Lessons Learned: STARTUP IS VISION - Eric Reis

The following is a rather unusual guest post. One of the more surreal parts of speaking publicly and putting ideas out into the ether is to watch other people run with them. I can't seem to help tuning into comment threads on blogs, news aggregators, etc. Internet people being what they are, a lot of these comments are nasty, brutish, and short. However, every once in a while, I come across someone who consistently corrects other people's mistakes. Someone who seems to get it. And who am I to complain if that someone happens to be a giant robot dinosaur named FAKEGRIMLOCK?

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Skylar Tibbits: Can we make things that make themselves? | Video on TED.com

MIT researcher Skylar Tibbits works on self-assembly -- the idea that instead of building something (a chair, a skyscraper), we can create materials that build themselves, much the way a strand of DNA zips itself together. It's a big concept at early stages; Tibbits shows us three in-the-lab projects that hint at what a self-assembling future might look like.

The Future of Digital BookTechnology Demonstrated - Mike Matas

This just great!! Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad -- with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is "Our Choice," Al Gore's sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth."

The PersonalBrain - A Knowledge Management Software Tool

There is a plethora of Mindmapping software tools out there but PersonalBrain, using the metaphor of the working brain connecting neurons (in this context - parent thoughts) to a series of child thoughts (thoughts associated with the parent thought) offers a very simple moving functionality that allows the user to move from parent thought to parent thought in the process making connections a static mind map isn't able to do.

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Visualising Excel Graphs - Great New Tool - NodeXL

Do you need to display and analyze a network graph but you don’t want to deal with difficult applications, arcane file formats, or techie programming languages? NodeXL may be what you’re looking for. NodeXL is a template for Excel 2007 and 2010 that lets you enter a network edge list, click a button, and see the network graph, all in the Excel window. You can easily customize the graph’s appearance; zoom, scale and pan the graph; dynamically filter vertices and edges; alter the graph’s layout; find clusters of related vertices; and calculate graph metrics. Networks can be imported from and exported to a variety of file formats, and built-in connections for getting networks from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and your local email are provided.

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