Author Archives: Ron Bieber

Gillmor Gang – User Driven Innovation

Posted on by

The latest Gillmor Gang podcast talks about a concept called “User Driven Innovation” using Google and other vendors who have opened up their API’s as an example of this concept. The main subject of the podcast is disruption, of which this is just a part.

User Driven Innovation is the opening of service API’s to allow users to create applications based on a conglomeration of different service providers. You might remember reading something about this in articles on this site, including the ones here and here.

I have to say, I like the term “User Driven Innovation” much better than “Application Level Reuse”. Whatever you call it, it was validating for me to hear this on the way home last night.

Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks

Aside

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame has announced the completion of the movie Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks, a documentary chronicling the development of a software product called Aardvark. DVD preorders are being taken now for a ship date of December 1. The trailer is available on the project page and I have to say, it looks really cool from a geeks point of view. I think I’ll be preordering this one.

Enhanced RSS Feeds

Posted on by

Over time, I’ve noticed that much of the traffic coming to the site these days is through the RSS Feeds. As I’ve noticed this traffic, I decided to finally break down and grab myself a copy of FeedDemon and lo and behold, I now do most of my reading through an RSS reader these days.

Some of the feeds that I read actually aggregate del.icio.us links and Flickr feeds into the main RSS feed which I thought was really cool. It winds up that this is done through FeedBurner.

So, with the help of the WordPress Feedburner Plugin by Steve Smith over at orderedlist.com, I’ve enhanced the RSS feeds on the site to use FeedBurner.

I hope you RSS aggregators out there like the new feed.

Older Pictures

Posted on by

ed-ron-dad-small

Photo by rbieber

This was on a trip to Springfield when we were young. Left to right, my brother Ed, myself (with a brand new canteen), and our father.

I found a bunch of older pictures that I had either taken with an earlier digital camera or scanned in like the one above. I’ve added some of them to the photo album and I’ll be adding more as I go through them.

It’s so cool sometimes to look back at these!

Software based IP PBX System – Sphere Communications

Posted on by

Yesterday I saw a presentation by Sphere Communications showing their product Sphericall, a service oriented PBX system.

The ideas in this software were really cool. The product is a software based IP PBX system which includes a SOAP based interface into the system, allowing you to completely integrate your VoIP network with your business applications.

The ideas presented in the presentation were pretty interesting. The product integrates phone, IM, and presence capabilities into its main desktop product, and also allows integration via web services to your business applications, allowing you to integrate your phone system into any application via a standards based interface.

Imagine being able to pop up customer information as soon as they dial in and being able to greet them by name and have their full history available to you right away via your CRM application. Imagine being able to put together conference calls by dragging and dropping people into your conference bridge when they call your office number. Now, image having IM like presence capabilities built into your phone system, so that you know whether someone is on the phone without having to call and be dumped into phone mail. These scenarios and many others were some of the things that Todd talked about during this presentation.

I thought the product looked extremely cool and shows a vision of corporate communication systems that is very compelling and exciting. The company has a whitepaper available on their web site (registration required).