Entries from July 2008
As the vice-chair for SCIP’s 2009 conference planned for April 23 – 24 in Chicago, I am happy to report that the call for proposals has finally been posted on the SCIP web site.
In the past I’ve had the pleasure to both present at a SCIP conference and serve on the program committee to choose the sessions that will be presented in a particular track. If a CI professional has a topic that they would like to promote or explore, a session at the SCIP conference is a great way to do that.
We’ve tried to put together an innovative set of tracks and meet the needs of both new conference attendees and old hands. The new tracks are as follows:
- CI Offense/Defense
- Professional Effectiveness
- Critical Skills
- Entrepreneurial CI
- Intelligence R&D
- Active Dialog
I’m happy to field any questions propsective presenters might have here on this blog or in e-mail. At a high level I would recommend that you choose an interesting topic for which you can demonstrate an in-depth or unique knowledge. I also highly recommend taking the time to put together a strong and detailed proposal.
Good luck!
Categories: CI
Tagged: competitive intelligence, SCIP, SCIP09
Wordle is a web site that creates very pretty word clouds from blocks of text or web site URLs. I could see this being a very, very fun way to waste a lot of time and produce some very attractive zeitgeist.
A Wordle cloud of this blog
A Wordle cloud of my del.icio.us feed.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: tags, wordle
So last Friday, July 11th, I left the house at about 5:30 AM and joined the line about 30-people strong at the AT&T store in Ashburn, Virginia to wait in line for the chance to get my hot little hands on the new 3G iPhone. If absolutely nothing else I was excited to finally get rid of my Treo 650, a device that never lived up to its promise. I was too much of a telecom snob to buy the first generation iPhone despite my Apple fanboy status– the lack of 3G was just too limiting. Having lived with the iPhone for nearly a week now, I can definitely say that it was worth the wait.
Being a true ENTJ on the Myers Briggs framework, one of the things that I was most looking forward to was integrating the organizational, GTD brilliance of OmniFocus on my Macintosh into a handheld device. This has been a great improvement over the “To Do” list on the Treo because I can look at action items based on projects, context (i.e. where I am or resources at my disposal) and what is due soon or even (shudder!) overdue. OmniFocus also brings a To Do application to the iPhone, something the first generation phone was sorely missing. So sorry for the Windows users out there that I don’t think there’s an OmniFocus for Windows, but a person could probably use OmniFocus exlcusively on the iPhone. Next up in the life hacking effort is to use Jott and Evernote.
The transition from my .Mac account to MobileMe was not without its delays and hiccups. The synchronization of bookmarks, contacts and calendar events has gone pretty well once I got the service up and running over the weekend. So far, so good on that. I can see the potential for MobileMe, despite the awful brand name, to build on the so-so offering that was .Mac. I’m enjoying the AJAX-y goodness of the MobileMe calendar most of all, so that I can access a pretty full-fledged calendar from within Firefox at work, home and then using the Calendar application on the iPhone.
The top item on my MobileMe wish list is synchronization with Microsoft Outlook, the clunky productivity suite we use in my office (and pretty much any corporate environment). Microsoft hasn’t taken a real look at Outlook in at least a decade, and that bad boy is really showing its age. I’ll stop there for now because I could wrote a whole blog rant abotu everything that’s wrong with Outlook.
In summary: iPhone good. Fire bad.
Categories: Today
Tagged: iphone
I’m sure a new easily-amused visualization nerd discovers this site every day, but today I discovered graphjam.com.
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Categories: Random
Tagged: data visualization, graphjam
