About a year ago I was told to develop a keen, spontaneous interest in the enterprise implications of Web 2.0, a contentious beast that continues to draw a lot of attention. This I duly did, and as a result I have lots of wisdom to impart. I'm going to focus here on the social (i.e., no Rich Internet Apps or mashups) manifestations of Web 2.0. Space is limited: Wikis, blogs and social networks are all we'll cover. Hold tight--this'll be terse.

Wikis are shared editing environments. The most famous is the Wikipedia, which weighs in at more than 2 million articles (compare the Britannica at 65,000). According to Don Tapscott, 2,500 people contributed to a Wikipedia article on the London bombings of July, 2005. This "brains per deliverable" ratio is outrageously compelling to business. Problem with enterprise wikis: Participation. Approach: Make it people's day job (don't ask them to contribute in their "spare time") and (to get their feet wet) have them create a wiki deliverable on a deadline rather than a "living document" with no due date. (The "spare time" approach can work in a sufficiently large enterprise--if you have thousands of people aimed at a wiki, some of them will probably contribute something.)

New Scientist is reporting on new gaze tracking technology designed for use in 3D virtual worlds. Gaze tracking has been used for years by people with motor neurone disease, cerebral palsy and other "locked-in" syndromes, but only to operate desktop interfaces. This more recent technology will bring the likes of Second Life and World of Warcraft to people who can't play them with a keyboard and mouse.

According to the article, the magic is a suite of "eye gestures" that includes (among others, presumably) glancing off-screen in pre-defined directions. The gestures let the eyes become more expressive than they are when they're used simply as a mouse. This has obvious advantages for people with severe motor deficits.

According to The Register, there were 1,400 incidents of crossing guard abuse (driving past while they're in the road, revving engines, shouting epithets, etc.) reported in the UK last year. Dozens of guards (they're called "lollipop ladies" because of the signs they carry and because, apparently, few of them are men) have been hit by cars.

Local councils are responding with 1) training and 2) the Routesafe Monitor, a double-headed video camera installed in the lollipop person's stop sign. The camera is activated when the sign is held up and monitors the situation before and behind. Anyone misbehaving while the sign is upright will be taped and (presumably) tracked down and remonstrated with.

The (narrow but very important) problem: Test scripts used for version 1.0 of an application will probably break when applied to version 2.0 of that application. Testers try to edit old test scripts so that they won't need to create new ones from scratch, but the process is slow, tedious and error-prone. It involves running a script until it breaks (this may take a while), figuring out whether it was a test script error and, if so, correcting it, and then starting over...potentially hundreds of times.

An example: Imagine what would happen to a test script if version 1.0 of the application used a combo box while version 2.0 used a text box for the same function. Obviously, any script that touches (what used to be) the combo box will break in 2.0. This is an example of a Changed Object (CO) error. The other type of error is Wrong Path (WP), which occurs when a script tries to access a Graphical User Interface (GUI) element (button, check box, etc.) that's been removed in 2.0. Either error will bring the test run to a screeching halt.

The Register is reporting on a pilot program in the UK under which police officers will have video cameras sticking out of their helmets. The goal is to encourage good behavior on the part of suspects (and, I suppose, on the part of police officers).

So What?
I've long thought that ubiquitous video cameras will breed new levels of politeness in the citizenry, but it recently hit me that there's going to be another area where we'll see a significant impact: Bars.

I've brought up Twitter before. Twitter is a micro-blogging service. You use it to "tweet" messages of no more than 140 characters. Your friends, colleagues and the general public can follow your Twitter stream and keep up with such urgent intelligence as, "Feeling bored," or "Currently surrounded by idiots." Or, perhaps, "Arrested."

"Arrested" was the tweet sent by US citizen James Karl Buck from an Egyptian police car (using his cell phone). He had been covering an anti-government protest. The message was received by the numerous followers of his Twitter stream both inside and outside Egypt. It triggered a sequence of events that ultimately persuaded the Egyptian security services to part company with him.

