AkaSig

Many social entrepreneurship-related concepts now florish on the Web. Some time ago, the social-oriented entrepreneur could get inspiration from NGOs and from for-profit social ventures such as the Grameen Bank (well, I suppose it does not have an NGO status of some sort… I am not even sure of this ; anyway…).
Now that I am […]

Congratulations to Plone and Freemind, two great open source software packages, which have celebrated weddings recently and have promptly released a new born “Plone Freemind v.1.0” extension product for Plone. I have been really fond of Plone and Freemind for several years now. It’s good news to learn that Freemind mindmaps can now be published […]

Motorola researchers are experiencing bad times these days : Motorola Labs is to shrink by half, including teams in Europe (possibly including the knowledge technologies team I was leading in Paris ?). At the same time, Microsoft announces its plan to open an R&D center in Europe, possibly in France or UK. And this center […]

Yesterday, I attended a research seminar at the “Université de Paris 8″. Pierre Levy is a philosopher and professor and head of the collective intelligence chair at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He presented the latest developments in his work on IEML, which stands for Information Economy Meta Language. Things are taking shape on this […]

I’ve got a nice anecdotal evidence of the fact that digital divide is easier to bridge than social divide. Two years ago, I applauded the initiative “Internet de rue” (Internet-in-the-street?) by a French non-profit. They went to extremely poor families near Paris and provided them with access to Internet technology and used that opportunity for […]

Can agile methods such as eXtreme Programming (XP) be applied to consulting activities? What could eXtreme Consulting (XC) mean? Do you need to analyze the whole big picture before starting the delivery of good recommendations?
In XP iterations, users tell user stories which are prioritized and then transformed by rotating pairs of programmers into tested features. […]

Bruce Schneier is one of that kind of world-class computer security expert I love: he knows what he is talking about and does not overestimate the capabilities of computer technologies however fancy they are. With an extremely simple math explanation, he shows how dangerous, expensive and inefficient data mining technologies can be for identifying terrorist […]

5 Ways to Mix, Rip, and Mash Your Data introduces promising web and desktop applications that extract structured data feeds from web sites and mix them together into something possibly useful to you. Think of things like getting filtered Monster job ads as a convenient RSS feed, along with job ads from your other favorite […]

[updated: the version of the python script was an obsolete one, I updated it, and changed the title of the post for more clarity]
I have 40 old computers (donation from a corporation) that are to be dispatched among small social work non-profit organizations and needy people in several French cities and probably also in Senegal. […]

You’ll probably notice that I have bought a domain name: akasig.org I hope the transition to be as smooth as possible (you should not notice any serious difference except maybe in your RSS readers depending on how they manage web adresses). In case you encounter some surprise due to the move, please drop me an […]

Here are two things to go beyond Web Services (with ReSTfullness in mind):

the “Web-Oriented Architecture” (WOA) concept is a lightweight version of the “Service-Oriented Architecture” concept, in a more Web 2.0 fashion.
restlets are a Java framework for Web 2.0 applications; they replace servlets API and facilitate the composition of “mashups” or Web applications relying on […]

Here is a “random patent generator“. The basic idea is to randomly generate ideas of inventions in the hope that they would constitute prior art capable of invalidating some of the stupid patents that get granted by patent offices. It is even inspiring some novel business models. Of course, it’s meant to be a joke […]

WikiCalc is a nice piece of GPLed software that pusblishes wiki pages that are structured like Excel spreadsheets are: one can view and edit tables, modify calculation formulas in cells, manage their formatting through the web browser, etc. It brings to spreadsheets the inherent advantages of many wikis: ease of use for Web publications, ease […]

Here are two interesting CNet articles about :

how intellectual property could be better monetized in an open market of innovation
how open source software fuels innovation by pushing the creation of differentiated intellectual property into “higher” layers of technology and services

Here is a nice piece of software for creating screencasts (video recordings of what you can see and do on your screen, for instance for demonstration or training purposes): pyvnc2swf. It is an open source package, running on both Linux and Windows. It requires that you first install:

Python (version 2.3 or above)
pygame (version 1.6 or […]

Innovation usually focuses on bringing new features to markets through “innovative” products or services invented by technology researchers and blessed by business managers. “Innovative” usages are rarely planned or expected even though the previous “next big things in the Internet” (Web, P2P, blogs, …) went big because of emergent usage dynamics rather than of “innovative” […]

Cette chronique de Bertrand Lemaire (LMI) au sujet des appels d’offres des marchés publics de l’Etat m’a rappelé combien les administrations centrales gèrent mal leurs décisions d’achat. Les administrations centrales de l’Etat, d’une manière générale, me semblent être des organisations bien malades, souvent bien plus malades que les bureaucraties privées. Leur difficultés à acheter des […]

SFR is the #2 telecom operator in France (subsidiary of Vodafone and Vivendi Universal). They announced yesterday that they would allow 50 additional employees every year to spend from 6 to 11 paid days per year working for a non-profit organization. These days are paid and managed as usual working days. SFR limited the authorized […]

Jean-Pierre is member of a French NGO dedicated to extreme poverty in France. He works closely with some nomad gypsy families who live in poverty near Paris. He sometimes brings them his laptop, a digital camera, a printer and an Internet connection and made some experiments with Skype and other software. They enjoy getting some […]

It seems like the NSA is conducting a 3,5 years long $64 million worth research program on data mining maybe based on the eavesdropping of domestic and foreign phone calls and email exchanges. This program is called NIMD which stands for Novel Intelligence from Massive Data. Their approach is said to be based on the […]