I absolutely agree. Use constraint to help you think about where innovation may lie. It’s one of the biggest challenges to government (certainly in the UK). There are so many initiatives with badly-drawn and / or conflicting delivery targets that the will to innovate disappears.
Private Information Retrieval asks an interesting (to me) question:
Can you make queries from a database without the database knowing what you want ?
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The answer is, of couse, that you can, but you have to be clever about it. This has a strong bearing on how Google and the like store our personal information (which an IP address is pretty well equivalent to). Related question: do most citizens notice the loss of privacy due to CCTVs? Question: do they notice the benefit when they need them?
Philips Chief Technology Officer for Electronics has some interesting comments around innovations:
if you begin to look more recently, then you begin to see a mix of innovations, which are technology innovations with innovations that are much consumer centric, or consumer-driven innovations, utilizing in some cases a very innovative technology
Give it a try – so long as you are validated genuine Windows! The promise of RSS consumption and tabs is a nice one, but I’m loving Performancing on Firefox, so it will be a big, big job to convince me to change back.
The Sullivan nod is genius. I’m going to try it.
Some good, but less god-like tips on recruitment from Guy Kawasaki. I whole-heartedly agree with getting people who are better than you. (Yes, there are some out there, in response to your not quite stated question).
Update: linked tips on how not to mess up your CV.
Use a thing called Hamachi to secure your VNC setup. My home VNC only works from my work address, so I’m pretty secure, but this looks like a good option.
Man, Scoble worries me about our 1,000 person conference we’re running in April. Then again, we’ll need about £1,000 spend per head to make it zing – a cool £1m to you and me. We’re not being so creamed on refreshments in the same way, and we have a great load of sponsors to take the weight off. And I do hope we avoid doing any of this.
More Guy on running a business. Rathole goal avoidance is an important concept to grasp.
Neat trick – I’ll never get it to work.