Accenture Technology Labs has developed SABLE (Search, Analyze and Browse Large Environments), a search engine for parts of the firm's Knowledge Exchange (KX). SABLE supports document search (PowerPoint, Word, PDF, etc.), high-speed preview, bookmarking and the identification of experts. It's available to Accenture personnel at https://sable.techlabs.accenture.com

So What?
In addition to conventional search, SABLE uses a Web service the Labs developed that goes against a database of firm experts. Often when you search for a document, you're actually searching for a person. The document (if you find it) may be valuable, but the real jackpot is the name of its author, from whom you can get more up-to-date material as well as valuable background information. SABLE tries to short-circuit this process by supplying experts (as well as documents) explicitly in your search results. (This feature will be released soon.)

I recently got rid of my CD collection. It wasn't a big collection, as these things go: Maybe 200 discs. I didn't even need the shelf space...I just wanted to clear out an increasingly embarrassing relic of the "age of atoms."

So What?
Where am I getting my music now? There are two schools of thought--religion, really--on this question. There are the Buyers, who want to own their songs' bits and are willing to pay $.99 per track for the privilege. Buyers are usually iTunes customers.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently on Inrix, Inc., a Kirkland, Washington-based Microsoft spinoff that tracks speeds on 100,000 miles of US highway using data from GPS-enabled fleet vehicles, toll booths, road sensors...and citizens' mobile devices. The data is sold to a variety of companies (including MapQuest, Dash, and Garmin), which use it to provide traffic monitoring services to consumers.

Dash has perhaps the most interesting proposition. You buy their two-way navigation device and pay a monthly fee. The device reports your location and speed to Dash, and the locations and speeds of your fellow customers are aggregated and fed back to you as up-to-the-minute traffic reports.

Chatterbots can carry on an instant messaging conversation. Famous chatterbots include Eliza (the first) and Julia, who famously kept one college student on a string for over an hour. His end of the conversation consisted mostly of, "How do you type so fast?!" He never did realize that "she" was an "it." There's a hurdle that Artificial Intelligences need to clear; it's called the Turing Test and the standard version consists of the AI persuading a person (via an IM conversation) that it's actually a human being. Julia definitely passed the test--or the boy failed it, one of the two.

So What?
Chatterbots are interesting today because most of us have IM on all the time. Thus a tool that's accessible through IM may stand a better chance of being used than an equivalent tool available on some other platform, such as the Web. It's with this in mind that Accenture Technology Labs is developing Labsbot, an AIM-based system designed to help you locate internal experts. (Labsbot is not, strictly speaking, a chatterbot--it doesn't try to mimic human conversation.)

Recently, researchers at Harvard successfully stopped a pacemaker by reprogramming it using a radio transmitter--in other words, they did it from a distance, without touching the device itself. Fortunately (talk about your lucky breaks), the pacemaker wasn't actually in anybody at the time.

So What?
The "Internet Protocol" (IP) is the communications language used by the Internet. More and more devices speak it--the projection is that, one day, ovens, light bulbs, automobiles--anything that uses electricity--will implement IP and chatter away over the network. This projection often goes by the name "IP on Everything." (This is true. You can buy T-shirts.)

An editorial in a recent issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry presents the case for "Internet addiction" as a legitimate disorder deserving of inclusion in the DSM. (The DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--the official compendium of the conditions and syndromes that afflict humanity. If you want to get insurance coverage for your mental problem, it has to be in the DSM.)

So What?
Three areas comprise Internet addiction: excessive gaming; excessive preoccupation with (let's call them) basic drives; and excessive e-mail/texting. Each of these areas has three components: withdrawal symptoms; rising tolerance; and negative repercussions (as when relationships suffer or you start lying about your usage).

New Scientist reported recently on a strange necklace that will soon be available from Ambient Corporation of Dallas, Texas. It has a package of sensors that pick up electrical impulses around the vocal chords. These signals are used to drive an artificial voice. Effectively, the necklace lets you subvocalize audibly (if that makes any sense) or (equally senselessly) to converse without speaking.

So What?
It's actually designed for people who cannot speak normally, but Ambient apparently feels that there's a wider market. It would certainly be helpful in noisy environments---if the collar plugged directly into your phone, the party on the other end would hear only your (artificial) voice, not the noise. Then there are places where talking on the phone isn't (well, shouldn't be) acceptable--theaters, trains, etc. The collar could be a boon to polite society.

