Innovation

In light of a spate of recent iPhone 3GS overheating reports, Apple published a set of guidelines to help iPhone users ensure that their devices remain at proper operating temperatures to prevent overheating and related issues.

In the past eight months, Ask.com has unfurled a set of changes to its search engine that the IAC unit calls a success, although its share of U.S. search queries has actually shrunk during that time period.

For many, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is synonymous with innovation, but not with the successful commercialisation of its intellectual property (IP).

Back in 2004, Texas Instruments (TI) noticed a problem in its customer service department, one that's typical in companies serving technical customer bases. Some of TI's main customers (engineers) buy and use some of the company's most technical products, such as digital signal processors. TI needed a better way to quickly provide answers to customer questions, without the customer sitting on hold with a call center, waiting for a representative who might not even have the technical expertise to answer the inquiry.

Web 2.0 is a set of technologies, a huge set of related functionality and almost a lifestyle choice. This straight-up, non-techie tutorial will help you separate the facts from the hype.

The combination of innovative IT and a cooperative orientation toward vendors leads directly to better vendor performance and firm profitability.

Enterprise 2.0 has the potential to provide knowledge and content management in a surprisingly cheap and easy fashion using Web-based tools. Learn what it's about, what distinguishes it from consumer Web 2.0 technologies and why you should pay attention.

Most organisations can benefit from a balanced scorecard approach, which can raise the profile of key projects, increase functionality, and predict future performance — and it often leads to greater financial return.

When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?"

Power Twitter user, former Mac evangelist, and Alltop cofounder Guy Kawasaki knows a thing or two about innovation. But, he says, that doesn't make it easy.

Mark Hennessy speaks candidly on transforming the IT organization at IBM, fostering a culture of innovation, managing IT during the financial crisis, maximizing the value of social networking tools, and taking advantage of an imminent technological game-changer.

Microsoft researcher Don Syme talks about the development of F#, its simplicity when solving complex tasks, the thriving F# community and the future ahead for this fuctional programming language.

IT leaders were told to "do more with less" even before economic woes exacerbated the issue. Savvy managers have always kept their eye on the goal: demonstrating what IT can do for the business, so that it's not always viewed as a cost center. Last week, one IT manager explained her strategy.

The role and expectations of IT have changed from service provider to innovator, strategist and service source. CIOs have to adopt a new approach to fulfil these expectations.

Improving business-IT alignment and demonstrating the value of IT are top priorities for CIOs, with many of them chronically relegated to playing catch-up to the businesses expectations and struggling to justify IT costs.

American poet Theodore Roethke once wrote, "In a dark time, the eye begins to see." Certainly, we would all agree that the current global financial crisis can be described as "a dark time." But, as Roethke's phrase suggests, this is also an opportunity to really see--to see and better understand the way the global economy works and how we can work more effectively within it.

Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, is a touchstone here in Silicon Valley. His book examines the process of innovation as it attempts to answer the question "why do most new technologies seem to come from startups and not from established companies that are also familiar with the technology?" He cites many markets as examples, including tube table radios (displaced by transistor radios), cable-driven steam diggers (displaced by hydraulic diggers), and disk drives (where successive waves of technology were represented in shrinking form factors) that brought new companies to the fore at each new wave. In each of these markets, according to Christensen, innovation shook up the established way of doing things and propelled new market entrants past companies that had dominated the previous technology.