Popular in Japan for ages, the QR (Quick Response) tag is coming to a bus advert, book or newspaper near you. I’ve generated one below. The concept is referred to as “hardlinking”: creating a link between the physical world and the virtual. Users simply load the software to their camera phone, iphone or blackberry – point the camera at the object and voila – your phone takes you to the webpage embedded in the tag.

The process to incorporate them into your media is simple too: you go to a site like beetagg, generate the barcode of your choice, add the tag to your copy (say for the newspaper, Vancouver Skytrain or Bus)  and you have provided a targeted link to the website. Marketers would also collect information of where the ad was viewed which can then be used for improving reach.

I’ve been thinking these two dimensional, user-created bar codes would have been around ages ago in North America but until now not all cellphones had cameras.

QR tags aren’t just for ads. More and more of the half million visits to the tru.ca website each month are from mobile devices.  Educause  talks about how these tags could be used for library book renewal, linkages to equipment manuals and other uses.

Ok, for the grand prize, where did my tag take you?

Happy Spring!

Netbooks

Earlier I predicted this would be a big year for netbooks at TRU and now in only March that has proven to be an understatement as students and faculty snap up the $300 machines. This supports a trend away from the sale and use of desktop units, especially Macs. 

While desktop growth has plummeted, PC laptop sales are up. Microsoft attributes the success to its new ad campaign but the growth is probably the result of netbook sales with Windows.

Exabytes

Thinking about exabytes – How much data is 5 exabytes, the amount of data that apparently moves through the Internet each month?

If:

• An exabyte is 10 x 18 bytes and a gigabyte is 10 x 9 bytes
• And a single layer DVD holds 4.7 GB of data and is about 1.2 mm thick.

So if you stacked the DVD’s holding a month’s information it would stand 1,276 kilometers high. Amazing. A year’s worth of those DVDs stretches from Toronto to Sydney, Australia. (You’d need glue to hold them together – I’ll think about how much glue later ;p) 

If your boss asks you to back up the Internet, say no.

Of course Twitter has become a social phenomenon. It is successful because it focuses on only one thing, 140 character “tweats” to followers and the world. Heck even Barack Obama and Stephen Colbert are followers of little old me – brimac, apparently. Imagine that. Too bad I never use it. 

While tweats from US presidents or Johnny Depp are far more interesting than from your humble correspondent, there is something captivating about the technology. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m seeing social networks like facebook more of a broadcast technology than intitmate social experience. Twitter on the other hand, is more conversational and two-way.

The winner of techcrunch50 2008 was a technology called Yammer. Yammer is basically twitter behind the corporate or institutional firewall.  Only those users with a valid @tru.ca email, for example, can participate. It is also twitter with a business model: the idea would be that yammer quickly becomes your communications tool so other features are available to support the community at a cost of a couple dollars a month per user.

I’ve already  registered tru.ca and added a few colleagues. The idea is that this could be an effective internal communications tool to let people know what is happening, updates from the president, and a forum to address the issue of the day. Having all 1,700 or so employees on here would be cool.

I have no idea if this will take off – but in an time where ideas (and Ideas Management) are keys to success, it can’t be a bad thing. Further, IT and HR departments should be proactive with these technologies, as they will probably be used more and more as the virtual water cooler, like it or not.

And the future and why things aren’t simple.

An interesting presentation that challenged my assumptions on innovation and commoditization. And I thought management was simple…

I’ve tended to think that the future was that everything we do in internal IT would become a utility service elsewhere and that would be the end of it. Perhaps things aren’t so simple and we take our role in cultivating innovation in the organization for granted..

Wardley mentions the Red Queen Hypothesis  from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and equates that with the role of management. The Red Queen says that ”It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Getting the balance right between the innovative and the commodity is the key.

The following chart from Wardley’s blog illustrates how technologies move along the s-curve from the innovative to the mundane. Picking the right technologies at the right time was the challenge faced by management and the source of continuous competitive advantage.

We continue to look for ways to reduce the energy demands of our IT infrastructure at TRU. I’ve been working with Dr Tom Owen, our new Director of Environmental Sustainability, to find ways of reducing our CO2 footprint through the effective use of IT. This year we are focusing on reducing the storage and handling of paper transcripts, letters and other documents required to support students as part of Project SAGE. Other green projects we are working on include:

• Cloud Computing;
• IP Video Conferencing;
• Paperless HR Processes;
• Document Management Systems;
• Desktop Virtualization;
• Desktop Power Management;
• Running the data centre hotter;
• Paperless procurement, and;
• Full product life-cycle CO2 footprint considerations.

I’ve placed these initiatives in a boston matrix to show which projects we should do first (i.e. quick wins and low hanging fruit.)

An impediment to any green strategy is simply a lack of information on energy use. That is about to change, at least in people’s homes.

Look for more manufacturers to include a Zigbee chip, a low-power wireless device that can be placed in  appliances  throughout your  home. The first benefit of the Zigbee chip will be making you aware of how much power is actually been used by each appliance. All those mod cons you’ve plugged in are vampires, slowly draining energy and costing you money. What appears “off” isn’t really.

Zigbee chips will allow all those power hogs to talk to software that controls switches and power bars that can regulate shut off equipment. Once we’ve made that great leap forward, things get more interesting. When we realize we are all in this together, you will let your appliances communicate with the Smart Grid that lets the power company control your homes energy demand (and perhaps raise or lower your thermostat) to keep the grid stable.

Reducing energy consumption in the home by only 10% in the US would be the carbon equivalent of removing 8 million cars off the road each year.

This connection with the smart grid will also let you push the power you may generate through home wind or solar gear back to it.  A handy utility from 3Tier lets you determine how much potential solar or wind power is available in your area. Look for more consumer power generation devices at your local hardware store.

And nobody’s happy. Humour on Conan O’Brien