A colleague of mine just got back from the South by Southwest conference, a techno-lovefest that brings together software developers, graphic designers and a gaggle of luminaries of various persuasions. The big news, according to him, is that Twitter has come of age. (For a good explanation of Twitter see here.)

So What?
I wrote about Twitter once. I was not kind. Twitter is a micro-blogging service to which you post messages ("tweets") of no more than 140 characters, which isn't much in the English language. Friends, relations and the vaguely disturbed can subscribe to your feed, through which you're expected to reveal the details of your day. ("Sitting down...eating lunch...feeling bored...scratching hard.") My feeling about Twitter was that 1) I've got no time to record the details of my life because I'm too busy living it and 2) anyone who wants to follow my day-to-day activities desperately needs some day-to-day activities of his own.

Fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal recently about the English/Welsh DNA database. We'll sneak up on it.

The movie GATTACA always bugged me, or rather people's reaction to it did. Whenever I'd mention biometrics, people would say, "Have you seen GATTACA? Isn't that a frightening view of where DNA identification is going?" Well, no, actually. It's a frightening view of where DNA analysis could go, but identification is a different story.

Eighteen luminaries (including Google co-founder Larry Page) recently developed a list of 14 Grand Engineering Challenges which they consider "essential for humanity to flourish." A couple of the challenges seem a bit...odd (Enhance Virtual Reality, Reverse Engineer the Brain), but one stands out from the rest (at least, for the Labs): Advance Health Informatics.

So What?

Well, not really. The recent post-election violence in Kenya was, as it turns out, aided by the humble SMS message: Blasts of thousands of messages as well as simple friend-to-friend forwards carried incitements to murder--which were acted upon on a large scale. In response, the local telco broadcast several messages of rational moderation, apparently on the theory that "The cure for hate speech is more speech," as the popular saying has it.

So What?

New Scientist is reporting on something it calls the "Moanstick," an alternative joystick technology designed for people with motor impairments. With Moanstick, you can move the mouse smoothly in two dimensions, click, and double click–hands-free. How, you ask? By moaning dolefully with varied pitch, energy and vowel sounds. (The video has disappeared from YouTube! See some clips of similar technology here.)

So What?

Consumer electronics giant Philips has patented a ball-shaped, throwable display whose position and movement are tracked by a stationary controller; in addition, positions of players in the living room are tracked using ultrasound units. Philips says that the device could be used for a new generation of "whole body" games. One possible game that's been suggested is a version of Keep Away in which the ball turns a different color when it goes out of bounds.

So What?

There's a story by Oscar Wilde called The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian is a young man who owns a portrait of himself. He stays out late every night and is completely debauched. But he doesn't show any ill effects; rather, it's the portrait that becomes steadily older and more twisted. I won't give away the ending except to say that it is not pretty.

Which brings us to what you might call The Mirror of Dorian Gray, aka the Persuasive Mirror (PM), from our Sophia Antipolis lab. The PM takes as input your exercise habits, dietary habits, smoking habits and so on and then produces pictures of you as you will look in five, 10 and 20 years if you continue on your current path. People who try it tend to laugh nervously at the results.

Requirements Critic ("RC") is a joint project out of our Silicon Valley and Bangalore labs (time difference: An almost perfect 11.5 hours) that's looking for ways to aid the process of requirements development. Its current prototype is a Microsoft Word plug-in that acts sort of like a grammar checker–except it's checking the wording of your requirements documents for a range of common problems.

RC is part of a larger innovation agenda for Requirements Engineering that the Labs have developed in co-operation with the Global Delivery Excellence group. The broader vision is called "ACcenture Requirements Engineering Suite (ACRES)". The comprehensive suite that Labs is working toward will include a combination of commercial offerings and Labs-developed tools.

Philips has announced what you might call the "mood pen," a package of sensors (heart rate, blood pressure, skin temperature, finger pressure) built into a pen that collectively determine your emotional state and react accordingly. Ink color and tip shape can change during the course of a stroke; if you know how to read it, the line forms a record of the writer's changing state of soul. Philips says: "Signatures are currently always the same, yet some documents will be signed with enthusiasm, others possibly with hesitation. Having a recording of this could be useful for historical reasons."

Yes. Well. Certainly.

