-how-the-internet-enables-intimacy/ http://www.infocompanions.com/stefana-broadbent-how-the-internet-enables-intimacy/#comments Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:01:56 +0000 Himanshu Sharma http://www.infocompanions.com/?p=506 We worry that IM, texting, are spoiling human intimacy, but ’s research shows how tech is capable of cultivating deeper relationships, bringing love across barriers like distance and workplace rules.

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]]> http://www.infocompanions.com/stefana-broadbent-how-the-internet-enables-intimacy/feed/ 0 The power to connect the world http://www.infocompanions.com/the-power-to-connect-the-world/ http://www.infocompanions.com/the-power-to-connect-the-world/#comments Sun, 04 May 2008 06:00:00 +0000 Himanshu Sharma http://www.infocompanions.net/?p=90 talks about his commitment to giving the whole world access to the . Ruiz is the CEO of , and through ’s 50×15 initiative, Ruiz and his company hope to connect 50 percent of the world to the by 2015. Sharing his own extraordinary life story, Ruiz makes the case that access to education is life-changing.

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About Hector Ruiz:
Hector Ruiz is chairman and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Born in Piedras Negras, Mexico, Dr. Ruiz is passionate about the role of technology in education and empowering the underprivileged. At the 2004 in Davos, he announced AMD’s 50×15 Initiative, a commitment to provide 50 percent of the world’s population with basic Internet access by the year 2015.

Ruiz contends that his company’s 50×15 initiative is “not only possible; it is perhaps the most important event we will experience in our lifetime.”

]]> http://www.infocompanions.com/the-power-to-connect-the-world/feed/ 0 The Web in 2012 http://www.infocompanions.com/the-web-in-2012/ http://www.infocompanions.com/the-web-in-2012/#comments Sun, 16 Sep 2007 07:00:00 +0000 Himanshu Sharma http://www.infocompanions.net/?p=55 A panel on the future of commerce, journalism, and community on the , featuring (fox/e-commerce), Arianna Huffington, and (social media/Craigslist) from the 2007 New Yorker Conference. In a closer look at this webcast it was interesting to see the differing perspectives of Barry Diller and . Diller argues that professional media practitioners will in the future be taking up a more significant role in the user-generated domain. A viewpoint that has some connections with ’s recent book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture’.

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About Barry Diller:
Barry Diller is an American media executive responsible for the creation of Fox Broadcasting Company. In the hip, young world of Internet start-ups, media mogul Barry Diller, owner of the Home Shoppingand USA Networks, the Sci-Fi Channel and Ticketmaster, is sometimes regarded as an interloper. But Diller’s innovative spirit, which helped invent thetelevision miniseries and launched the brash young when no one thought a fourth network was possible, is now hard at work integrating old and new media into a commerce empire.

About Arianna Huffington:
Arianna Huffington is an author and nationally syndicated columnist in the United States. Huffington describes herself as a “former right-winger who has evolved into a compassionate and progressive populist”. She is the founder of The Huffington Post, an online news and commentary website and aggregated blog. Her latest book is On Becoming Fearless… in Love, Work, and Life.

About Craig Newmark:
Newmark is an American Internet entrepreneur best known for being the founder of the San Francisco-based website Craigslist. Newmark attended Morristown High School. Upon graduation he attended college at Case Western Reserve University. Newmark is a vocal advocate of keeping the Internet free. He has donated $10,000 to a non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, which plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the Internet. Newmark resides in San Francisco’s Cole Valley and is active at craigslist in customer service, mostly dealing with spammers and scammers.

]]> http://www.infocompanions.com/the-web-in-2012/feed/ 7 The Web’s Secret Stories http://www.infocompanions.com/the-webs-secret-stories/ http://www.infocompanions.com/the-webs-secret-stories/#comments Sun, 29 Jul 2007 07:00:00 +0000 Himanshu Sharma http://www.infocompanions.net/?p=39 wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web — so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there. Here he presents “We Feel Fine,” a project that scours blogs to collect the planet’s emoti(c)ons, and the “Yahoo! Time Capsule,” which preserves images, quotes and thoughts snapped up in 2006. And he premieres “Universe,” which presents current events as constellations of words — a tag cloud of our collective consciousness.

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About Jonathan Harris:
Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan Harris’ work celebrates the world’s diversity even as it illustrates the universal concerns of its occupants. His computer programs scour the for unfiltered content, which his beautiful interfaces then organize to create coherence from the chaos.

