Excellent post from Andrew McAfee. Key points:
One of modern IT’s most underappreciated roles is as an enforcer of process discipline. Today’s enterprise systems make sure that complex, multi-step processes – ones that involve employees, customers, suppliers, and other groups—are executed the same way time after time, location after location, with few or no exceptions.
Today, the parts of a business process that are executed with the assistance of IT are the easiest ones to control, monitor, and enforce. They’re also the easiest ones to reengineer with confidence…
KPOs - Copal and Pipal - are featured in the New York Times today.
In all the brouhaha over the new iPhone and its features, one thing that’s particularly promising is that with the cellular carriers really focusing on data as a source of revenue growth, voice minutes are bound to get cheaper. If I understand it correctly, the iPhone voice minutes are not going to be priced higher than any other phone’s, but the data plan is more expensive.
The US Supreme Court applies what it calls the “doctrine of patent exhaustion” and says LG can’t go about suing everyone up and down the supply chain for patent infringement.
The current issue of the Harvard Business Review has a fascinating study of patent sharks and their tactics.
The authors make five recommendations to counter patent sharks. To that, I’d like to make a sixth: Use IP landscaping (samples on our wiki) to understand the key players and key inventions before jumping into a new field.
Macaques control robotic arm and eat with it.
It seems like WalMart too has decided to go with the “tested and true” SAP platform. If this had happened 5 years ago, it would be considered a HUGE win. Today, WalMart doesn’t have quite the cachet… the aura is gone. But a big win for SAP nevertheless.
A very interesting perspective on nuclear power: the construction costs for nuclear plants are rising sharply enough to make it untenable.
End-of-life treatment in UCLA costs twice as much as that at Mayo Clinic.
Two of Dolcera’s newest team members have prepared a new demo report each:
- Pressure Sensitive Adhesives: by Srinivash Rao, who is part of our chemistry team
- Carbon Nanotubes: by Swapnil Gautam, who is part of our physics team
These are demo reports and not comprehensive, but they have a lot of information that practitioners in this field and those just dabbling alike would find useful and interesting.