Condivisione di buoni prodotti della Rete.
Le nuove tribù promuovono nuove infrastrutture di accesso alla Rete. L'innovazione la promuovono i Cittadini; siamo noi quelli che stiamo aspettando.
Twitter is an amazing tool. I have been fortunate to connect to some amazing people and great things have developed from the relationships that I have begun on Twitter.
Ma a spezzare il clima di tranquillità è stata la presidente di Confindustria Emma Marcegaglia, dal palco dell’assemblea di Unindustria in corso a Treviso. Senza giri di parole, ha dichiarato: «La politica deve tornare ad occuparsi di problemi veri». Marcegaglia ha poi aggiunto che la campagna elettorale è stata incentrata «sulle veline, sulle foto, sugli amanti delle mogli, ma di tutto ciò non frega niente, anzi fa un po’ schifo. E’ finita la ricreazione: dopo il voto, vogliamo tornare a vedere una politica che si occupi dei problemi veri».
The good: The Nokia E75 offers a compact design while managing to fit in a full QWERTY keyboard. The smartphone ships with Nokia's new messaging client, which features push delivery for all accounts. Other highlights include 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 3.2-megapixel camera.
The bad: The E75 is expensive. Call quality wasn't the best, and the dialpad on front is cramped.
We've had about a week to absorb the Google's pitch for Wave, its new experimental communication platform, and about a day to try the actual early "sandbox" build of the service. See our hands-on review. But there's more to talk about with Wave. It's not just an app, it's an important evolution in the philosophy of written communication.
People will see Wave in different ways. For some, it's a clever take on e-mail. Others will see it as instant messaging with new features. Developers will look at Wave's open specs and APIs, and see a framework for new collaborative apps. But is it really any of these things, or just a crazy experiment from Google's Australian outpost?
While we've heard a lot about Windows 7, we haven't heard too much about the software and hardware that will take advantage of the new operating system.
That's starting to change.
That's the annual reported growth of real gross domestic product per full-time worker from 1998 to 2007, according to government figures. "The amount that U.S. workers produce has grown at remarkable rates in recent years," gushed the 2007 Economic Report of the President. These productivity gains are usually held up as proof that the U.S. innovation machine has continued to thrive despite all sorts of obstacles.
But unfortunately, productivity growth may be overstated for two reasons. First, the economy was lifted by two financial bubbles in a row—the stock market bubble followed by the credit bubble—leading to excess growth of finance and real estate. "The financial sector contributed substantially to the surge in productivity growth," says Martin Baily, a Brookings Institution productivity expert. "Some of the financial innovation has turned out not to generate real benefits."
During the past decade, innovation has stumbled. And that may help explain America's economic woes
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"We live in an era of rapid innovation." I'm sure you've heard that phrase, or some variant, over and over again. The evidence appears to be all around us: Google (GOOG), Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, flat-screen televisions, the Internet itself.
But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted? And if that's true, is there any reason to expect the next decade to be any better?
These are not comfortable questions in the U.S. Pride in America's innovative spirit is one of the few things that both Democrats and Republicans—from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama—share.
But there's growing evidence that the innovation shortfall of the past decade is not only real but may also have contributed to today's financial crisis. Think back to 1998, the early days of the dot-com bubble. At the time, the news was filled with reports of startling breakthroughs in science and medicine, from new cancer treatments and gene therapies that promised to cure intractable diseases to high-speed satellite Internet, cars powered by fuel cells, micromachines on chips, and even cloning. These technologies seemed to be commercializing at "Internet speed," creating companies and drawing in enormous investments from profit-seeking venture capitalists—and ordinarily cautious corporate giants. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan summed it up in a 2000 speech: "We appear to be in the midst of a period of rapid innovation that is bringing with it substantial and lasting benefits to our economy."
Where are the new products?
With the hindsight of a decade, one thing is abundantly clear: The commercial impact of most of those breakthroughs fell far short of expectations—not just in the U.S. but around the world. No gene therapy has yet been approved for sale in the U.S. Rural dwellers can get satellite Internet, but it's far slower, with longer lag times, than the ambitious satellite services that were being developed a decade ago. The economics of alternative energy haven't changed much. And while the biotech industry has continued to grow and produce important drugs—such as Avastin and Gleevec, which are used to fight cancer—the gains in health as a whole have been disappointing, given the enormous sums invested in research. As Gary P. Pisano, a Harvard Business School expert on the biotech business, observes: "It was a much harder road commercially than anyone believed."
If the reality of innovation was less than the perception, that helps explain why America's apparent boom was built on borrowing. The information technology revolution is worth cheering about, but it isn't sufficient by itself to sustain strong growth—especially since much of the actual production of tech gear shifted to Asia. With far fewer breakthrough products than expected, Americans had little new to sell to the rest of the world. Exports stagnated, stuck at around 11% of gross domestic product until 2006, while imports soared. That forced the U.S. to borrow trillions of dollars from overseas. The same surges of imports and borrowing also distorted economic statistics so that growth from 1998 to 2007, rather than averaging 2.7% per year, may have been closer to 2.3% per year. While Wall Street's mistakes may have triggered the financial crisis, the innovation shortfall helps explain why the collapse has been so broad. (To see a full explanation of the problems with the economic statistics, go to Growth: Why the Stats Are Misleading.)
But here's some optimism to temper the gloom: Many of the technological high hopes of 1998, it turns out, were simply delayed. Scientific progress continued, the technologies have matured, and more innovations are coming to market—everything from the first gout treatment in 40 years to cloud computing, the long-ballyhooed phenomenon "information at your fingertips." The path has been long and winding, but if the rate of commercialization picks up, the current downturn may not be as protracted as expected.
To see both the reality of the innovation shortfall and its potentially happy ending, look at Organogenesis, a small company in Canton, Mass. Back in 1998, Organogenesis received approval from the Food & Drug Administration to sell the world's first living skin substitute. The product, Apligraf, was a thin, stretchy substance that could be grown in quantity and applied to speed the healing of diabetic leg ulcers and other wounds that had stayed open for years.
From a health perspective, the approval of Apligraf seemed to open up an entire world of "tissue engineering," growing all sorts of replacement body parts from living human cells. From an economic angle, the possibilities were equally appealing: Apligraf, approved in Canada and Switzerland, was being exported, creating skilled jobs in Massachusetts. This was the sort of high-tech product needed to drive the U.S. economy into the 21st century.
In 1990, in a keynote speech at the Comdex computer conference, Microsoft's (MSFT) then-chief executive, Bill Gates, bolstered his bona fides as a tech visionary when he declared the PC industry would produce advances within a few years that would put information at people's fingertips. To get there, Gates said, the world needed three things: a more "personal" personal computer, more powerful communications networks, and easy access to a broad range of information. Sometimes visionaries are right on the vision but off on the timing.
Top 10 Tools Lists of Learning Professionals 2009
Updated: 05/06/2009This is the 3rd year we have invited learning professionals from around the world to contribute their Top 10 Tools for Learning to build the annual Top 100 Tools for Learning. Below are the learning professionals who have shared their lists in 2009 to help to build the Top 10 Tools for Learning Professionals in 2009.To share your Top 10 Tools: Send the names of your Top 10 Tools, by Twitter to @c4lpt, or by email, or set up a blog posting - more info here