Bus ride

Today I was a guest speaker at the Industry Conference on knowledge management technologies hosted by Heineken. Of course they gave us the grand tour on the brewery premises, amazing!

I have been working on a GoogleMap overlay

GoogleMaps is an interesting phenomena, Google supplied brief documentation on the API, nevertheless lots of people, not just geeks, started to work on it and step by step the API grows. I guess that that is what web 2.0 is all about. Starting with some sort of Beta and let the community work on it to the next Beta. Frankly I enjoyed my hours with the API documentation and places like Mapki, a wiki on GoogleMaps. The result is a map based search entry for documents.

Are you still with me as I doodle along?

For the record...

I was 30 minutes early this morning!

Always on the outlook for the customer

Managers instead of manager

From left to right: David Sutcliffe (f), Reimar Kornmeier (G), Patrick Demont (hr), Alain Bloch (F), Johan den Biggelaar (NL), Annie Combelles (coo), Nicolas Martin-Vivaldi (S) and Torgeir Brovold (UK).

Airport Carpets

Why do airport floors have such kind of carpets, are industrial flooring factories colour blind?
Why are we getting visualy tortured while waiting, waiting, waiting...
The only two positive things I can think of are:

1. You know you are at an airport, so even when you're exhausted by the early red-eye, you won't get lost.
2. It reminds you of another thing aswell, you need to get out of this place, no matter what!

Places

Being a professional traveller, working troughout Europe and sometimes the US, I visit many hotels. Sometimes great, sometimes odd, sleeping well or badly. The one on the first picture is somewere in the Lake District. We found it while travelling back to Manchester Airport from Penrith way up in Cumbria (UK). Very quite and ruraly located. Great place to work peacefully with an occasional Boddingtons as a refreshment.

The Grasmere Hotel, Broadgate, Grasmere The English Lake District, Cumbria LA22 9TA - England, UK

The next one, Jurys, is in Londen, a fine place to stay, slightly cheaper in weekends. Centrally located in Great Russelstreet near Chinatown.

Jurys Great Russell Street, 16-22 Great Russell Street, London, London, UK

The last one, in the Lake District, close to the M6 between Penrith and Kendal, is called Shap Wells. A fine place in a seemingly remote area on the narrow B6261. For some reason it attracts coaches/buses with elderly people on a trip to Blackpool. Five buses arrived just after we did, the restaurant became a military mess with a factory-like routine of serving the masses. The menu is geared towards these kind of large groups, the wines aswell (quite sweet), the room and bed were fine and the fresh air from the hills guaranteed a good night's sleep.

Shap Wells Hotel, Shap, Nr. Penrith, Cumbria CA10 3QU, UK

The ultimate form of shared vision: co-creation

I heard prof. John Kotter pose something like:

"the ultimate form of shared vision is co-creation."

There is a hell of a lot of truth in that, needless to say. But what about this: Google letting people create their own custom version of Google, with the free service called: Google Co-Op (CSE). Is that Google following Rollyo. Is that Google empowering me to co-create Google, is that Google wanting to learn more from it's users, ... you tell me.

Knowledge Management Audits in Bangkok (Thailand)

A friend of mine made it to the Thai Business Newspapers having teached knowledge management audit techniques to a large group of asian businessmen. The conference was organised by the Asian Productivity Organisation.

Forgotten Technologies that make you think...

Wally Wallington has demonstrated that he can lift a Stonehenge-sized pillar weighing 22,000 lbs and moved a barn over 300 ft. What makes this so special is that he does it using only himself, gravity, and his incredible ingenuity.