It stands to reason that every industry has a use for competitive intelligence. But when your product’s growing outside for all to see, it’s only a matter of time until someone decides to use satellite images to check out their crops.
This article focuses mostly on growers using the information provided via aerial and satellite images to get better acquainted with their own crops — they use near-infrared images to determine the grape vines’ vigor before the grapes are harvested.
The technology is called Oenoview, and it provides detailed information and imagery to wineries about their products — but wouldn’t a competitor be just as interested in what the neighbouring winery is producing? It seems a bit unfair on the surface, doesn’t it?
I posted before about another web hosting review site that I wished I had come across when I was looking for a web host (although that was back in 2006 — how time flies). If you’re currently looking for webhosting, I would seriously consider checking out Web Hosting Rating.
I’m always still amazed that there are hosts out there that are able to offer unlimited bandwidth and unlimited sites; I guess we’ve come a long way in terms of what it costs to maintain a site (and I’m only talking from when I was looking for hosting in 2006).
I guess now the real trick is to compare the hosting review sites to each other and see which one offers the most comprehensive and honest reviews.
I just thought I’d post this video I came across that I found completely hilarious (and although it’s Sunday night, I would imagine most of you will be reading this on Monday morning — and a laugh’s a good way to start the week).
This is comedian Don McMillan talking about what you shouldn’t do in PowerPoint — and definitely strikes a chord with anyone who has sat through a ton of presentations.
I’ve recently started reading Darren Wershler-Henry’s book Free: as in speech and beer, which I’m enjoying a great deal — and it’s one of those books that really gets you thinking differently about a variety of things. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction:
This is not a techno-anarchist manifesto advocating the destruction of the copyright system as we know it. As entertaining as that might be, this is a book for grownups.
This is not a starry-eyed paean to the wonders of e-business, nor is it a smug, self-congratulatory dismissal of the possibilities of dot-coms.
This book is an executive summary about the fraught relationship that networked society has to one word — FREE.
This is just a short post to let you about a useful site I came across today. I’ve complainedabout my web host before — and I’m sure there are many others who feel my pain (my host actually ranks quite well for customer service, so I can’t even imagine how bad the bad hosts are). If only I had heard of Web Hosting Geeks.
Web Hosting Geeks provides reviews of companies that provide web hosting services, and rank the companies based on the features they provide, (as well as bonus features like free domains and unlimited websites or bandwidth).
If you’re in the market for a web host, I would seriously suggest checking this site out. It’s a great way to get a side-by-side feature comparison for a bunch of different hosts, not to mention comparing prices.
Since it’s a Friday, and since it’s summer, I thought I’d post something to give you a bit of a laugh that I came across. If you want to skip to the funny part, it’s around the 7 minute mark.
The video below is hilarious, but can also show what happens when advertising goes horribly, horribly wrong. The ad’s for Windows 386 by the way. Enjoy and have a great weekend.
It’s estimated that every individual worker spends about an hour and a half a week browsing sites that have nothing to do with their jobs, which they reason costs employers about £1000 per employee per year.
Steve points out the obvious flaws in the CBI’s logic — that workers who are prevented from shopping on eBay or checking their Hotmail accounts are not necessarily going to become productive, and that the very definition of ‘work-related’ is problematic (is reading the newspaper work-related for example?).
While I agree completely with both of Steve’s points, I think there’s another angle to consider here as well. Companies can easily restrict workers access to sites, and those workers have little recourse. Very few people could legitimately claim they need access to sports scores or whatever else they might want to read in the course of a day.
With all the hype around about Web 2.0, it’s great to hear such a common sense take on what needs to be done around educating people on Web 2.0.
Pete’s first rule of focusing on the job, rather than the tool, is something everyone (not just KM folks) should keep in mind with any piece of technology. No one cares how cool/new/shiny it is. Plain and simple, they want results.
Pete mentions both del.icio.us and blogging as too phenomena that didn’t necessarily catch on right away with their audiences — neither of which should come as a great surprise. Pete’s conclusion that people aren’t too interested in the tools themselves seems incredibly simple — but it’s easy to forget when you’re immersed in using those tools every day.
Companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM have formed the Information Overload Research Group with the goal of helping people manage the amount of information they have to deal with in a day.
According to Jonathan Spira, one of the group’s founding members, wikis, blogs and RSS have made the deluge of information worse, rather than better.
Maggie Jackson (author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age) also joins the conversation to talk about how all this information is eroding our attention spans. It’s very interesting and well worth a listen.
You can listen to the entire discussion at the link I’ve provided (and cheers to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for putting their content online).
What a day of tortured joy for Canadian Apple fanatics — Rogers Wireless finally launches the iPhone here and the Rogers website subsequently dies. I’m sure their call centres aren’t faring much better.
While I’ve never been much of a Mac/Apple fan myself, I was the proud owner of a 1 gigabyte iPod Shuffle at one time, until it met its demise in a washing machine accident.
Speaking of shuffles, Rogers has pulled off some fancy footwork when it comes to how they’re going to be charging people for data on their phones. But first a little background.
