SmallBusiness.co.uk
July 30th, 2009 by admin. No Comments »Read Jasper’s thoughts on flexible working in SmallBusiness.co.uk’s first article in a series about technology in business
Mashable’s take on Google Wave
July 22nd, 2009 by Jasper. No Comments »Mashable have released an initial review of Google Wave. I think that Ben Parr hits the nail on the head in his line of questioning.
Is it altogether too different to how people work today? Does it demand people learn too many new techniques and approaches to be usable?
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A oneDrum perspective on Microsoft Office 2010
July 15th, 2009 by Jasper. 2 Comments »This week Microsoft started talking more about its Office 2010 release, specifically, changes to the desktop application, a new web-based version, and support for each in SharePoint. Since this impacts us at oneDrum, I’ve spent some time trying to understand what is coming.
Changeboard
July 15th, 2009 by katy. No Comments »Read Jasper’s article about how collaboration can drive innovation on Changeboard.com
Another oneDrum Tour
July 13th, 2009 by Jasper. No Comments »
oneDrum beta demo 2 from Jasper Westaway on Vimeo.
Video for TechCrunch Europas
July 13th, 2009 by Jasper. No Comments »
Tour from Jasper Westaway on Vimeo.
Types of innovation
July 13th, 2009 by Jasper. No Comments »A lot of people have been quizzing me about the relationship between collaboration and innovation. This got me to thinking about types of innovation over the weekend.
In my experience I’ve come across the following:
1. Process innovation – deliver a product faster or cheaper; Dell was a process innovator through it’s mastery of supply chain management.
2. Shop front innovation – sell a given product differently. Amazon is a great example, selling an old fashioned commodity (books) through a web browser.
3. Product innovation – Improve an existing product.
I did a search on Google and – as you might expect – there has been a lot of study in this area. Although there are several different characterizations, to my mind, two other significant sorts were thrown up by my search:
4. Business Model innovation – For me an example is Skype, who employs their customers computers as parts of their infrastructure for routing calls. This does not improve the product! This allows them to scale users for free.
5. Marketing innovation – Discovery of new markets (who knew teenagers would buy stuff!?) and ways of reaching those markets. I’m tempted to roll this into the shop front innovation but one could still market to the same people, the same way but through a different shop front.
Thanks to our private beta testers
July 13th, 2009 by Jasper. No Comments »I would like to thank all of our private beta testers for their work over the last few months.
From now on we will be gradually brining more users on board (again apologies to everyone that has registered for being later than we expected).
The key issue we have had to address since we started testing is around version management. We originally built a rather traditional version control mechanism, but the private beta has revealed that this does not work well when file versioning is combined with real time changes.
For those interested, the new approach uses a class of algorithm called operational transform – and incidentally Google Wave uses a similar approach. This took us longer to implement than we anticipated but it is now in place and we are rolling it out.