His projects are both intensely personal (the “We Feel Fine” project, made with Sep Kanvar, which scans the world’s blogs to collect snapshots of the writers’ feelings) and entirely global (the new “Universe,” which turns current events into constellations of words). But their effect is the same — to show off a world that resonates with shared emotions, concerns, problems, triumphs and troubles.

]]> http://www.infocompanions.com/the-webs-secret-stories/feed/ 0 There’s Innovation Ahead http://www.infocompanions.com/theres-innovation-ahead/ http://www.infocompanions.com/theres-innovation-ahead/#comments Sun, 13 May 2007 07:00:00 +0000 Himanshu Sharma http://www.infocompanions.net/?p=29 The dot-com boom-and-bust is often compared to the 1849 , and .com founder offers historical evidence showing how similar they were: from the riches made by pioneers to the media hype that attracted luckless speculators. But a better analogy can be found in the early days of the electric industry, he says. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was first wired to support lightbulbs; the following century saw a long procession of new appliances, life-changing advances, and of course some amusing failures. His conclusion in 2003: “I believe there’s more innovation ahead of us than behind us.”

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About Jeff Bezos:
Jeff Bezos didn’t invent online shopping, but he almost single-handedly turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. His Amazon.com began as a bookstore in 1994, and quickly expanded into dozens of product categories, forcing the world’s biggest retailers to rethink their business models, and ultimately changing the way people shop.

But Amazon.com isn’t just an internet success story. It’s the standard by which all web businesses are now judged — if not by their shareholders, then by their customers. Amazon set a high bar for reliability and customer service, and also introduced a wide range of online retail conventions — from user reviews and one-click shopping to the tab interface and shopping cart icon — so commonplace we no longer think of them as once having been innovations.

When the bubble burst, Amazon.com took a hit with the other e-commerce pioneers, but the fundamentally sound company hung tough. It now sells more than $8 billion a year of goods, profitably, and its technology will influence the changes to business and media that will come next. Bezos, meanwhile, is one of the few early Web CEOs who still run the companies they founded. Outside of his work with Amazon, he recently founded Blue Origin, a space-flight startup.

]]> http://www.infocompanions.com/theres-innovation-ahead/feed/ 0 Wikipedia’s Growth Secrets http://www.infocompanions.com/wikipedias-growth-secrets/ http://www.infocompanions.com/wikipedias-growth-secrets/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:00:00 +0000 Himanshu Sharma http://www.infocompanions.net/?p=41 assembled “a ragtag band of volunteers,” gave them tools for collaborating, and created , the self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished encyclopedia of the future. Here, he explains how the collaborative approach works, and why it succeeds. Along the way, he debunks some controversies, explains the “neutral point-of-view policy” and why it is non-debatable; and details the Wikipedia governance model: a democracy with a bit of aristocracy and some monarchy thrown in.

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About Jimmy Wales:
Jimmy Wales went from betting on interest rates and foreign-currency fluctuations (as an option trader) to betting on the willingness of people to share their knowledge. That’s how Wikipedia, imagined in 2001, became one of the most-referenced, most-used repositories of knowledge on the planet, with more than one million articles in English (compared with the Britannica’s 80,000) and hundreds of thousands in dozens of other languages, all freely available.

The “wiki” in the name refers to software that allows anyone with Internet access to add, delete or edit entries. This has led to controversies about the reliability of the , prompting the to set tighter rules for editors, while still keeping Wikipedia open-source. One thing is certain: Wikipedia will never be finished. In the meantime Wales has started working on , a wiki-style search engine.

]]> http://www.infocompanions.com/wikipedias-growth-secrets/feed/ 0 Innovation in Deloitte http://www.infocompanions.com/innovation-in-deloitte/ http://www.infocompanions.com/innovation-in-deloitte/#comments Sun, 18 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000 Himanshu Sharma http://www.infocompanions.net/?p=40 , Manufacturing Industry Group Leader speaks of innovation in . Recently voted by member firm clients in Australia as the most innovative professional services firm, as part of Review Weekly’s St. George Bank professional services client award, Australia’s innovation program has become a beacon for clients seeking a trigger to supercharge growth. Inspired by the success of the initial program in Southern Africa, Australia encourages its people to explore innovative ways to grow business for clients; to think of new products and services for the market; and to make improvements in internal processes and service delivery.

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Deloitte United States has begun a similar program called “ Quest,” which has also been fostering a culture of innovation. All ideas submitted to Quest are reviewed, added to an “Idea Bank” and posted to a blog. Ideas recommended for further exploration are offered R&D support and resources to create a preliminary business case. If an idea is ultimately recommended for implementation, its contributors also receive a monetary award.

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