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June 2009
Friends,
 Today I received an email from the good ol' IEEE
(I made all my previous employers buy me a membership, and my current one is no exception). It
offered me a bonus of a free e-book, which I had to choose from a list of three options. And what
cracked me up was that one of the three was titled
Engineering the Art of Negotiation: How to Handle Your Boss. Not that I ever had problems
getting along with my bosses (and if I had I'd solve them without any books), but this highlighted
for me the delight of working for myself: the boss and I now always agree, and we really enjoy
working together... I hope you're all enjoying working with whatever people you chose to
surround yourself with! Enjoy!
In this issue
News: IORG annual conference set for September
Reflection: Wave of the future?
From the Toolbox: C-Mail
What's New
IORG annual conference set for September
The 2009 conference of the Information Overload Research Group will take place at the
Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, on Monday, Sept. 14, preceded by an evening session and
gala dinner on Sunday, Sept. 13.
The program will include leading practitioners and experts
from Basex, Dow Jones, Morgan Stanley, SRI, the US Air Force, Xerox and other organizations. Full
details will be posted on the
IORG web site. Early registration is open at
http://iorg.eventbrite.com/.
Please help us make this a lively event by getting the word
around - blog it, tweet it, tell your friends!
Observations, reflections and opinions
Wave of the future?
Last month saw a very exciting moment in humanity's halting progress towards effective
computer mediated communication and collaboration, the area I've spent so much effort on over
the years. I'm referring to the unveiling of the Google Wave prototype in the Google I/O
developer conference. Of course we see many new products vying for success in this space, but Wave
is really the proverbial "something completely different": the folks at Google have integrated
the most central processes of Computer Supported Collaborative Work - Email, IM, Shared document
editing, Discussion boards, and more - into a single tool; a tool with a dynamic, vibrant usage
model that takes advantage of the latest Web 2.0 concepts (and then some). You can't look at the
demo video without feeling the joy the creators (the brothers who gave us Google maps) must've felt.
If you missed it, take a look at the full video and screenshots
here. If you can't spare the 1:20 hours for the video, an abridged 10 minute version is
available
here. Then ask yourself, as I've done: how long will it take enterprises to overcome the inertia
and take advantage of the full benefits of this system? Will this be just for the social media
crowd, or is this really the future of all email? I suspect the latter, and I can't wait to find
out!
From the toolbox
 C-Mail
New York based
C-Mail
is one of the more interesting startups that attempt to help you handle your incoming mail in MS
Outlook. Like some others, it applies a variety of methods to figure which messages are important to
you, and refines this over time based on your behavior. It then sorts and flags the Inbox's content
according to this importance, and provides controls to manage the tasks implicit in email.
But what is unusual in C-Mail is that it is server based, and therefore has a view of the
mailing activity of entire groups or companies. This allows it to generate in real time graphs and
reports that show things like who is sending people lots of unimportant (to them!) mail, what
percentage of important emails go unread, what's the time to respond to various email types, what
the social networks are in the group and where the communication bottlenecks are, and so on. This is
strong medicine indeed!
Of course to try this out you need your enterprise to install C-Mail;
you can't try it as an individual early adopter (there are other tools that do that, such as
ClearContext). But in any case, I recommend you take a look at the
demo video and see what this powerful tool can do!
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Recently blogged
- A loop of helpful helplessness
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Polaroid photography is back!
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Tweet tweet, I'm on Twitter!
Snapshots of Ingenuity
Everybody has experienced the frustration of dealing with
companies' nested phone menus: press 1 for this, press 2 for that...
Well, Canadian startup
Fonolo
provides an ingenious solution: you can see the phone menu on your screen or iPhone, click the node
you need, and leave a phone number. The system dials the company, navigates the menu for you, and
rings to connect you directly to the point you need. Wayda go!
The Monthly Factoid
Q:
Which place has four chemical elements named after it?
A:
Ytterby, Sweden. This small village had the Chutzpah to hog Erbium, Terbium, Yttrium and
Ytterbium, which were first discovered in a nearby quarry.
The lesson: Even in
chemistry, it's Location, Location, Location!
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