Revital Cohen, whom you might think of as an "artist," has developed a picture frame (which I guess makes it art) that displays real-time data from remote (say, in a hospital) life support machines. Putting the frame in your house would let you keep track of a loved one's condition.

So What?

MIT's Human Dynamics Lab is working on a form of social networking as old as humanity itself: Face-to-face introductions and subsequent chit-chat. Users wear badges that calculate how far apart people are standing (a good indicator of their reactions to one another, perhaps); record their conversation; and track their movements. In a large meeting with MIT corporate sponsors, the badges revealed a steadily more connected network (as people continued to meet each other throughout the day), with some vying for the title of "most connected" by trying to meet as many people as humanly possible.

So What?

Accenture Technology Labs' Enterprise Knowledge Retention (EKR) tool is an integrated suite of applications designed to ease the transfer of knowledge from worker to worker. It was originally designed for outsourcing engagements (where it's had great success under the name Rapid Transition Suite), but has recently been helpful in facilitating knowledge transfer for mergers & acquisitions as well as situations in which a workforce is heading rapidly for retirement. (There's also been discussion around using it to facilitate expansion into foreign markets.)

So What?

Aerotel has announced the GeoSkeeper, a Global Positioning System-enabled, wrist-mounted unit that alerts a call center when you press its panic button. The call center can also track your position and raise an alert when you leave predefined zones (such as your school). In addition to the GeoSkeeper (can you parse that name? I can't parse that name), Aerotel makes a variety of wireless medical monitoring devices suitable for "mobile patients." All of these products could, in theory, be combined to produce a comprehensive location/diagnostic "über-box."

So What?

Accenture Technology Labs' "Digital Pen and Paper Mobile Workforce Prototype" (DPPMWP) (Okay, who's responsible for our acronyms? Anyone? Anyone?) is one of many sales force automation tools we've developed over the years. It uses a digital pen (for input) and a cell phone (for communication and output). It works like this:

The sales rep fills out a form printed on paper that has a fine pattern of tiny (almost invisible) reference marks. As the pen moves over the paper, its miniature camera tracks the reference marks in order to stay oriented--and thus divine the strokes the sales rep is making with the pen. (This technology is available from Anoto.) When the form is filled in, the rep checks the "finished" box and the pen sends the stored strokes via mobile phone to a server, where they are interpreted (turned into text) and processed. Shortly thereafter, a result comes back via SMS to the mobile phone and is given to the customer. (It might, perhaps, be an insurance quote.) Circle complete.

And once again we come to a post on co-author Don Tapscott's Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. This Wikinomics series has just two posts to go; savor it while you can.

Don Tapscott's thesis in this chapter is that we're in an era of what I choose to call "mass platforms"–where a platform is defined as a collection of data/functions provided cheap/free to programmers who want to create new, possibly unexpected applications on top of it. For example:

I try to keep my posts non-technical, but sometimes I fail. This is one of those times. So it's probably best to skip the article below unless you played Dungeons & Dragons as a child.

Accenture Technology Labs' rather generically-named Knowledge Discovery Capability (KDC) is actually a sophisticated data integration and visualization tool designed primarily for use in research and investigative fields (e.g., science, law enforcement, intelligence, disease management, capital markets, etc).

This may come off as a naked plug for a new gadget, but it's actually a sober technology assessment. You have my word on this as a journalist, husband, father, and President of the United States.

I'm always interested in new user interface hardware and I've just run across the Digital Pen from Livescribe. The system uses specially-marked paper and a miniature pen-mounted camera to track strokes, then synchronizes with a PC to upload the data as an image or (see below) to convert the strokes to machine-readable text. As an input device–particularly for students who have to draw diagrams–it's hard to beat.

Time once again for an installment in the long-running Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything saga, in which we analyze Don Tapscott's startling 300-page tome. This time around we cover The New Alexandrians.

A bit of background: When the library at Alexandria burned to the ground in 642, it had over half a million volumes, a stunning achievement for its day. (By contrast, in the year 1,500, the largest library on Earth had only 1,000 volumes.) The library's collection was built by (admittedly forced) sharing: Visitors to Alexandria were obliged to allow scribes to copy any documents they carried. (Sometimes the visitors got back their originals...sometimes they got back the copies. C'est la vie.) The result was a spectacular public resource that could serve as a jumping-off point for a wide range of research.