Friday, January 13, 2006

What is pushing IT innovations

Looking at the true real new applications in the past year it occurs to me that it is not business software where all innovation is happening. If we have a look at the productportfolio of IBM, Microsoft, Sun and Oracle there aren't many new applications. We have a better infrastructure but nothing new for the end-user. Google is currently the most innovative company and most of its products are targeted at the consumer, not the big business.

We don't need the capital of the big business anymore to sponsor new technology. Infrastructure costs are very low and small startups can implement their ideas with little costs. Open source software taps into a pool of bright and very driven community of developers.

How to organise one's life online

The number of free online services is rapidly increasing and I am still overwhelmed by all the possibilities. I use services like blogger, basecamp, del.icio.us, yahoo, skype, etc. to organise my schedule, do projects, keep a journal, organise my information and communicate with people. I still need to structure how I will use each service. For now I have settled for blogger as my journal, for all topics: personal, technical, work, etc.

I got my self linked up with the Technorati network, yet another application of the social networking phenomenon that is happening around us. Very neat how I can combine the Blogger service with Technorati. I still need to tag my posts and this blog in general.

Waiting for the tram


IMG_0046.JPG
Originally uploaded by soemirno.
On our way to france. A picture from our last vacation. Just for testing the blogging functionality from within Flickr.


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Using knowledge as an asset

I guess adsense is a way of making money of ones knowledge: create some content that will attract people and generate revenue with google ads. It will not make you rich but it could be a steady stream of income not directly related to quantity of labour, but rather by the quality of your output or more specifically the need for your content.

So I made my first 7 cents by using adsense on this blog. Not much for now, but who knows how it will grow in the 35 years to my pension.

Career Decisions

Had lunch with a colleague about my future career. We came to the conclusion that working at slb has such an attraction om me that I must pursue this before anything else. So I need to fix my resume and contact my previous manager again. I guess it is a good time to have look at slb as an employer with the current high oil prices. Lots of investments and work in this sector.